Pretty Blue

Flickr

2008-08-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

I've played around with Flickr before, it's a great place to store photographs without taking up all your harddrive space, and also an easy way to share them, or publish to other places (like my blog!).

I didn't make my own account, I used the Manukau Learn one. I decided to look for photos of my soon-to-be hometown. I've embedded a few here.

This one is on Santa Ana Valley Road, This photographer takes beautiful pictures, the lighting is fantastic. He has a whole album full of pictures from the county and they're all just as lovely.

This one is a picture of the Methodist church that is in the middle of the township.

Rollyo

2008-08-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

I made a search roll and put a searcbox widget in my sidebar.

While it's a nifty idea I have to admit that I'm unlikely to use it, and will most likely keep up my habit of using google for everything (bad, I know).

I think that rollyo could be a useful as a teaching aide. You could teach people how to use keywords to search, while ensuring that the sites they search are on topic. This will give them a greater chance of success, less chance of spam, and perhaps cement the basic concepts for searching before they venture out into the mish-mash that search engines often produce.

Generators and me

2008-07-31T19:30:00.000-07:00

I played around with a few of the generators. I'd used some before, some just for fun, and some I'd actually used for work - posters for a summer read programme and also some different graphics made for one of our training programmes.

First of all I decided I needed to find out 'what my problem' was:

Just repeat after me:
"I'm a mentally unstable motorcycle mama who don't take no crap from nobody!"

I tried my 'other name' and got:

"I'm a flirtatious bad-ass biker chick with a highly suspicious nature!"

What's up with the motorbikes??

Exploring Technorati and co

2008-07-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

I looked at Topix and Technorati, Syndic8 wasn't available for me to go to, sadly.

Of the two I preferred Technorati, as someone mentioned it seems very american, I think that is more a reflection on who's blogging though. All those American's have a lot to say for themselves!

Anyway, I found a few library related blog sites. I have to say that on the whole I locate my library blog sites through referral from other library blog sites. It's that whole blogroll and connected world experience.

Bloglines and other aggregators

2008-07-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

I made my bloglines account and then created a public URL. My blogroll can be found at:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/bluemonkey

All in all I didn't find the lesson that difficult. It was a matter of following the instructions on the bloglines site. It was a bit more confusing when it came time to find my public URL, however the screenshots on the learning blog covered this pretty well.

I'm not a big fan of bloglines, it serves its purpose but it isn't that pretty. I far prefer netvibes as I can make different tabs, see nice coloured boxes with synopsis and so on. Also netvibes lets me get RSS from facebook etc so I can do all my facebook stuff right from there.

We now return to your regularly scheduled broadcast

2008-07-30T18:05:00.000-07:00

Alright so, I'm a little behind here in lessons.

I'll have to do some quick climbing to get myself back in contention to win myself a musical tool.

First up - posting about the blog process.

I found this pretty simple, I've created a number of blogs in the past so using blogger was nothing new to me. My challenge was coming up with a suitable username to assure my anonymity. Once I did that it was pretty straightforward to get this thing created and ready.

As far as how I felt about the process - I think that blogs in general have their uses. There are some people that really enjoy blogging about their personal lives, others use them to discuss particular topics of interest, or work related issues. These seem to work for them. I'm personally not interested in keeping a blog.

If I want to communicate with people there are other ways that I choose to express myself online.

For work purposes I can see many different ways we could use blog functionality if needed. Ideas such as book clubs, staff newsletters, childrens and teens clubs, branch in-house 'noticeboards' and so on.

The words of the monkey

2008-06-30T16:17:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog, created to record my progress as I traverse my way through the lessons of Learning 2.0.

I am THE blue monkey.

Many will claim to be a blue monkey yet will fail to deliver on the promise. They will tell you that a blue monkey is also known as a diademed monkey, a species of guenon native to various parts of Africa. While I am not adverse to diadems (what girl does not love diamonds?) these monkeys are not THE blue monkey.

You will find bars, sports clubs, stuffed toys (see pic) and even slippers that purport to be the blue monkey. Beware these imposters, it is only here through this blog, that the true words of the monkey can be heard.