Online Image Generators and Flight (again)

This was fun! I have created online greeting cards in the past so this was not a new concept for me.

OverDrive and Flight (or lack thereof)

I successfully installed the OverDrive Media Console on my computer, browsed, selected a book, and checked it out to my account. I got as far as getting the book into My Digital Bookshelf. When I tried to download the book, however, I got "Unexpected file format" and then an error message. I tried several times with different titles, which leads me to believe that there is a problem with the OverDrive software itself.

What did I notice that I liked?
What did I notice that I didn't like? It didn't work.

I browsed Audio Books - Classical Literature and was pleased by the selection of titles, and a quick check revealed that yes, some of my favorite authors were available in the collection (D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, to name a few).

When I am able to download "A Room With a View" (the item I checked out) I will enjoy listening to it, I am sure. For now, I will have to settle for the physical book.

del.icio.us roses

Here's the link to my del.icio.us account:

http://del.icio.us/mrykjohnson

As you can see, two of my passions are cockatoos and roses! The concept of tagging is new to me, but I can see the usefulness of being able to search your bookmarks using tags (from any computer) rather than searching through an entire list of favorites (tedious!). Other powerful uses of Delicious that I can easily appreciate are its use in shared reading lists and collaborative projects.

I love the word folksonomy!

WIKI WIKI and Major Mitchell, whoever he was

This cockatoo is called Major Mitchell's cockatoo, which begs the question - who was Major Mitchell??

I loved Stephen Colbert’s Wikiality sketch. I found the PB Wiki Tour to be very informative as far as describing what one needs to do to edit a wiki, including adding widgets.

I can see how this type of application would work well in libraries - for subject guides, community guides, conference planning, knowledge base (library instruction resources), and collaborative editing of documents. In many cases, wikis are much more efficient than e-mail (who would have thought?).

YouTube, Dancing Cockatoos, etc.

I searched YouTube for videos about my alma mater's library - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They have a pretty good one about the UI Undergraduate Library, where I spent many hours in my youth . . . brought back some memories!

Also found some great videos on cockatoos dancing (my favorite is Snowball, a Medium Sulphur-Crested Eleanora Cockatoo, dancing to music by the Beastie Boys). I tried to upload this video without success (kept getting an error message).

I looked for my favorite TV shows on both Hulu and Fancast. However, full episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Men in Trees, and Brothers and Sisters are not available on either of these sites. Since they are all on ABC-TV, I can watch full episodes (and I have) by going to abctv.com's website. I do this whenever I miss an episode because I am working (like Thursday nights for Lost). It's just easier than setting up the VCR to record the show (I don't yet have a DVR, but will acquire one soon).

Since my favorite shows aren't available on either Hulu or Fancast, I would probably not use either of these on a regular basis. I suppose these sites would be useful in libraries for patrons to view TV shows or movies (with headphones, of course), but I am not sure how popular they would be.