Assignment #117

Google Groups/Usenet

Back when the Internet was just getting going, access to the WWW was $8/hour, at least around here. But for $10/month you could get email and something many of us thought was pretty cool called Newsgroups or the Usenet. These electronic bulletin boards on virtually anything were great for getting expert information or finding people of like interests. I set up a job exchange to England using the Usenet and it’s had a soft place in my heart ever since. Here’s the Wikipedia article on Usenet.

Anyway, I thought the Usenet had gone the way of the Dodo but no, it’s alive and well and accessible through Google Groups. Google bought the archive resource for the Usenet brilliantly named DejaNews back in 2001 and has expanded the whole operation.

Now you don’t have to use Google to get to the Usenet. In fact it’s more fun if you don’t. Here’s a complete tutorial and almost everything you’ll want to know.

http://www.harley.com/usenet/intro.html

One thing’s for sure, if you’re going for a merit badge in Geekology, using the Usenet is one way to help you get it. Oh! and Librarians, here’s a good newsgroup just for you:

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.libraries.talk/topics?lnk=srg

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Assignment #116

Get Organized with Plaxo

Let’s steal another lesson from Library 2.1 –Thanks Julia!

There are a number of websites that allow users to set up organizational calendars and task lists for free. Among these are Remember the Milk, Jotlet, and Plaxo.

My personal favorite is Plaxo, which seems to have all of the best components of the others with its own special features. For starters, it can sync data with other programs such as Outlook, AOL, and various Web based email services including Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. It will automatically pull your contacts and events from any of the programs that you choose, which definitely saves a lot of time and trouble. You can add feeds from Flickr, blogs, and Amazon, which automatically update. You can also subscribe to schedules for sports teams, bands, television shows, etc. using iCal. A great thing about Plaxo is that you can share all or part of your calendar with your contacts, or you can publish it and make it public. Then, of course, there's always the option of just leaving it private and allowing no one else access.

Discovery Exercise

1. Sign up for Plaxo Basic (or if you're willing to spend the money, Plaxo Premium).
2. Add a couple of events to your calendar and be sure to mark recurring events.
3. Try creating separate categories for your calendar (such as home and work), and edit your events into these categories. Make sure you're able to view calendars for each category separately and that you can overlay them onto one another.
4. Make a countdown of important birthdates and anniversaries.
5. Create a task list, and be sure to check things off as you complete them.
6. Pick a band, tv show, or sport of interest and, using icalshare.com, subscribe to it on Plaxo.
7. And finally, be sure to create a blog post about your discovery experience. While you're at it, think of ways you and your coworkers could use Plaxo (or Jotlet or Remember the Milk) during library hours.

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Assignment #115

Wikipedia

The last time I checked, Wikipedia had close to 2 million articles and was still climbing. Contrast that with my favorite book encyclopedia, the Americana, which has roughly 100 thousand articles. Anyway, you get my point, Wikipedia will eventually hold all factual information.

So now check out

http://www.neomeme.net/2007/02/07/nine-cool-things-you-didnt-know-you-could-do-with-wikipedia

And on top of those nine things you can add biographies and information on movies, plays, and even individual songs.

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Assignment #114

Movies

Movies have to be THE art form of the 20^th and probably the 21^st Century. Like we used to (and still do) share our literary experiences with each other (Harry Potter). It’s more common to talk about Star Wars or the latest Spiderman movie.

Here are four websites that between them give all the info you could want to know about movies.

The Internet Movie Database.

http://imdb.com/

Huge resource, though don’t take everything they say as Gospel. I’ve run across a number of mistakes.

Rotten Tomatoes

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/

The place to go for reviews and when and where.

Chasing The Frog

http://chasingthefrog.com/

The real facts behind movies based on real stories.

Teach With Movies

http://www.teachwithmovies.org/index.html

Lesson plans and good facts behind “teachable” movies.

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Assignment #113

Instructables

Here's a great Web2.0 site. It's called Instructables.

http://www.instructables.com/

Step by step instructions on how to do stuff. Great idea. Wish I'd

thought of it.

Anyway, when Stephen Colbert did his challenge thing with the light

saber, I was awed with the stuff he got and wondered how it was done. Instructables has how to do it and the program to do it with.

http://www.instructables.com/id/ECLY2XRF1B3R711/?ALLSTEPS

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Assignment #112

Social Networking in Plain English

From Common Craft, the people who brought you

RSS IN PLAIN ENGLISH

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

And

WIKIS IN PLAIN ENGLISH

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

comes their latest

SOCIAL NETWORKING IN PLAIN ENGLISH

http://www.commoncraft.com/show

for a guy like me who can’t quite seem to see the need for MySpace I kind of went ooooooh! I still can’t quite see it but it is less muddy. But seriously folks, I do enjoy their videos and I always learn something.

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Assignment #111

Glubble

You parents who are worried about what stuff you kids are looking at on the Net have gotten a new buddy. It's called Glubble.

http://glubble.com/

Glubble restricts your kids to a white list of pre-approved websites.

Here's a more involved explanation.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/18/glubble-makes-firefox-family-friendly/

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Assignment #110

I’m going to steal today’s assignment from Helene Blowers at Learning 2.1

http://explorediscoverplay.blogspot.com/

Well we're big rock singers…

"…we've got golden fingers
And we're loved everywhere we go
We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show
We take all kind of pills to give us all kind of thrills
But the thrill we've never known
Is the thrill that'll get you when you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone."

I don’t know how many of you recognize these lyrics from Dr. Hook’s 1973 hit, On the Cover of the Rolling Stone. But if you've ever dreamed about being featured on a magazine cover, these image generators will give you that chance. (Note: Some magazine image generators may not adhere to library collection management.)

• Wired magazine cover
• Time, National Geographic, Business Today, etc.
• Time – Person of the Year
  RollingStone, Time, etc.
• Create your own magazine cover - generic

Discovery Exercise: (This one is purely for fun)

1. Select an image generator of your choice, upload a photo and create your magazine cover.
2. Save your creation by using your mouse’s right click and select “save image as”
3. Create a blog post and upload your cover to either your blog or ning profile.

Optional: Upload your magazine cover image to Flickr and tag it “LibMagCovers”

Think about how you could use these image generators to create unique signs for your library? Or offer a creative class for library users on magazine cover fun?

In the meantime, why not join me and put yourself “on the cover of the Rolling Stone.” :)

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Assignment #109

What are We Thinking/Talking About?

OK, so I found this cool site thanks to Mark Frauenfelder over at Rule The Web

http://www.ruletheweb.net/my_weblog/

Mark’s also got a book out with the same name and I just got it this last weekend. Great book for learning the Web and I’ll probably steal a bunch of his stuff. ANYWAY, The site he features is called popurls and puts together a bunch of the most popular stuff on the bigger sites

http://popurls.com/

It’s pretty cool.

And it got to thinking-What are we all thinking about right now?

Here’re 3 sites that can help answer that question.

Email me some more.

http://www.google.com/trends

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_ts_b_nav/104-0160586-7674366

http://www.talkers.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=31

Ok so the last one is kind of dated but you get the idea.

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Assignment #108

Listen to Podcasts Faster

This is a slick trick. So there’s this hour podcast you’ve downloaded but you haven’t got an hour to listen. Open it with the Quick Time Player (Right click – OPEN WITH…) In Quick Time go to WINDOW – SHOW A/V CONTROLS and then play with the playback speed. You’ll notice that you can speed up the podcast (or song for that matter) and the pitch doesn’t change – cool.

Also Amber sends her love from Aviano with a comment on Monday’s Assignment:

Ciao R.A.

Another of my favorite photo share sites is Orfay.com -- Great for
picture blogging. Limited to 75 uploads a week with the free account,
and I don't know the exact size of the per file as I still have dial up
at home and tend to shrink my photos to a 50K or less for uploading
purposes. However it's not accessible from a .mil computer or at least
USAFE's firewall doesn't let it though.

Amber

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Assignment #107

Hyperlinking Words and Other Right Clicks

Don’t laugh – I just learned how to do this.

Now all this time I have been putting the full URL in this email whenever I wanted you to go somewhere. Instead, I could have just said something like go to my blog here and have the word linked to a URL.

To do this in WORD, highlight the word “here” and then right click-HYPERLINK and put the URL in the address line.

Feeling stupid, I looked at the other Right Click menu items and found out I could highlight a word and LOOK UP, TRANSLATE, FIND A SYNONYM FOR as well as CUT, COPY, PASTE, and the formatting stuff which is what I used the Right Click for previously. Boy, is my face red!

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Assignment #106

The Best Websites

If you had some trouble getting through all those sites at http://www.go2web20.net/

Then how about just exploring the award winners.

Here’s a bunch

http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0

Here’s some more

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100.html?tag=nl.e415

Here’s a third group

http://www.100bestwebsites.org/

and a fourth

http://www.worldbestwebsites.com/

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Assignment #105

Definitions in Spanish

This was cool! A patron came in and wanted a Spanish dictionary. Not an English-Spanish dictionary as his Spanish accent told me he already spoke Spanish. Not having one, I tried Google and even told it in English “define accessión”. Bingo! The first thing up was the meaning in Spanish. How that computer always reads my mind is the magic of Google.

Oh! And do you want to give Google a very nice blue (or grey) hue? You’ll be the envy of everyone.

Firefoxers get Stylish 0.5.1 in your Tools-Addons. Then go to http://userstyles.org/

And get the

Google Web Search - dark blue redesign (vC)

I also got the Youtube dark grey redesign. It goes better with the black and white movies I put up.

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Assignment #104

Photo Sharing Sites

Kim Komando had an interesting email the other day on these sites:

Flickr: You can upload up to 100 megabytes of photos each month. This refers to bandwidth, not storage; deleting photos won’t increase the amount you can upload.File size is limited to five megabytes. Only small images are accessible. However, the originals are saved in case you upgrade to Flickr Pro. Also, you’ll only see your 200 most recent photos; if you upgrade your account, you’ll see the rest. Your free account will be deleted after 90 days of inactivity. Flickr has a strong sense of community. Its users like to comment on others’ work. The photos also have more of an artistic bent.

http://www.flickr.com/

Shutterfly gives you unlimited storage and no file size limit. It says that it has never deleted a photo. You can create slide shows and add captions to your photos. Of course, Shutterfly promotes products such as prints and calendars.

http://www.shutterfly.com/

Snapfish also gives you unlimited storage. High-resolution images are kept for three months so you can make large prints. Then the photos are converted to a lower resolution, suitable for small prints. Snapfish sells prints and other photo-related products. If you don’t make at least one purchase a year, your account is deleted.

http://www.snapfish.com/

Kodak EasyShare Gallery gives you unlimited storage. It does not specify a limit on file size. Like Snapfish, it deletes your account if you don’t make a purchase once every 12 months.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/

Photobucket is different from the other photo-sharing sites. It is designed to host images for blogs and auction sites. Photobucket gives you one gigabyte of storage. You also get 25 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. If your photos are viewed a lot, they may not be available for others to view. Your photos are limited to one megabyte in size.

http://photobucket.com/

Photobucket has a nice Learning 2.1 lesson here

http://explorediscoverplay.blogspot.com/

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Assignment #103

Cool!

Surfing around the other day I found Seimoz's 2007 Web 2.0 awards.

http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0#cat_62

Under SEARCH I found PIPL - a people search engine.

http://pipl.com/

Wanting to objectively check this resource, I looked for (who else?)

Me - rameyerguam

It brought me to a presentation Jane Desart and Stephen Abram made to the Canadian Library Association.

http://www.sirsidynix.com/Resources/Pdfs/Company/Abram/200706_CLA_Learning_2.0_2007.pdf

And there on slide 53 was - me - or at least my blog. Cool!

My wife was not impressed. Something about time vs money.

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Assignment #102

Yourminis-Widgets-iGoogle-Tabs

The new Learning2.1 Blog has lessons on various Internet things that I can use in this email so I’ve decided to steal their stuff today. The full lesson is here: http://explorediscoverplay.blogspot.com/

Yourminis is a virtual desktop like Netvibes or iGoogle only cooler and more colorful. http://www.yourminis.com/

Here’s the Discovery Exercise from Learning2.1

# Go to YourMinis and click Open Startpage.

# Click one of the "templates" at the bottom of the right-hand pane to add a tab full of widgets to your pages.

# Create a new tab by clicking Add Tab at the top of the page, and use the gray bar on the left to add some widgets to your page. (If you don't see the bar, click Add Content in the upper left corner.) It's easy to drag them around on the page. Mouse over each widget and click the buttons that appear in its top right corner to set options and change widget color, etc. You can also use the small drop-down arrows beside each tab's name to change the tab background color, delete the tab or perform other "maintenance" tasks.

Also I found this little hack a few days ago to add more tabs to your iGoogle page (Only 6 is so passé). On your iGoogle homepage just add

javascript:_renameTab(); _dlsetp('at=')

to the address bar and hit enter.

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Assignment #101

These sites supposedly give you the keys to unlock the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system at major companies. This is the maze of “punch one for advertising” etc that you get when you call. They tell you how to easily reach a real person.

http://ivrhacks.com/

www.gethuman.com

Also- Lt Hubbard emailed my about Alt-Key codes (Assignment #95) You can also get to a full character map under the start menu -> all programs -> accessories -> system tools -> character map

Thanks

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Assignment #100

Icons

Don’t you just love all these colorful Web2.0 icons? Even if we don’t have the slightest idea as to what a site does or whatever, the icons are cool. Today’s first site gets my SO DAMN CUTE award. It’s http://www.sputtr.com/

Now I know we probably do too much Search stuff in this email but I couldn’t resist this site. It appeals to the 5 year old in me.

The second site says it’s a complete Web2.0 Directory with first a one line description and then a blurb. It’d take you a while to get through them all but then, what else do you have to do this week?

http://www.go2web20.net/

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Assignment #99

Awesome

This was just on Phil Bradley’s blog.

http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2007/06/photosynth_demo.html

and I was blown away.

Prepare to be impressed:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

About the closest thing we have right now is Flickr’s World Map with its geotagged pictures.

Goto Flickr (assignment #2) and sign in. In the upper left corner click ORGANIZE. On top click MAP. On the left click EXPLORE THIS MAP. On the right side click SATELLITE. Use your mouse to move the map. Use the slider to go closer. Click on the red dots for pics.

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Assignment #98

Putting videos on your IPOD

According to our Base Historian this is a cinch using the video reformatting service at ZamZar.com but he did have a little trouble with a Japanese video in letterbox. It got squeezed a little too much.

http://zamzar.com/

It’s a little bit more work to go from a DVD to your IPOD but here are two different ways compliments of everybody at YOUTUBE. The first has the Stones as a bonus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4EFNHpj_Ho

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HduME9L1HV8

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Assignment #97

Old Reference Librarian Tricks with Google Images

I have found Google Images good for 3 things other than just pictures.

One) Put the name of a country into the Search Bar and you'll get excellent maps - lots of them.

Two) Put the word chart or poster after something like Music or Basketball or Guitar and get really cool stuff.

Three) Put a body part into the Search Bar and you can get photos that might otherwise be interdicted by your particular circumstance. An exception to this is Net Nanny which doesn't like Google Images but doesn't know about http://zuula.com/ Images.

(I once told my Capt. that despite the best efforts of the Air Force I could have a pornographic picture on his computer within 30 seconds.)

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Assignment #96

Google released a study that said that 10% of Internet sites contain virus and-or malware that can be downloaded to your computer. The article is here.

http://www.usenix.org/events/hotbots07/tech/full_papers/provos/provos.pdf

At the same time, one of my friends wanted to know how to avoid malware when downloading programs like we do here sometimes.

Probably the easiest thing to do is get your downloads from CNET.

http://www.download.com/

CNET does a good job of guarding the integrity of the programs accessible from their site.

So, if there’s some program you want, and you’re not sure about the site, take note of what the file is called and go on over to CNET to download it.

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Assignment #95

Alt-Key Codes

Ever wonder how they get those odd foreign letters and things like currency symbols into Windows documents? Well, you hold down the Alt Key and punch a four digit code on the keypad and voilà (0224). Here’s a list of key codes

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html#accent

or,if you’re in Word, just do INSERT-SYMBOL.

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Assignment #94

Audio and Video Formats

Kim Komando had a post last week on audio formats:

MP3--This is an old standard, but still very usable. Almost all music players can handle it. You won't go wrong with MP3.

WMA--This stands for Windows Media Audio. Its files are much smaller than MP3s, but they deliver comparable music quality. Because WMAs are smaller, you can get more of them on the player. Many MP3 music players can also handle WMAs.

AAC--This is Advanced Audio Coding. It is used to format the music sold by Apple and RealNetworks. It is difficult to convert to more open standards such as MP3. Therefore, it is generally restricted to just a few music players.

WAV--This is an uncompressed format. It is sometimes used on recordable CDs. But it is not suited for storage on a computer. It's just too big.

How do you convert WAV to MP3, or MP3 to WMA? There are a number of conversion programs. My favorite is dBpowerAMP. It's free at: www.dbpoweramp.com

The only thing I’d add is Red Book Audio which is kind of like a WAV file and is the format on your audio CD’s.

Video formats are really complicated and probably the only things you need to know are these main formats that are also streamed.

WMV Windows Media Video from Microsoft

MOV Quick Time Movies from Apple and

FLV Flash Video from Adobe

There is a free piece of software that will change formats of video files. It’s called SUPER © and it’s a bit quirky and confusing but you can get it here: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

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Assignment #93

Firefox Addons

Last weekend my Firefox browser was acting funny. Youtube came up fine but the video was taking forever. I had just put on this new addon called BetterSearch which puts thumbnails on your Google Search. I tried taking off the BetterSearch and it did run a little faster but not much. So I took off the Greasemonkey, the Search Term Highlighter and something else I can’t remember and the flash video was back to normal. I put BetterSearch back on because it looks cool and – no problem. I guess what I’m trying to say is be careful with those Firefox addons. They’re fun but they can bite you in the butt.

They’re at Tools-Addons in your Firefox Browser.

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Assignment #92

Add a little code to google.

One of the library blogs I look at every day is called Librarian in Black

http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/

by a Goth Librarian (there’re two words I never thought I’d see together) named Sara Houghton from San Mateo. She posted a trick with Google Images.

After you search for an image, add &imgtype=face to the URL in the address bar and you get only faces. Pretty cool. Add &imgtype=news and you get only images that relate to news stories.

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Assignment #91

From the folks that brought us RSS in Plain English

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

comes Wikis in Plain English

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

and I finally can add myself to Helene Blowers Learning 2.1 Wiki.

http://learning21.pbwiki.com/

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Assignment #90

Lesson # 1

Yes, It’s a little late for #1 but I’m willing to bet not many of you have gone through this little exercise. I’m going to assume that we are all going to use IE and a newer version of Word for this.

Goto http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_ts_b_nav/104-0160586-7674366

And Highlight and Copy the Potter kid entry.

Goto Word and Right Click and Paste

Goto EDIT-UNDO PASTE

Goto EDIT-PASTE SPECIAL (If it’s not there wait 5 seconds) FORMATTED TEXT

Repeat using Unformatted Text, HTML, and Unformatted Unicode Text.

I usually only use the Paste itself and the Unformatted Text myself depending on the situation.

On my daily emails I have a template with the formatting already there. Then I paste the Unformatted Text.

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Assignment #89

The Paranormal

I’ve got a program here on Monday evenings I call the Near Death, Reincarnation and Other Spooky Stuff Discussion Group. I’ve got a few people interested in it and gives me an excuse to look at these things, and religion itself, objectively and informally.

Anyway, I’ve found lots of good supporting materials on the Web.

Google Videos and YouTube have stuff. Especially good are

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5cGSUBU8-w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9sjf-Y2Njo

which is the first of five parts.

There’s also a torrent with lots of excellent media files here

http://search.utorrent.com/search.php?q=reincarnation%20-breeg&e=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2emininova%2eorg%2fsearch%2f%3futorrent%26search%3d&u=1 It’s the big one.

Of course, you can always get good stuff from our favorite late night radio show if you have a subscription

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

and here’s a good program from public radio station WHRO

http://www.whro.org/home/publicradio/whrv/localprogramming/hearsay/2006/January/010906-011206.htm

and I love this site

http://near-death.com/

just because it’s so well organized.

Librarians, email me if you’re interested in this stuff or want to start your own program.

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Assignment #88

Google’s Book Search tries hard to be an index for all books, or at least all the books it has scanned. It used to be better before their legal problems but they’re trying to make a comeback. I’ve no doubt that at some time in the future, copyright holders will realize what a tremendous benefit it is to have somebody index your book along with the surrounding text for the search term. Right now Google’s snippet thing is somewhat painful but they are trying and they are getting better. Here’s an interesting video presentation on Google Book Search and Google Scholar:

http://www.google.com/librariancenter/librarian_movies.html

Here’s their Book Search Blog:

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/

Get some handouts and posters here:

http://www.google.com/librariancenter/librarian_tools.html

A couple of years ago I researched the movie/book Don’t Go Near the Water (1956-57) and it’s relationship to Guam. Wasn’t much on the Web but Book Search was invaluable.

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