The mashup I chose to explore was Weather Bonk. Here is the page for my area, Lexington, Kentucky. It's a blend of the following interfaces: Google AdWords + Google Maps + hostip.info + Microsoft Virtual Earth + NASA + NOAA Weather Service + WeatherBug + Yahoo Geocoding + Yahoo Maps + Yahoo Traffic.
Basically it has temperatures, radar images, precipitation, and satellite data overlaid onto a Google Map. It also shows webcams and forecasts.
I suppose the thing I like most about this and probably other mashups is how seemless they've brought everything together and melded it together into one thing.
The other thing we were to explore this time were search rolls. Search roll services such as Rollyo allow the user to create a set of blogs in which to search and then provides the interface to do so. One of the oness I found for 'privacy', the search term we were supposed to use, was the Annoyed Librarian's post on anonymity and pseudonymity online and why it's important. I created my own search roll of reference items called rabidreference. Have fun with it.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Gee it's been awhile
One of our assigments is to find a library video on YouTube and embed it on the blog. Here is mine:
Okay, so it's not really serious, but I thought I'd bring some fun into ths rather dry blog.
As far as using YouTube (and I have for awhile), I find that it's very easy to find whatever's out there, between the search feature and the tags. There are a lot of libraries who have made videos (mostly humourous) to promote themselves, and of course there are all sorts of how-to/instructional videos out there, such as the ones for our class. So I think it's definitely useful. Unfortunately a lot of institutions block the service (because let's face it, there's a lot of frivolity there).
We were also supposed to check out podcasts. I went to Odeo and subscribed to the City of Casa Grande (Arizona) Public Library's monthly news. There wasn't much in the way of medical library stuff yet, although I did find one on Library 2.0, but it was a one-time thing, and we were asked to subscribe to an ongoing one.
Podcasting seems to be an excellent way to get announcements and news of the library into the hands of users, at least those that are savy. Since they can be embedded in a blog (I didn't do that here, because you have to give the service permission to access your blog and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet), people don't have to go anywhere to find the podcast. Odeo also searches for other podcasts not on its system and allows you to share the podcasts with others. Overall, I was impressed and would like to explore this further.
Okay, so it's not really serious, but I thought I'd bring some fun into ths rather dry blog.
As far as using YouTube (and I have for awhile), I find that it's very easy to find whatever's out there, between the search feature and the tags. There are a lot of libraries who have made videos (mostly humourous) to promote themselves, and of course there are all sorts of how-to/instructional videos out there, such as the ones for our class. So I think it's definitely useful. Unfortunately a lot of institutions block the service (because let's face it, there's a lot of frivolity there).
We were also supposed to check out podcasts. I went to Odeo and subscribed to the City of Casa Grande (Arizona) Public Library's monthly news. There wasn't much in the way of medical library stuff yet, although I did find one on Library 2.0, but it was a one-time thing, and we were asked to subscribe to an ongoing one.
Podcasting seems to be an excellent way to get announcements and news of the library into the hands of users, at least those that are savy. Since they can be embedded in a blog (I didn't do that here, because you have to give the service permission to access your blog and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet), people don't have to go anywhere to find the podcast. Odeo also searches for other podcasts not on its system and allows you to share the podcasts with others. Overall, I was impressed and would like to explore this further.
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