Friday mornings

I'm missing my colleagues. We usually spend our Friday mornings looking at a Cam23 thing together and having a play. But they're not here today, so I'll blog about our experience of thing 11 - Slideshare. Like many of the sites and services we're being introduced to by the 23 things program, the initial homepage is quite scary - busy and off-putting and fills one with 'I don't know what to do'-ness. This is why it's great to have the Cam 23 team in the wings pushing us on to the stage like a proud parent. 'You can do it, Go on!' We have also learned the benefit of having simultaneous tabs open on our browsers, so that we can slip seamlessly from 'Cam 23 blog' to' thing to explore' without falling over or bursting into tears or wishing we had a print-out.

A question at an early stage is 'How do you add audio to a presentation to turn it into a screencast?' Hmm, getting ahead of ourselves there, maybe. The Heriot-Watt slideshows seem to be two years old, so we have a look at something a bit more recent - Phil Bradley on Facebook Privacy. 79 slides - we don't make it to the end.

While I'd love to share colleagues' slide presentations on various things, I'm probably more likely to do this in a local environment, so I expect if I use slideshare at all, it'll be by someone saying 'and if you want to see my slides for this presentation, I've posted them on slideshare'. But for 'slideshare', I guess I could read libraries@cambridge or the presenter's own website or any other number of sites, or get the slides as an email attachment. Coming to a slide presentation without actually having seen it presented, the presentation can often falter where you'd get a bit of witty repartee, and I find myself thinking 'and what would they have said while that slide was up?' Which I guess brings me back to the screencast question. I'm glad Slideshare is there, and I might enjoy ransacking it, but am unlikely to find 100% useful stuff - I think I'd want to be directed to something specific, either by its author or by a colleague for it to really grab me.

Thank you for thinking of everything

Thanks for explaining Flickr and Creative Commons, Cam 23 team. Makes it much easier. And I think I'm converted. A friend of mine also recommended morguefile as a great source for photos too. Nice that there's so many inspiring images of books and libraries out there ...

The Visual

I like Flickr. Can't quite yet see how I can use it usefully. And I'm a bit confused about what's freely available for use, and what isn't. Need to look into that a bit more carefully. It's enormously enjoyable to look at the pictures though - many are really quirky and different.

All this makes my head hurt

Thinking about communication, about speech, about catgorization - the good and the bad. The way we use language - in a personal, informal waysometimes, in a more formal way at other times. Thinking about in-jokes, about shorthand and shared family words, and that perhaps I would want to tag some of my stuff in a more personal, coded way. But then all this Web 2.0 stuff is operating in a public, or at least a social sphere, so don't we want to agree what we call 'x'? Isn't that what a common language is all about? If I was a medic, looking up the latest research, then I'd want to be sure that I was using the same term as everyone else, wouldn't I? On the other hand, looking at Library Thing just now, I was thinking of ways I could tag my catalogue records, which just wouldn't be allowable in a strictly MARC environment. Tags which would be useful for a particular sub-set of the community I serve. Hmm.

Building spewage

Signing up to Twitter just now - thanks cam23ers for the advice not to use my work email if I think I may want to use this later for a library blog. You never know. I correctly identified my distorted nightmarish two word phrase and satisfied myself and others that I am not a computer. Only to find that Twitter is over capacity. Hmm. Does this happen often?

Three meetings

Google calendar - potentially useful. Actually irritating. Or is it just me? I find the display really confusing. I managed to enter the same meeting three times because no matter how many times I refreshed the page it didn't seem to be there. But then I went away and came back and it was there and now I don't know how to stop the calendar telling me that I have three meetings on July 6th at 11am. I suppose there's some comfort in knowing that they are exactly the same meeting and that I will be able to meet this triple-booking. Shades of Groundhog Day though...

Time for a drink

I've been on the receiving end of lots of Doodle polls, and think they work well. Haven't initiated one before though, so will be interested to see what they're like to administer.

There's quite a few of you out there

Well - I know there's over a hundred cam23 bloggers, so for thing 4, I'm just going to say I've visited a few of you and like what you're doing. So many of you are stylish. So many of you are interesting. It's good to know you're there.

Slow starter

Almost embarrassed to start posting a month late with thing 1. But better late than never, I suppose. I like igoogle and - look! - I can make it pretty too. But it has proved the tipping point for my home computer which now crashes every time I open my browser.