Thing 4(b). Posting from Flickr

19-vacat-05010
Originally uploaded by radfo001

Ah, a sunny day on Mom's deck, near the shore of the rapidly drying-up Lake Hartwell. Pretty easy to post this on Chilly Place, once I tried it a few times.

Thing 4. Photosharing and editing

Flickr's a stroke of genius. Kudos to the bright lad or lass who conjured up such a concept. While I'm no Michael Stephens (mentioned in a previous post), who has documented practically his ENTIRE life via Flickr, I've got as many as 100 images posted and linked. It's way cool how friends, family, colleagues, can access your stuff, too--no more having to use email attachments. And groups and tags make stuff easier to find. I especially like the way I can work between Flickr and Blogger to add images from the latter to the former.

Thing 3. Keeping Up. RSS

RSS is like so cool. One-stop delivery of s-o-o-o much info--I like it. I use Bloglines, 'cause I find it easy to add/delete and organize blogs I'm interested in. Let's see, at this point, I've got 50 blogs coming in, about 70% active posts. (of course, that, the problem: once you subscribe, the person doing the blog might just take a hiatus for a while. Or the company. Google Librarian Central, for example, has totally dropped the ball. No postings from them since last June. Not even a hasty be-seeing-ya or anything. I know they're busy, but....) These 50 are organized into four folders, either because I like to keep things simple, or because I'm just not very interesting--Library, Technology, Politics, Arts and Music. The biggest folder is Libraries, with twenty-eight blogs; Arts and Music is the smallest. Oh, I've got a few blogs that don't fit into a folder-types sitting around, too. One is from a guy who used to write about the T-wolves in City Pages before the Village Voice schmo's bought it out and stupified it. His name's Britt Robson and he knows b-ball far better than the team he covers plays it.

Thing 2. Web 2.0

There's so much Web and Library 2.0 out there now--it's almost becoming an infoglut. And, what was bound to happen has occurred: I've come across a definition of W3.0 now. (There's link on Techmeme, if you're interested.) So much to check out--blogs and wikis and YouTube vids and Facebook pages and Libraryswim and podcasts and gaming and RSS feeds and yadayada--and so little time. Not that all the infoglut isn't more than a little bit fascinating, which equals frustration, which makes the overload harder to deal with. But with all that yada comes some good things, Michael Stephens for one. The dude doesn't seem to have much time to post on his blog, Tame the Web, 'cause he's super-busy with teaching, writing and doing his traveling workshop, but he's a gem (and TTW is still one of the best blogs on W2.0 out there). He overviewed, elequently and comprehensively, the whole shootin' match of 2.0 in Library Technology Reports ("Best Practices in Social Software")--pretty amazing any one person could do that. And, talking to him after one of his training session, he's a pretty nice guy, too--who makes the infoglut a little easier to deal with . Thanks, Michael.

Thing 1. Setting up my blog

This was an easy one. The hardest thing, actually, is thinking about what to write. There are so many bloggers out there, discussing important things, that blogging on a series of lessons seems, well, trivial. So--to make it easy to think about what to write--I'll just settle in and do what I'm supposed to. It's a learning experience, after all, an experience. Empirical. Later, I'll move on to the important stuff.

Ok, setting up the blog was easy. That avatar bit was problematic, though. For one, I've had sour experiences with Second Life--slow loading and response, poor tutorials and heaven help you if you leave that intro-island before you know the basic stuff like making your avatar sit down. And I always feel a bit of a fool with the choice of avatars one gets from Second Life or Yahoo or anywhere: do they all have to look like surfers, mallrats, grad students or characters out of Juno? I'm s-o-o tired of spiky hair and little goatees. But, anyhow, I created one. But couldn't figure out to paste the avatar code into the blog's html. So, sorry, no avator yet for In a Chilly Place.