Exercise #17

For this adventure I went to the shortlist of the winning websites in the Web 2.0 Awards. Under the Education category I chose Mango Languages, which gained second place. Here is the link: www.mangolanguages.com
This is a very good place to go to learn a foreign language at your own pace and in a fun and interactive way. At present 12 languages are available using a combination of written text and audio clips. The lessons are presented in a series of slides, which you control, so for example, if you need to hear a word or phrase spoken again you just click the back arrow.
You can view the first lesson without logging in, but to use the whole course you do need to
register. This is very quick and easy, and free too.
I think this site would be a valuable online learning resource for travellers and would grow in popularity and usefulness as it expands and adds more languages. Great fun!

Exercise #16

Zoho Writer
This online word processor would be very useful, once I've tried more documents to really understand all the features it offers. One thing I couldn't for the life of me figure out was how to make a landscape document. After trying every button I gave up and had to do a portrait. The same thing happened with Google Docs, it was very frustrating. If anyone knows the trick, please let me know! Anyway I created this poster and found it easy to publish to my blog. Somewhere in cyberspace on its way to the blog the word- spacing went a bit wonky and bits and pieces re-arranged themselves so I must have gone a bit wrong somewhere, but I'm quite pleased with the result.

NZ Book Month

                           DISCOVER

                       NEW ZEALAND

                            WRITING
                                                             
                                                         NZ BOOK MONTH
              
                   SEPTEMBER
                          2008   

                               

Exercise #15

Well, I don't know that I like this Rollyo place. It seems a more roundabout way of getting to where you want to go. I suppose people who do a lot of internet searching would use it, but I can't see it being of any use to me. It's a bit confusing, but maybe I've missed the point altogether!
Here is the link to my searchroll: http://rollyo.com/gdine55/

In the past two weeks the winter flu bugs and tummy bugs have hit our netball girls hard. The previous two games were played with only 5 players - they lost both games. There are only 3 more games to be played so here's hoping the team is at full strength again and ready to play, maybe for a win.

Exercise #14

Library Thing is like a great big library book club. You can keep a reading history, connect with others who have read your books, read reviews and write your own, join a group and search other members' libraries. Also other members recommend books to you based on the titles in your library, which is wonderful. You can be connected to local bookstores, libraries and book festivals and take advantage of the author visits that they host.
The website is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. Here is the link to my page:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/gdine55

Exercise #13

I created this word cloud at wordle, which I found quite easy to use. The tricky thing was copying and pasting to my blog. I found it very frustrating and time-consuming, but after trying every way I knew it suddenly worked. I don't know how I did it! Here is the link: http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/131203/garden

Exercise #12

After exploring the wet paint wiki, I added a favourite holiday destination, which was very easy to do. When adding my blog to the favourite blogs, it took me a while to figure out the link business, but I finally did it.
For those who are passionate about something and want to share their ideas with like-minded people, these wikis would be perfect.

Exercise #11

I have studied the information about wikis, which I didn't fully understand before. Now I see it's sort of one step up from a blog. Whereas a blog is focused on just one person, a wiki lets everyone get involved. Readers can not only post a comment, but can actually edit, add to and completely change the look of the page if they so wish. This works brilliantly as a centralised email system as shown in the excellent slide show on Youtube which explains how a wiki works.
A library wiki is useful for readers' advisory and as an expansion of the rating system which we already have, whereby patrons submit book reviews for other patrons to read. I liked the book lovers wiki developed by the Princeton Public Library. I have suggested for purchase by NSL a book which is reviewed in that wiki, so very handy for keeping up-to-date with recent publications.

Exercise #10

Library 2.0

The core message in the perspectives about Library 2.0 is that libraries must stay relevant and up-to-date, as they always have done, or risk being left behind and becoming redundant. Now, however, we are seeing dramatic change in the delivery and sharing of information, using technology which is rapidly developing. Libraries must keep up or even strive to be one step ahead so they are ready to serve their community.
Dr Wendy Schultz looks further into the future and talks about Library 3.0 and even Library 4.0. It all sounds very exciting and quite mind-boggling, but I hope we will still retain the personal customer interaction that we have today.

Exercise #9

I have been looking at Technorati and have found it quite staggering how many bloggers there are, and how huge the blogosphere is. I think this site is reasonably easy to search for what you want.
Searching for Web 2.0, as the exercise asked us to, yielded interesting results like this: Blog posts 119, 133; Blogs 15,875. Both Blogs and Posts had 10 related tags, all with thousands of entries. The actual Web.2.0 tag yielded 32,171 hits. When I entered Web 2.0 into the Blog directory there were loads of pages of hits, but no actual number of results was given. The same goes for searches under Photos and Videos - plenty of hits, but no specific number. I wonder why.
I don't know if I'll use Technorati when this programme is over, but as a starting point for searching blogs it would be very useful.

Exercise #8

I have taken a look at delicious, in particular the bookmarked site http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/index.xml
which has absolutely amazing photos from the Olympics opening ceremony. It's quite interesting to see how many people have bookmarked a site and how many have left notes.
Delicious is another way of sharing your favourite sites with the community and is an easy way to see what other people find interesting.
Also this is the first time I have created a link and it's worked!

Rotorua, Lake Rotoehu 002

Rotorua, Lake Rotoehu 002, originally uploaded by Rickbecroft2008.

Cloudy day at the lake, good for fishing.

Exercise #7

I found this exercise a little confusing - too much information perhaps. I seemed to be darting from one site to another trying to establish which feeds I wanted to subscribe to. I found the easiest way was to copy the URL of the site in to the subscribe box. As to how useful this will be, well to be honest I don't think I will be using Bloglines much at all. However for people who like to get all their information from the internet, having your own page of personalised sites would undoubtedly be very time-saving.

Moonlight Daffodils

Moonlight Daffodils, originally uploaded by Jim-AR.

I thought this was an unusual picture of daffodils at nighttime - and I actually quite enjoy looking at Flickr and sending pictures to my blog.

Second game

The team's second game followed the same pattern as the first - a loss of 14-3. The opposition were much better and faster getting the ball down to their goal. Our spirits are high though and we're all looking forward to next week's game.