Has it really been that long?

Oops. Somehow May Week happened, which means that I spent much of last week's free time in an alcoholic haze (that wasn't me. I genuinely believe that walking around Cambridge there was a cloud of evaporated Pimms hanging over the city). So it's been a while since I last checked anything out. Having done Doodle, I was filled with confidence for the next thing.

Google Calendar. In all its sparse, minimalist glory. I followed the instructions and created a few events. This was very simple and straightforward, and I liked it a lot. I chose to put two weeks in at a time, and it still looks pretty empty, but work simply doesn't revolve around meetings and events: I come in, I work, I go home again.On the other hand, if I can get my colleagues to use Google Calendar too, then we would be able to keep a diary on there of all the times we're on holiday. Now that would be useful; much simpler than writing in two different diaries, and a lot less scribbling out!

I do like the flexibility - I like to customise  my internet experience as far as humanly possible, and aside from the bland colour scheme, I was able to do a lot with setting the page up how I liked it. It's useful being able to add one-off and regular events - not to mention being able to decide whether you want weekends visible or not.

Ultimately, I think there are few flaws. One is that unless you share this with others, you might just as well keep a diary. In that context, it doesn't really do anything new that your pocket diary doesn't, except for the reminders. The other is my own problem, in that I have a personal persona on the internet, and a professional persona on the internet. It's hard to keep everything together when you have (at last count) 4 different Google accounts, since you only really want one single calendar for everything!

And there's even a way to embed the poll I'd made

Doodling

Hurrah!!! An easy "Thing" at last!!!
That's assuming it counts that I've done it already. This Doodle is one I did when organising a dinner for a group of ex-university archers. It was a triumph, not least thanks to using Doodle to work out dates people could do. I am a fan of Doodle - it doesn't do much (and perhaps, doesn't need to), but what it does, it does well.

It occurs to me that there is very little sense in organising multiple peer support group polls to arrange multiple peer support group meetings. I've added myself to someone else's Doodle poll here, but I'll be checking with the 23things organisers that what I've already done will be acceptable instead.

I'm off to explore the alternatives to Doodle now...

This is from the dinner I organised using Doodle. It was held at the Hawks Clubhouse in Cambridge.

Commenting on commenting

I've bounced around a few of the other blogs. Some are overwhelmingly advanced, and others are pretty similar to mine, and I guess it'll be interesting to see which ones start out fairly basic and become more fantastical, and which ones will remain similar throughout the exercise. I commented on a few, but really found I had nothing to say. I'll be honest - I rarely read other people's comments on subjects anymore. I've found most start out reasonably enough - "I disagree with the author for this reason," but within about 20 comments it's often descended into sniping and name-calling. Or it's gone off-topic. Or it's me - I just can't be bothered to read a few hundred comments in the hope that some will be interesting or useful, once I've read the initial article. If I'm interested, I'm more likely to check out related articles or websites than other people's comments.

iGoogle - do you?

And here it is, my iGoogle page. I found it quite hard working out what would be useful to me, so it's very much a work in progress. A lot of the things I've added are things I do not visit very often, but it was hard pinpointing things that I refer to more frequently than these. I left on a few things Google suggested, to try them out and see what use I could make of them. Ultimately, I find that most browsers use tabbing, and certainly Chrome and Firefox both allow you to save tabs. I can see that being able to log in to all the things you need at one point without having to use the same computer can be useful, but since I use the same computer at work the whole time, it remains a bit of a moot point.

Web 2.0 - 1, Librarian - 0

The previous post took 2 hours to do. Writing it was fine, but the addition of an image presented a challenge. Firstly, finding an image was difficult. I don't have banks of images available to me at the touch of a button, all copyright-free. I started with Flickr, but their images - even those freely available - for some reason just wouldn't load successfully. I thought "no problem, I'll save the image to my computer and upload it from there," but found that when I did this, I was unable to actually save the image at all. (When you right-click on the image you want, and select "view image", it shows you what you end up saving - a tiny blank box.)

In the end I went with one from last year's holiday in Washington, of the outside of the Library of Congress. The one I wanted was of the library of the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima, Peru, which was meant to represent where I feel I am currently in relation to web 2.0. Now I feel a photo of the Great Library of Alexandria would be a better choice!

EDIT: After some more exploring, I was able to discover a way to put an image in the background of the blog. The image has to be available online, so you either need to upload one elsewhere or use a freely available one. I got this one from Wikimedia Commons, and I think I'm okay to use it as long as I cite the author (Jpoeta) and say that they do not endorse me or my use of this work.

EDIT 07/06/10: Even more exploring, and I found a way to customise the little image that sits in the top left hand corner of the tab when I visit my blog. It's called a Favicon, and the post I used to help me customise it was here.

Librarian vs web 2.0 : who will win?

This is me working on thing 3, part of the 23 Things.

I am what was for a while labelled "Generation X"; I began using the internet at school, and I'm often looked upon as the go-to person when something technological goes wrong in the library where I work. Despite that, I'm not all that comfortable with many of the web 2.0 tools and features. I also find it extremely hard to visualise how they can work in a professional setting (that's having seen them at work in a professional setting too!).

So for me, 23 Things is a chance to make the jump from web 2.0 for fun to web 2.0 for work. I'm hoping that some of the things will be something I can use to improve my workplace's presence on the web and increase accessibility of the library for its users.