ATOLearning exercise

Last thing....

1. Go to www.ebookee.com
2. Have a look at the ebooks that are available on the site (encyclopedias, classics)
3. Check out the 'free magazine subscriptions'
4. Read about Amazon's Kindle

Not sure re this one - guess would be great to stock up on some books if were going travelling & didn't want to cart the paper kind around.

I did work out (eventually) that for Huckleberry Finn, could go to a link to Rapid and slowly download it (which I did to see what it looks like). Of course if I parted with money, could get it much quicker. So there's free and then there's free... I refrained from saving this 1.4 MB PDF copy of the book (I have it in hard copy at home & haven't gotten around to reading it, so don't think I'll get around to reading an electronic copy of it). Noticed it is part of the Project Gutenberg. Layout was ok and nicely formatted.

After discovering this link, went back to Little Women and found the external download links for that. Now the page makes a bit more sense, but the layout needs improvement to make it easier for novices (like me) to negotiate.

Part of the attraction for the site, I'm guessing, is the whole try before you buy concept. Read a chapter or two online & if you find you really like it (or get sick of reading it online), can then go shopping for the hardcopy. I wonder how much business Amazon get's this way. Would be good if you're remote & don't have the luxury of visiting the library or bookshop and would like to buy based on more than the blurb on the backcover and online reviews.

Quite an interesting assortment of titles under the various categories. LOL with what's catergorised as "romance" !

Had a look at the Magazines section - there seems to be quite a theme happening with the most viewed titles! Strange that Technology Review and Men's Health actually made it onto the list, given the calibre of the other titles on offer. :-) Again, looking at the various tabs there is quite the range of topics/titles - Japanese Modelling stood out. Not sure how, but ended up on a page for The Cambridge History of Japan Volume 4 (Early Modern Japan) which did look interesting.


The free magazine site that they were recommending was http://www.asiaing.com/ which I've never heard of before, but did look worthy of further pursuit (with a bit of time!!)


Kindle (Amazon) sounds a great concept but needs a bit of work & a price decrease. And availability beyond USA. It was good to see the 1 star ratings - the consensus seems to be wait for the 2nd version, but even the 1 star ratings weren't too bad.

I guess this is the end of the Learning Experience for now.

Ciao or Miaow for now.

Beyond #46 - My Web 2.0 - part 1

I had a look thru Technorati and came across this site http://www.wordle.net/create

I thought this would be great if you’ve found an article or report and want to find out what the keywords are for further searching – what’s mentioned most?


This is an example already done




I’ve tried a couple of examples:



Original article: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24663336-952,00.html



Another test



Original article: http://www.ato.gov.au/corporate/content.asp?doc=/content/00169431.htm



Greater prominence given to the most used words - might be good for the obscure or the basic researcher.







At the 2008 ALLA conference, we were introduced to this YouTube video by Michael Wesch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wesch - the first one listed, The Machine is Us/ing Us (need a standalone to view). I highly recommend viewing this video re the Web 2.0 – it is a great representation of the way that technology has changed and the use of mashups (with catchy music too!). A nice intro to the use of this technology which might be good in a training situation, providing you've got ability to use a standalone to view it.

Thing 46: Updates!

Revisiting the original 23 things...



Thing 21 Discover some useful search tools for locating podcasts.

I had originally had a look at this site: http://podcasts.yahoo.com

One thing that is definitely new since I did this is that apparantly this site doesn't exist anymore so perhaps my blog entry was correct - may as well just search for podcasts in search engines, not need a special search engine/page for it

I did, however, find a couple of specific search engines by Yahoo:

http://video.yahoo.com/ - for video

and one for audio

http://audio.search.yahoo.com/audio - did a search for abc.net.au and found a few hits.

As it says Find audio files from across the Web including music, podcasts, interviews and more I guess that they've expanded coverage.

I still think it's easier to just do a search for podcasts within a particular site or on a particular topic across any search engine.


Thing 13 Learn about tagging and discover a Del.icio.us (a social bookmaking site)

http://delicious.com/ - the site name has changed - no need to remember where those dots are anymore!

re registered and found it much easier this time round to navigate & add entries etc

The layout of the site is much different from what I remembered; a lot easier to make sense of the results and the layout of the tags is much better.

Big improvement for this site!!

Thing #45: Go with the flow - flowcharts & mindmaps

Used Mindmeister & Gliffy for this one.


Mindemeister - Mindmap

This is a boring Christmas card/present list (couldn’t think of anything exciting so made up a bunch of names) - useful for the more visual of us - a different take on writing lists as well as the more normal project stuff, outlines of reports etc

Very easy to use.

It takes awhile for the insert to come up, but copied just fine




Gliffy - Flowcharts - used it to create a lounge room, so it's not just stock standard flowcharts

http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1540774/ The embedding into blog html code didn't work, so have a squiz at this instead.


http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1540779/ Flow chart here (I don't think I've ever actually used a proper flowchart to make use of the all the symbols as they name them).


Both very easy to use. Good for a one-off project that it doesn't matter who sees what you're up to. Very WYSIWYG.

Thing #44: Nag yourself

http://jott.com Jott

Looks very simple, quick & easy to use. Guess it's one way around endless bits of paper that then get misplaced. Would be heaps quicker than adding to a PDA etc.

I found the New York Times review of Jott plus other services can use on your phone was most useful http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/technology/personaltech/05pogue.html?scp=2&sq=Jott&st=cse

Thing #42: Google Groups / Usenet

Well, I found it interesting that anyone is using this system, given the plenthora of alternative discussion groups/lists availabe. It does seem that useage is once again on the wane - probably because there's just so many possible channels available now. It might have worked a bit better on a standalone - Google was pushing out ads at me for some of my searches which obscured the screen somewhat. And what about phrase searching!! A bit too basic and frustrating for me. Would be of value from a historical viewpoint.

Thing #39: Animoto

Had a lot of fun with this one. Very hard to limit self to only 15 or less photos.

I obtained photos from http://www.flickr.com/

A $3 fee for full length videos is a good money spinner - much easier to find more photos than fewer and with such a modest fee most would be happy to pay. And probably again and again!

They've made it very easy to put together. Tried the remix function and got a much better result than what I had first up. As have 15 photos, not all seem to show in the video.

http://animoto.com/play/ruSUEHkO4hQqB8XlIYOA6A

Aimed at the novice - just shove in a heap of photos, choose some music and voila - heaps of fancy effects are done for you. So easy.

Thing #35: Microblogging

Twitter.

Hmmm.

What can I say?

Setting up an account was easy.

Declined to have Twitter have access to all my contacts (scary stuff).

Searched (on a major nostalgic whim) and found some people posing as "Buffy" and "Xander" and "Angel" from the "old" tv show. They must have fun thinking up posts to add re vampire slaying lives. Apparantly a Xander is now following me - talk about quick on the uptake.





No "Spike" though - oh, the shame of it all.....

Thing#32 Online file storage with Box.net

Mostly was fairly easy. A bit of toing and froing initially, but reckon on a 2nd go would be fairly easy to manage. Not sure that it would be good for work use - lose control of the files and trusting a 3rd party with the information. Useful for personal use if moving around a bit I guess. Have used Zoho before and found it a good product.

Online file storage example

Rudd determined to act on housing affordability.doc

Thing 31: Get Organized with Plaxo

Plaxo seems to offer a great many features and ways to share data and connections with friends, family and colleagues. The mind boggles.

It's easy to use, with the ability to import your address and contact information from a number of sources including Gmail, Yahoo etc, and if any of your contacts are registered with Plaxo, you are automatically updated with their contact details, whenever they are updated - so handy when people change jobs, email addresses etc. Of course this requires them to update themselves which is never guaranteed. You can personalise the information that they have supplied in your own contacts area, which is quite nifty (especially if you know more than one person by the same first name and need to differentiate them).

I do wonder about viruses, given that it's importing contacts from an email list.

Thing #29: Scrapblog - I'm in Love

Useful for those crafty types out there (scrapbooking seems a phenomenal trend that shows no signs of abatement). Could be useful front page to highlight a new acquisition eg Budget papers with pictures of Swan and Rudd, ALP logo, money etc or as a front page before you get into a wiki entry (though you'd have to make sure that it looked professional to entice people in).

Dee Henderson - Uncommon Heroes Series

Thing#27 Photobucket

Created own account and shoved a heap of photos and videos there and even tagged some. I probably wouldn't use the account though to view them yet again.

If I want to look at the photos/videos, I'd just look at them on photobucket site itself - wouldn't have a need to save them to look at again in future unless especially fantastic (and there's always more out there to view). Some of it in exceptionally poor taste - obviously the younguns have taken to it somewhat.

All up, some good photos to look at (amongst heaps of extremely boring/poor taste), but don't see a use for it, other than spending heaps of time looking.

Creating an avatar wanted a new version of flash installed - I didn't bother.

Thing #26: Widgets - little bits of the internet on your desktop

Hi

Had a look at the yourminis widgets site http://www.yourminis.com/browse_minis.aspx?c=travel&s=rating&t=all&p=1

Ok, it took a little while to work out that if you "spin the wheel" once selecting copy and choose B for blogger and then sign in etc that the widget will get magically transported to my blog. Believe me, copying the html code definitely wasn't working!

Looks good. Need a world time thingy, but I guess one of the entries under clock could be set up to show the time in a particular spot... Hmmm, trouble is I'd want a few set up! Better use on your own webpage, rather than a blog. Would get lost in the blog entries along the way.

Thing #25: Letterpop.com - newsletters

Hi

Used http://letterpop.com to create the start of a Christmas newsletter ...

I've made it private, but apparantly if you send out the URL to people, they can still view it - guess it's just not searchable.
http://letterpop.com/newsletters/?id=86246-b89924

Didn't work over the desktop at all. Used a standalone PC to register and create & save etc.

Took awhile to work out how to add any text in, but once did it was all relatively simple.

Thing #24 Zamzar.

23 April 2008

Back again...

[Just loved this picture - irony in the extreme]

Now on with the learning result...







http://www.zamzar.com/ was extremely easy to use, especially once I knew to scroll down the screen a bit to find that the document I'd selected for conversion had been selected alright (I did wonder at first if it was actually letting me upload a document off of the share drive or not).









Couldn't select a .tif doc which was a pain - that's what I'd most use it for (convert to pdf).









Did .doc to .pdf and then .pdf to .doc

.doc to .pdf worked a treat. Not sure that I've ever had a need for this, but it worked all the same.

.pdf to .doc didn't work so great. Sure, I can now add text before the article I chose, I can add text over and even add a picture over the top and I can add text after. But I can't seem to alter the original text. Ah, well.


Did take awhile for them to arrive... Probably our end, rather than zamzar.





As expected, there were quite a few popups associated with using this free site - but that seems perfectly normal these days! And they're rather keen that you join up.