Thing #10

And now, Thing #10: Play around with Image Generators. I scanned through most of the image generators listed on the Nebraska Learns 2.0 website. A couple of them didn't really appeal to me, so I passed them by. However, I did blow the better part of my evening playing with this stuff.

Of the ones I played with, I'll start with the ones which left me with nothing worth showing you.

With Dynamic Einstein Picture, I had Einstein writing "I will not tear holes in space-time" over and over, like a kid staying after school. It wasn't really funny enough to save, and I can't imagine that there aren't several thousand variations on that theme out there.

The Comicbook Speech Bubbler was stupid, yet great fun. However, the saved images were defective. The text was perfectly aligned in the word bubble on the screen, but the lines were squished together and slightly overlapping in the jpg I downloaded. I tried multiple times, with the same result. So I just deleted them. Boo.

The Generator Blog lists scads of different image generators. Many of them are silly time wasters, good for a laugh and not much else, but one in particular really stood out for me: Hide Text, which allows you to convert text into an image. So if you have something (like your e-mail address) that you want people to be able to read with their eyes, but which will be invisible to search engines and robots, this is the way to do it.

FD's Flickr Toys included a link to Motivator, one of the few image generators I have played with in the past. About two years ago, I used it to make posters of Ranganathan's Five Laws featuring screenshots from the anime Read Or Die. If you've seen R.O.D., you might be amused by these. If you haven't seen it, you might just be bemused.







I scanned through FD's other entries, and cheered "Cheezburger!" when I saw the Lolcat Generator. This is my long-suffering cat Luna, who was very unamused by my shenanigans. In case you're not a mythology fan, the monsters are a griffin and a chimera.



What made my discovery of the Lolcat Generator truly funny, however, was the fact that mere minutes earlier, on the Custom Computer Keyboard, I had made a lolcat key.



Can you tell I'm a huge fan of I Can Has Cheezburger?

Then, after all that silliness, I came to ALA's Mini-READ posters. Look at their website. So austere. So dignified. I know READ posters are supposed to feature people reading books, but I don't have any pictures of myself reading (and I'm having a bad hair day, so I don't want to snap one now), and I won't post a picture of a friend or family member without their permission, so I went with this massive pillar of books which was on display in the National Library in Prague in 2005. Nothing says "READ" like a mountain of literature.



I'm going to finish with the first image generator I looked at this evening, because it actually turned out to be my favorite. Dumpr has an "Amazing Circles" generator that held me mesmerized. I made a dozen bubbles out of my 2005 Czech Republic vacation photos. I leave you with one of my favorites. If you want to see the rest, check out my other blog.

Thing #9

Two in one day? Yes indeed! Trying to make up for lost time. Here is Thing #9: More Flickr Fun.

Flickrvision - New photos pop up on a map, wherever they are. This would be fun if one was seeking random inspiration, but that's the only practical application I can think of for it. I watched it for several minutes and saw some interesting pictures, and also some incredibly boring ones. On several occasions, a popup popped up blank, with only a note saying the photo was "unavailable." I can only guess that these may be pictures the Flickr member opted not to share publicly, or perhaps deleted immediately after uploading. Too bad there isn't a mechanism for excluding them from the popups. Sometimes the pictures came quickly, sometimes not. When they came slowly, the whole experience was boring. I probably won't visit this site again. I have plenty of other sources for random inspiration.

Flickr Color Pickr - Pick a color from a mosaic, and it shows an array of photos containing predominantly that color. Now this one I imagine a real use for, especially if someone is building a photo mosaic and wants each small photo to behave like a pixel within a larger picture. I know there are programs that create such mosaics automatically, but if you wanted to create an original work of art not existing as a source picture, this could be useful. Also, if you wanted a picture to match a given background, decor, or mood, this might be a good way to search. You even have limited control over the types of pictures the come up, if you want only pictures of doors, graffiti, or urban decay. This could be a big bucket of fun for artists and creative designers. And it has much better potential for sparking random inspiration than Flickrvision, because you control the pace.

Montagr - And this site does automatically what I described above: rendering a larger image out of a mosaic of smaller images. However, the resolution isn't great, and the montages aren't very identifiable. For the few I looked at, I could not identify what the montage was trying to depict. They provide the source picture the program is trying to render, and each time I thought, "Okay, I can kind of see it, but not really . . . no, no. That really looks absolutely nothing whatsoever like it." It ended up looking more like abstract art. Also, the montages take a very long time to load, even with broadband.

Spell with Flickr - This is really fun, and potentially very useful for graphic design. However, the site is frankly ugly, and once you've spelled a word with pictures of letters, it's not terribly obvious how to return to the main page to enter another word. (It's a very tiny link labeled "Entry form" in the middle of the page.) Clunky site design aside, this app is just plain cool. If you enter the same word twice (or if you keep refreshing the results page), you get different images spelling it out, so you could keep retrying until you get one that fits your aesthetic.











There were scads of third party apps listed in the Great Flickr Tools Collection. Just reading the list would have taken me all night, to say nothing of trying any of them. I'm sure there's an app for just about anything you could possibly want to do, but I'm not sure how you'd find an app in that incredibly long, unordered list. They need to break their tools down into categories or something. (They need a cataloger!) I did try a couple of them, but neither worked with my (horribly outdated) browser.

Flickrbits has the same problem. A big list of apps without any discernible order. If you're just browsing for something to play with, that's fine. Finding something specific is more difficult.

From that list, I picked Bubblr, which is a neat concept (allowing you to add dialogue/thought balloons to images and create your own comic strips), but I found it clunky in the execution. It's not very forgiving about letting you correct errors or edit the order of your images once selected. I got frustrated before I even had a complete comic.

I was just about ready to quit looking at Flickr apps when I noticed The Internet Inferno: Dante's hell as seen by Flickr. You descend into Hell (scroll down the page). Each circle of torment is populated by images that happened to be tagged with the name of the sin associated with the layer of hell. Some of the images are disturbing, but a lot of them are just weird. Many make little sense. Sometimes It's a mystery why a particular photo was tagged so that it ended up where it did. I mean, I wasn't surprised to see a sloth under Sloth--in fact I would have been disappointed if I hadn't--however, I am still puzzling as to why a goose appeared under Envy, or a bunch of lizards under Avarice. The page took a long time to load, but it was bizarrely fascinating. It's not particularly interactive, so it may be best to view this page as a creative work in and of itself, a work of art that changes every time you visit.

Anyway, of the six Flickr apps I looked at tonight, the only ones I am likely to revisit are Flickr Color Pickr and Spell with Flickr. But who knows what I'll discover in the future.

Which of these tools and toys might be of use in a library setting? Any of them. You never know what kind of question someone might have. It's good to have a passing familiarity with many many strange things as possible, because what seems esoteric to me might be the absolute perfect thing for someone else.

Flowers for Kafka (Thing #8)

Kafka statue in Prague
Originally uploaded by Helen in Wales

Good gravy, has it really been since Nov. 26 since I've been able to work on this? Yikes. Well, it's looking more and more like I won't be able to finish the 23 Things by the end of January. But I'm not giving up quite yet, anyway.

So, here goes . . . Thing #8: Discover Flickr.

The Online Photo Sharing in Plain English video was very convincing, of course, but creating a Flickr account and adding my photos is the kind of thing I could end up spending a lot, lot, lot of time on. I know me. I'd spend hours and hours writing the descriptions for each photo. And right now, that's just not an option. So to keep this short, I'm afraid I'm going to have to do the first exercise, which is just choosing any photo in Flickr and blogging about it.

Back in 2005, I had the opportunity to visit the Czech Republic for two weeks. It was one of the most exciting and wonderful experiences of my life. I took somewhere between 700 and 800 pictures with my digital camera. (And yes, they are all just rotting on my hard drive. I'll do something about that some other time.) But there was a statue that I remember clearly, which I did not get a picture of. So I searched Flickr for a picture of that statue. And here it is.

This statue honors Franz Kafka. Kafka is forever linked to my Prague vacation in my mind because I read a comprehensive book of his short stories on the way there, not only on the flight, but also during my eight or so cumulative hours sitting in airports. So by the time I actually reached Prague, the absurd writings of Prague's crazy son were well in my mind. So of course I had to check out places where Kafka lived, dined, etc. I even ate at the Franz Kafka restaurant. (Which has excellent food, by the way, if you're ever in Prague.)

Now, there are a lot of pictures in Flickr of this particular Kafka statue, but I chose this one because that bright red bouquet of flowers caught my eye. That is obviously not part of the statue. Did the photographer put it there? Or did she find it that way? If not her, then who thought to place flowers in the empty neck of Kafka's human steed? Why? What was the meaning behind it? It reminds me of when I was on Charles Bridge and found a coral necklace fastened around one of the lamp posts. There's a story there, a mystery. And it is almost assuredly lost to history. However, it can inspire creative minds to craft new stories. A sighting like this is fuel for the imagination.

So that's one use for Flickr--a place to cast around, looking at photos of the familiar which happen to capture some small detail of the unusual--sparks for the imagination.

Thing #7

Thing #7: Finding Feeds

Add five more feeds to my reader? I already feel like I spend too much time reading the feeds I have! (Okay, I'll confess--I just scan the titles and headlines and read only those that interest me. I'd never get any work done if I actually read everything.)

Okay, let's start with Technorati, which I've never used before. I was all fired up to search "libraries" but I decided I already have several general library sites, so I searched "grammar and punctuation" in the hopes of finding an educational blog that will help me improve the quality of my writing.

The first thing I note is that Technorati is slow, and it locked up my browser. Maybe it's just the connection I have today, or maybe their server is bogged down, but if it's this bad on the library's super-speedy internet connection, I'll definitely pass on using this with dial-up at home. Part of the problem might be the "Snap" previews, which kill everything else when they fail. After restarting the browser, Technorati worked much better, though, so perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on it.

Okay, back to "grammar and punctuation." The first blog to come up is CuteWriting. I read a couple of the recent articles. Seems informative, so I'll add it.

Also up is Language is the Peoples. Their most recent article is about the addition of "meh" to the dictionary, which I had been pretty excited about myself. (Well, as excited as anyone can be about an expression of pure indifference.) So I'm adding them, too.

I also found Punctuality Rules, which had a recent article explaining the "nth cousin" and "so-and-so nth removed" family relationships, which have always baffled me. It's not grammar, but it is useful, so I've got my third new feed.

So, I'm done with grammar and punctuation for now, but not with Technorati. Now instead of searching a term, I'll browse through their directory. Under Technology, Web 2.0, I found 2 Cents Worth (actually, it uses the symbol for "cents," but I don't know how to type that). They're talking about technology applications for 21 century classrooms. Since I work at a university, I'll add it for now and see if I find it useful.

I figure, just because I'm adding these feeds now doesn't mean I'll have to keep them if they're not informative or useful on an ongoing basis. If after a week or so I find I'm just not interested in the articles from a particular feed, I can ditch it.

On to Syndic8. Under "feeds" they offer a list of site names and information about when they were created, last updated, etc., but not anything about the content/purpose of the sites. Backing out of that essentially useless list, I searched for "cataloging." I found Catalogablog, which I've heard of before and looked at in the past, but totally forgot about. I'm adding the feed so I don't forget it again.

And now, on to Topix. Something cool here--my first visit to the site, and without my having to input a zip code or anything, it recognizes that I'm in Omaha, Nebraska. I presume it is doing this based on IP address or some such. I wish more sites did that. In fact, this is one of the topics discussed in David S. Platt's Why Software Sucks, which I recommend to anyone who gets frustrated with user-unfriendly software and websites.

So I'm already impressed with Topix. Glancing at their news and newswire, I see a lot of articles about things that I don't hear about on the Omaha World-Herald's metro/regional news. So I snapped that up. In fact, looking around other parts of Topix, I like the presentation for non-local news, as well. Yahoo news recently became essentially unusable with dial-up and an old browser, so I've been looking for a new news source. I'll have to try this one at home to see if it works as smoothly as it does on the library's computer.

Okay, now I've added six new feeds to my Bloglines account. That's enough for now.

P.S. -- The most useful (note: not "most interesting" or "most informative" but "most useful" in the sense that I consider them absolutely essential for my day-to-day work) feed I already had before this exercise is Typo of the Day for Librarians. No cataloger should pass this by. If you want to improve the searchability of the items in your catalog, search and destroy those typos! And this is a handy way to do that just a tiny bit each day without taking too much time out of your schedule.

Thing #6

Thing #6: Make life "really simple" with RSS & a newsreader.

Ah, here's another thing I already did on my own. Quite a long time ago, unrelated to work (obviously), I set up a Bloglines account to track (don't laugh) all of my favorite online comics. In fact, I'm now kind of offended when I come across a blog or a comic that don't offer an RSS feed. Checking them manually is such a bore!

One thing I've noticed, though, is that feeds are not always reliable. It's not uncommon for me to get an update, and from the content it is completely obvious that I've missed something. Sure enough, when I go to the site to check, I discover that I've missed out on sometimes as many as five updates. With equal frequency, I'll see one of my entries bolded to indicate a new update, only to find it's the exact same update I read the day before, like the feed is going out twice. And these don't happen to just one or two sites--one or both of these events have happened to more than half of my subscriptions at some point, not always infrequently.

Since Bloglines is one of the big players in the game, the problem most probably lies not with them but with the feeds set up by the individual sites. It's unfortunate, but it goes to show that if you're going to set up an RSS feed, you need to test it with several readers and several browsers, to make sure it works widely.

Even with the reliability problems I've encountered, RSS is absolutely invaluable. I would never want go back to checking all those sites manually. RSS is really the way to go.

The value of RSS for libraries is twofold. Internally, librarians and staff could use readers to keep up with various work related blogs. OCLC offers a lot of RSS feeds that you could subscribe to, and I'm sure you can find many other blogs or services that will feed you information to help you do your job better. Externally, libraries can provide RSS feeds to their users. If you don't already do this, look into offering a feed showcasing your new books and DVDs, or at least provide a feed with news about upcoming events and new services. Not everyone will visit your website every day, but a lot of people will toss your feed into their reader, and they'll find out about the cool stuff you're offering.

Oh, and a word of advice to those publishing feeds. Many of the feeds I subscribe to actually show me the content in the reader, but quite a few of them only tell me there's been an update and offer a link back to their site. This is annoying! If you push out a feed, put actual content in the feed!

Oh, again! One thing I had never done before was import an OMPL file to my reader, so I did grab the NLCrecommended.ompl. Looks like exporting an OMPL file is just as easy, too. Good to know, if I ever decide to switch readers. Thanks! I learned something new and useful.

Thing #5

Thing #5: Instant Messaging

Well, this one was easy too! We've already had instant messaging at work for quite a while. I've used my Google Talk account to visit with coworkers on occasion, and to resolve problems. It's a pretty handy tool. Of course, the hard part is remembering to change my status when I leave my desk.

Anyway, if you can catch me during the work day (if I remember to log in), my Google Talk username is: crisslibraryakroeger

For some reason, I don't seem to be able to log into my Google Talk account through Meebo. It tells me there's a problem with my login and password, although I'm using the same login have for my Google Talk. For that matter, I can't log into Google Talk via the web, either. It tells me it can't find any usernames associated with my e-mail address. However, I can log into Google Talk via the application on my hard drive, with the same username that Google Accounts can't find, and it works fine. I just used it to chat with Allana at the Nebraska Library Commission, so obviously my username exists and it works. I couldn't find a satisfactory explanation in the Google Help files. Anyone have any ideas?

For now, I'll keep using Google Talk from the app, since that still works. But someday I'll get a new computer here at work, and then I'll have to come up with a new solution.

Thing #4

Okay, time for Thing #4: Register your blog and join the party. Easy and done.

I did fill out my learning contract (part of Thing #2). My goal is simply to complete every one of the 23 Things by January 30, 2009. Some of them are things I've already done on my own, like blogging. Others, however, are things I've been actively avoiding, like YouTube , Flickr, and podcasts. Why have I been avoiding these things? Well, two reasons. One, at work, I don't generally have time to play with things that aren't directly related to my job. At home, I have a dial-up connection, so I avoid anything that takes a long time to load. So now is my opportunity to explore these things. I have the support and encouragement of my supervisor and my departmental director to participate in 23 Things. So the barrier is down, and I'll have a chance to explore and use these things. Who knows, I may come up with ways to make them useful to my job. At the very least, though, I'll know more about them if I have to help someone else use them.

The learning contract looks like a useful tool. I may modify it for use with other projects.