RSS Feeds on Bloglines

Were you able to successfully set up your RSS feed? If not, where did you run into problems? If you were successful, does this make information-gathering more convenient for you?

Yes, I was successful in setting up a Bloglines account and subscribing to some RSS feeds (or Real Simple Syndication) through Bloglines. Then I went to Food TV and clicked on RSS to find the url for them. Then I copied the url and pasted it into the Add spot on Bloglines. It was all very simple.

The idea of keeping on top of information that you want is great. I am a little overloaded with accounts to check at this point. I think the idea of having the feeds come right to your computer (like my coworker has with her Mac) would be great. She can click on her mail icon located on her computer dashboard and receive all of her feeds there. I think I will try to add a feed at home. Even though my PC with Windows XP doesn't have a dashboard, I hope that this will be simpler than checking another external site with my account there.

Google Universe

What do you like about the Google product? What do you dislike? Would you recommend the product to friends and colleagues?

I tried out 2 programs from Google. One is Google Docs and the other one from Google Labs is called Aardvark. I also use a gmail account on a regular basis.

The Google Docs program works really well. When I open a document that has been sent to me as an attachment in my gmail account, I get several choices for opening up the document. The choices are: View as HTML; Open as a Google document; or Download. If I choose open as Google document, then I can edit the document online; invite people to my document and make changes together, in real-time; and I can open my account at http://docs.google.com.

There is large amount of space to keep documents online in my Google Docs account. I haven't found anything that I dislike about this product so far and I would recommend this to friends and colleagues. I especially think that this is a good way to backup important documents in case of computer failure and also so that you can access them from any computer. This is much cheaper than buying an external hard drive to keep backup copies in.

The Aardvark application (at http://vark.com/) is designed for you to ask any question and through IMing (Instant Messaging) your question will be forwarded on to someone who may be able to answer the question. You can also sign on to Aardvark and use one word commands, such as "try" in an IM conversation box to see if you have an answer to any of the questions that are currently waiting for an answer.

I like the idea of a pool of people to share information through a third party (the Aardvark site) which keeps e-mail addresses confidential. All e-mail (even replies) are sent through Aardvark, so neither person knows the other person's e-mail address.

My only complaint about the service is that I have not yet found an answer to my question. The question is this: Where is the pauper's cemetary near Calgary, Alberta? I am still hopeful for a positive answer. I would recommend this, but only to people who are fairly computer savvy because the instant messaging format and the one word commands to be used add a degree of difficulty to the process.

Yes, yes, yes! I think I have found a way to beat the imbedded item in my blog. If you don't know what I mean, please read my previous blog post about trying to customize my blog background.

Social Networking - Facebook

For you, is Facebook useful or a time-waster?

I have had a Facebook account for several years now and it can be both useful and a time-waster. It is useful for keeping in contact with friends, especially those people that you don't see often and people who live in other places. I love looking at photos that friends have posted of themselves and their families.

I have a friend in B.C. whose whole family is on Facebook; including her husband's senior parents and all of his siblings and their families. The 3 generations of this family keep in touch and share birthdays, pictures, etc. using Facebook. That is cool! I found out that a friend of mine had a sick baby and needed some support from her network of family and friends through Facebook. From these examples, you can see that I find Facebook and other social networking sites to be very good communication tools.

However, I do see some people using Facebook for many hours each day, playing all of the games and using many applications within Facebook. Some use of these Facebook extras (or apps) is a good way to relax for a period of time, which we all need to do. I also know people who are disabled and unable to get out of the house often, who use Facebook to interact with people daily. I think that it is easy to get carried away and forget how much time a person has spent doing some of these things. But then again, I can get carried away and forget how much time I have spent reading a good book, so who am I to judge?

:( Trying to Customize My Blog :(

Since starting this blog to learn more about different aspects of Web 2.0, I decided that I would learn more if I customized my blog. Not to mention, that I was quite jealous of some of the really beautiful blogs that I saw when I browsed some of the other CPL bloggers sites. WOW! Some of you really know your stuff.

I even had a much more knowledgeable staff member help me. We found some really great free blog templates through google. All we (really she) had to do was copy the HTML (control + C) and then go into my dashboard; click customize; click HTML; select all (control + A) and replace it with the saved HTML (control + V). No problem, I really am a whiz at copy and paste - so now that I could see where to go to find the HTML and then just copy and paste - it was a snap!

Do you think that this is the end of the story? Unfortunately not. When we went to view the blog, there was a banner just under the name of my blog. It did not appear in the preview of the template. This was a banner in German that was definitely NOT what I wanted on my blog and not an ideology that I would ever promote!!! It took her more than an hour to get rid of this banner, and then only because she was able to go back to the "classic blog" and then change my template to the one I had originally picked with blogger. Now every time I have tried to add anything to my blog - a list of tags in my posts; a picture at the top of the blog - this embedded image shows up on my blog.

The last time I tried to add something, I ended up making a new blog, copying and pasting my posts on it, and then deleting the original one. Then I made the original blog again and had to copy and paste my posts back on it. I am afraid of trying anything again, so I think I will practice on the second blog and keep my original one safe.

Thanks for reading my rant! Has anyone else had issues like this?

Editing an Article on Wikipedia

How easy or difficult was it to find articles that needed editing? Were the errors you found factual or grammar / spelling?

It was not easy to find an article that I was able to edit. Most of the articles that I read were very well referenced. I did find a small article on a village in central Alberta where my mom's family came from. My great-grandfather was the first mayor and this information was not in the article, so I added it in. The hardest part was figuring out how to reference the information. I put in the url for the village museum that does have pictures and other information about the first mayor and the general store that was his business in the community. Unfortunately, I was unable to find an online reference to him.

So, can I call myself an editor now?
If only there was a paycheque to go with the title!!!

Best Websites on Delicious

What are the advantages of storing, sharing, and tagging web content this way? What are the disadvantages?

I see advantages in the tag bundles for finding several sites that relate to the same topic. An example of this would be the CITIZENSHIP tag bundle that has 15 sites in it. I liked the option to browse these bookmarks (found in the top right portion of the page). With this, I can look at each of the bookmarked sites.

A couple of disadvantages that I found were:

1) It was fairly easy to leave the CPL portion of the site and get into the rest of delicious without intending to do this. This happened to me when I put a tag name into the "search delicious" search box. It would be nice to have a search box just for the best websites section.

I also accidently found I was out of the best websites when I clicked on either of the options in the "See more bookmarks in Popular or Recent." section that appears just above the "CALGARYPUBLICLIBRARYFAVORITES" blue tag.

2) Another disadvantage is that there are 463 unbundled tags at the bottom of the tag bundles list. When I clicked on these, I found 49 pages with 482 bookmarks included in those pages. I found this quite intimidating. Even if I were to look at each bookmark, how would I remember where a particular site is when I wanted to access it with a customer? I realize that these bookmarks are in alphabetical order, but I need to remember the exact name of the website to find it easily. For example, if I look under Shakespeare, I will not find the site I want because it is called Absolute Shakespeare. Granted there is a tag for Shakespeare, so I must learn to access sites this way.

Thinking about what we will learn - hmmm?

Which aspect of Web 2.0 are you the most intrigued (or scared) by?

I am intrigued with some of the aspects that I know the least about. For example, twitter which I know that you can follow the tweets from someone, but I really don't know more than that about it. It will be interesting to learn more and hopefully to come to more of an understanding as to why anyone would want to know what a person is doing during each part of the day. It seems almost like stalking someone to me, but I don't really know very much about how it works.

I am also looking forward to learning more about searching on delicious, how rss feeds work, more about Google universe (hopefully something about Google docs that we may be using more in the future), online productivity tools and library thing.

Well, here goes ... my first blog post. And now I have to wait for the next thing. I will try to be patient and maybe I will be lucky and win the IPOD, so I can try out downloadable audio books!!!