And they lived happily ever after...THE END

Or is it?

Well, it's the end for me with Rss feeds, wikis, and social networking sites. We just don't mesh. But it may be only the beginning for me with GoogleDocs, Flickr, and eMedia.

I'm glad that I did all it. Even those of the "things" I'll probably never use again.
It was a good to be exposed to so many things I probably wouldn't have tried on my own. And now I don't have to have a blank look on my face when some kid in the J room starts talking about podcasts.

I would definitely participate in something like this again, but I'd like to see it run a little longer. My home computer my become an antique soon, so I had to do most of this at work. It was hard for me to find the time to get everything completed, as you can see by the fact that I'm posting this on December 24th.

Overall a good learning experience.

Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules

Just one of the many fine titles available for viewing through QBPL's eMedia service.

I have to shamefacedly admit that I had no idea we offered eMovies. eBooks yes. But eMovies? I may have to get a reader.

The ebooks are just not for me. Particularly the eAudio. I've never liked audio books in any format. My mind wanders. I really need to see the words myself. I guess I'm more visual. But this movie thing now...

Open the podcast bay doors, HAL

I thought PodcastAlley looked good for someone who knew what she was doing. That's not me. I've never done anything with podcasts before and had absolutely no idea what to search for, so I thought the directory on Podcast.net was fabulous. I found some podcasts of old time radio shows which was fun. I'm not sure what I'd use it for. Although I did hear on the news this morning that Queen Elizabeth gave her annual Christmas message by podcast. This year she's got a YouTube page. The times they are a-changin'.

You can learn a lot from Lydia

And I guess you can learn something from YouTube, too. I probably won't use it very often, but I had a blast looking at some 1970s tv commercials. Ah yes, I remember it well.

But here's my favorite clip of all time.

And the award goes to....

Biblio.com! #2 award winner in Web 2.0's books category.

It's similar to Alibris, which I've used for years. Both are networks of independent booksellers dealing in used and/or rare books. The advanced search lets you search not only by title or author, but also binding, price, publisher and provides limits for first editions, signed copies, or only copies with dust jacket. Once you've performed your search you can narrow your results by copies in VG or better condition. Definitely a plus in buying second hand books and a necessity in buying rare books or first editions.

One thing missing from Biblio that's available on Alibris is a rating system for the sellers.

I'm sure I'll be spending far too much money on Biblio!

A. GoogleDocs

Q. What do you get when you multiply ten duotrigintillion by 1 dwarf with glasses?

Or I guess it could be "what do you get when you want to create documents, presentations, or spreadsheets and be able to access them from any computer at work, home, or anyplace else with internet access?"

I usually save anything I'm working on in the library to my h: drive, but now I can access stuff from home too! Writeboard either requires you to bookmark the address of your document or go the extra step to set up a backpack. With GoogleDocs I could just log in with my regular Google account password and access all my stuff in one place. Super!

Social networking and the anti-social librarian

From a personal perspective, I'm not a fan of Facebook or MySpace. Who has the time for this stuff?! I have enough trouble keeping up with my actual life to create a virtual one too.

From a professional perspective, I'm abivalent. I see the value of meeting our teens where they live and they seem to live on social networking sites (though MySpace more than Facebook). Maybe they'd visit a library page. We'll find out soon enough. The YA librarians here are creating a CEL/YA page. They're pretty excited about it and I do hope it's a grand success. iRead would be nice to see on there. If we could get them more excited about reading and/or attending library programs I'm all for it! Yet, I'm not at all certain that they'll be attracted to a library page. And I have some security concerns. Maybe my mother told me one too many times not to talk to strangers.