fun times

I must say, I enjoyed this week's assignment, and I want to spend more time having fun with some of those sites at home. I looked at the Generator Blog, as you can see from my use of Photo Notes. (I may have also created a picture of my hypothetical baby with Babymaker3000.) I also checked out Library Thing, and I'm thinking about setting up my own account because I'm interested in personalized book recommendations. Rollyo did not interest me as much. It might be nice if you had a good idea about what you're looking for and where you might find it, but sometimes when I'm searching for things here at work I find answers and clues in unexpected places. The two sites that help you remember things might be helpful, but I personally don't want to be quite so reliant on phones and email for my to-do list (and at work Outlook reminds me of things just fine). Finally, I didn't get to spend much time on the 2.0 winners but I plan to look at them more.

mashups

I missed the mashups component of Week 2, so I looked into them. They seem fun enough, but I don't get the point of most of them. Some of the things you can do with Google maps are good though. For example, I'm guessing this Richmond Crime site is a mashup. (Or does someone actually enter every crime? Surely not.) Not sure how the VHS could use this. Maybe some day if we get a lot of extra time and money someone could create a mashup with a map of Virginia and where some of our collections come from. I don't know if that would be practical in a map format, but something where someone could look at a map of Virginia and click on Staunton and see some of our collections from that area. Hmmmm.

RSS and feeds

I've known about RSS feeds but was never brave enough to set one up. Now I have, with Google Reader. I started with their news bundle but pared it down to two news sites. Then I added the VHS 23 Things blog and RVANews.com.

I was a little overwhelmed with topix.net, and syndic8.com didn't look very user friendly (plus my internet was slow or they were having trouble, because I couldn't click on any of their links without it taking a billion years). Anyway, all that different news and entertainment was too much. I think I'll stick to sites I hand pick.

Another thought on RSS feeds for blogs- one of the fun things about blogs is reading the comments (particularly if you know the blogger or follow them regularly), and with feeds you can't see if there are comments without clicking on the post and going to the original site anyway. That's too bad.

more on online photos

Someone told me there was an article in the Washington Post yesterday about an archive in Texas that posts its unidentified photos online in hopes that the public will identify them. I'm not sure if I found the right institution (and I feel like lots of places might do this), but the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library posts a few pictures at a time and also has a link to a page with photos patrons have identified. I don't know how often they update the photos, but there seem to be only four listed at a time. With so few photos up I feel like it's more of a game that gets people to check back regularly, rather than an efficient way to identify a slew of images. Of course that could have merits of its own, too.

flickr

I've just looked at the LOC and LVA collections on Flickr, and it leaves me with conflicting thoughts. On the one hand, it's an easy way to get your photo collections out there for people to find and view. It might also help identify certain things if you have serious people leaving comments. On the other hand, lots of people seem to comment on things just for the sake of being heard, like the comments and tags in this photo from the LOC. But maybe that's okay, and you just accept it as part of making collections widely available.

One other comment is that the LOC photos seem to be better linked to the LOC collections sites, so it's easier to find more information.

the hardest part

Setting up a blog was easy enough, but it took me multiple tries to finally get the "word verification" right while setting up a google account.