The end of the journey... or just the beginning

This has been one amazing surfing experience. I've learned so much! I shot the curl of the RSS feed and podcast pipeline.



I rode some radical waves at blogs beach.



I embedded myself on the white sandy beach of flickrs and blogs. [check out this performance by Bruddah Iz.]



And I rode the wiki wiki bus to the wonderful world of wikis! Amazing. My favorites? Wikis, blogs, and Technorati. My least favorite? Facebook. It's an important tool to be aware of, but it's a world that, I believe, should be reserved for those under 30. But I'm glad that I was able to take a walk on that beach as well.

Overall, an ono experience. ALOHA!

The many colors of the Greater Phx Digital Library rainbow

Ahhhhh. Rainbows. Gotta love 'em. Peaking through the clouds of print materials, the brilliant colors of audiobooks slowly emerge. So pretty.

I find the Greater Phoenix Digital Library's site very easy to use. The listings not only tell you whether or not a copy is available, but also how many are available, and how long the waiting list is. Very neat. Tonight I'll go home and download one onto my computer. That way, I'll be all ready for the big moment when I get my new mp3 player for finishing this course!!! Yay!!!!

Surfing the podcast pipeline

Podcasts are fun to listen to. Some I was able to listen to, some I was not, due to the fact that they were blocked by the City network. I ultimately landed on the npr podcast page, and I selected NPR's most emailed stories. NPR is great to begin with, and listening to their most popular stories is such a wonderful opportunity.

Library Spot

YouTube. LOVE it, love it. Can't get enough. I checked out Yahoo Video as well (which I had no idea even existed), and it had far fewer posts.

And hands-down, this is THE best tv spot that takes place in a library (not that I know of many).

AloHA to Real Travel

Being one who loves to travel, I selected a travel tool from the Web 2.0 awards list. It's name: Real Travel. Unfortunately, it was a big disappointment.

Last year, my daughter travelled to Puebla, Mexico through a college exchange program. She absolutely loved it. Puebla is a vibrant, colorful city deep in the heart of Mexico. Accordingly, I selected Puebla as my fictitious destination to research on the Real Travel site.


Real Travel managed to provide me with a long list of hotels (advertisers, no doubt), but no restaurants and no activities. Give me a break. I know for a fact that there are both. But what I found most odd is the fact that both Forbes and Business Week voted this site to be essential to travel planning. Hello. What's up with that? I've had much better luck with budgettravel.about.com and tripadvisor.com.

So I say Alo-HA to Real Travel. (Just remember, aloha can also mean "goodbye").

Somewhere in the pacific...

Loved Google Docs. Loved it. And I suppose I agree with the thought that these freely-available, no need to install software on your computer, apps will be the wave of the future. They may, in fact, be the ultimate downfall of Microsoft's software arm. But they (Microsoft) are quite resilient, and they'll no doubt find another buoy to attach themselves to in the techno ocean.

Packing a lunch... PB Wiki and Jelly

Good ol' PB and J. Always a favorite of mine. Right up there next to mana pua or lomi lomi salmon. And I kinda like PB Wiki as well. Not much to say about it. Fun posting on those already-created blog pages... and easy. That's always ono (good). Aloha.

Aloha! Wiki Wiki

Ah, eventually all things come back to their Hawaiian roots. Before there were online wikis, before there was Wikipedia, there was the Wiki Wiki Shuttle! Honolulu's airport shuttle. Heck, it's fun riding the thing if only for the opportunity to say I'm going to ride the Wiki Wiki Bus!!

In fact, there's even a Wikipedia entry about said shuttle. Pretty neat.

Getting down to the business at hand, it was interesting searching the various wiki examples given in the Learning 2.0 lesson. I could not view a couple of them due to blockage by City internet filters. But I believe that I received a fairly good education on wikis from what I did read. It was interesting to note that the Bull Run Public Library wiki is actually maintained by one library user. It's not a library product at all!

I could see that libraries could find many interesting ways to utilize wikis... a book lover wiki in which individuals could post comments on various favorite books, a today in the library informative newsletter wiki, and so on. The former could provide open posting, and the latter could be edited by library staff only.

Watch Out for the Icebergs!

My favorite section of the OCLC newsletter was that of Rick Anderson:

The three icebergs that he mentioned: the just in case collection, reliance on user education, and the come to us model of librarianship--really set me thinking. I have heard much about the just in case collection and the come to us models, but the notion that we should not rely on the necessity of users to be educated in order to use our tools was novel in my mind. Having come from the world of community college librarianship, teaching customers to use library tools is what we do.

But it is essential for today's hurry up lifestyle that we create online tools (and in-library tools, for that matter) that are intuitive and easy to use. Yeah, we want to be loved and feel needed by our customers, but we're doing them a disservice to not allow our children to empower themselves with our great tools.

Tag. You're It! [aka You Put the Lime in the Coconut and Drink It All Up]

Technorati... The stairway to my 15 minutes o' fame in the blogosphere. I tagged a few of my posts and checked them out on Technorati. In my Technorati search, it was necessary to change the search limitation so that any and all blogs would be searched. It worked! Neat! Technorati definitely provides a service not available with such tools as Google.

While exploring Technorati, I discovered a link to the most popular blog in the world: Boing Boing!
http://www.boingboing.net/
"Boing Boing is a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It's the most popular blog in the world, as ranked by Technorati.com, and won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog awards at the 2006 Bloggies ceremony."


Boing Boing features so many interesting posts, not the least of which is one that takes us back to the islands, yet again. It's about a gentleman pursuing the idea of using coconuts as containers for his electronics projects!!

Del.icio.us and Nutr.itio.us

Before we get into the meat of this discussion, let's talk about what's really delicious. That's right, Shave Ice from Matsumoto's on the North Shore.
http://www.matsumotoshaveice.com/

Or how about some kalbi from Ono Hawaiian BBQ right here in Scottsdale.
http://www.onohawaiianbbq.com/menu.html

I'm getting hungry!! Okay, so back to the subject at hand. I agree with what was said on the 8+ minute del.icio.us tutorial. This is a fantastic tool for performing research. And the rss feed feature is great... it enables you to easily locate new and wonderful sources of information from the links of individuals who are respected in the industry (library or otherwise). The ability to create unique tags that mean something to you is a great outside-the-box feature as well.

Facebook 'em, Danno, Murder One