Web 2.0 reflections

There was a turning point in this assignment that I will forever be grateful to the subject for. It was when I realised that those linked into web 2.0’s potentials weren’t the ones out of sync with the real world. I was the one not in sync. The way information is gathered and disseminated has changed and whether I work in the field of information management or not, if I want to understand and engage in our world it is important that I explore the potential of web technologies. The Internet and its applications are also incredibly exciting, once you get into them, and this is what this assignment has forced me to do. I am now excited about the world online.

This does not mean that I am not still cynical about this online world’s ability to improve our lives on a grand scale - and I still don't trust it enough to forsake pen and paper altogether. But I can certainly appreciate the value of web technologies. Though searching for information can be faster and easier with the range of web 2.0 tools available, it requires time to set these tools up. Also, many sites just enable me to search for information that is completely useless and often incorrect. I also tend to do an awful lot of printing, but perhaps that is just me being old fashioned. I can see the potential of Twitter but I need to log onto it more often. I don’t have Internet on my phone (I know, so 2008) so I don’t really feel linked into the short, regular, instant-information, message world yet. But I am determined to make more of an effort on that front.
What I can no longer be ignorant about is the web’s ability to spread information faster than anything before it. I am eternally grateful to my RSS feeds for the range of information I receive on a regular basis and to my group members for introducing me to new concepts and resources.

I have realised with this assignment that to get the most out of my own little digital world (and with my own bookmarks, RSS feeds and blog it does feel like my own) I need to set some time aside to organise it more efficiently. I need to bookmark more often and more effectively. At work I need to log into my sites (Delicious, Twitter, Google Reader) and keep them buzzing away to tap into when required. It is a new way of working for me and is going to take some time to get used to. But at least I now feel connected to the other (very real it turns out) digital world.

Throughout this assignment is was also easy to get caught up in the small stuff (I spent an hour creating my Twitter wallpaper) and there was a lot of frustration along the way. I fiddled around with my bookmark icon for ages trying to work out how to move it from the top of the page where it had been sitting for days. Only tonight have I found the .html script gadget on the side bar, the time I would have saved if I had noticed that earlier! I also seem to be following fellow group members as a Gemma Walsh on Google Friend and WalshGemma the blogger, which seems convoluted and strange. I have obviously done something wrong there…

Working as part of a group has also been a rewarding part of this assignment, though I fell like we are all just starting to get to know each other. The six weeks has flown by, there was a lot to cover and I know I didn’t communicate with others as much as I wanted to. It has been great to share our experiences and I certainly feel less alone doing this assignment when linked with a group.

Though this is the end of this assignment it is certainly not the end of my Web 2.0 adventure. I don’t think I could have imagined I would learn so much in six weeks. The adventure has only just begun.

Mashing continued...

Music lovers have known about mashups for a while and there are some hilarious examples of overlaying the music from one band over images of another to create something new ( great examples here). But Web 2.0 programmers have taken this mashing idea to a whole new level. Entire websites can contain no original content of their own, instead luring data from a variety of applications into the one site. In terms of disseminating a range of viewpoints on a particular topic, this is a wonderful advancement in the development of the Internet.
Already libraries in their physical realm are a mash of information as various books, magazines, the Internet and newspapers can be found in the one location. It is no wonder then that Librarians are investigating web 2.0 mashups for their digital content, particularly as they continue to search for ways to manage information. One book will be particularly helpful for librarians, "Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data," edited by Nicole C. Engard.
As Annie Armstrong (2010) reviews more succinctly then I can paraphrase:
“Once a librarian or developer discovers the key to extracting and combining data from myriad websites, s/he can transform static, lifeless library web pages into dynamic, interactive user-centered experiences by incorporating such features as interactive maps, book suggestion services, video and image collections, and OPAC or federated search widgets.”

There is one website that is the epitome of dynamic in its mashup makeup and that is Mashpedia. I love this website. It takes Google to a whole new level, incorporating the one word subject search tool the site locates a range of information from different web sites and brings them to you. I Mashpedia'd information management and videos from YouTube, Tweets from Twitter, a definition from Wikipedia as well as related news from a variety of journals was all brought to the one page. Though some of the results were not useful, some were and the fact that one search could cross all different websites using different applications was amazing.
As our tutor John Tyrell has noted, local communities have also benefited from mashups as groups share information about local events, trails and tours. I couldn’t get onto Localhero.biz but my friends and I have been talking about organising a bike ride while the weather is warm and Bikely.com has already been useful in researching where to go.
So, mashups. Before this assignment I had never heard of them. Now I’ll be noting them wherever I search, they seem to be everywhere!

Map Experiment- The Great Ocean Road

This week I have been battling with GoogleMaps and Blogger applications to effectively share my recent holiday with the electronic world. There was so much to experiment with I decided the project needed its own page. Click here to view details of my recent Great Ocean Road Adventure (also linked at the top of my Home page).

As I had already used Flickr in the past I thought I would try a different photo program for my album and inevitable slideshow. I chose Photobucket because it was mentioned on this Blogger site so I figured they would be compatible. Photobucket works the same as Flickr with its options to upload photos and give them tags and titles to make them easier to find. Though it was very user friendly it does have advertising on its homepage, which Flickr seems to do without.
I also uploaded some of my photos to my markers on my GoogleMap and imbdeded the map into my blog. As I am fairly new to all this it has taken me a long time to organise my data (maps, photos, slideshow and video) to then embed into other programs. I can only admire the programmers of sites like Mashpedia from afar. That site is so amazing that needs an entry of its own. I think I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Bookmarking revisited

In the last couple of days I have been thinking more and more about Flickr. One of the tools that we didn’t use while travelling was the tag tool. So I hopped back onto my old Flickr site and tagged a few of the more obscure photos. I then started investigating their usefulness. When you search for photos you can search by full text or by tags, all users or your own photos. I added the tag Faenza to my photos taken in Faenza, a small town in Italy. When I did a search of all users via the Faenza tag, no photos came up. When I did a search of all users full text, there were 10,074 photos. That means more than 10,000 photos of Faenza, and none of them were tagged to locate them more easily. I understand tagging if you have 10,000 of your own photos and you want to be able to find them again. But as long as you give each photo a title, this shouldn’t be a problem. I also ran this experiment with a more general tag. An all users full text search for Iran found 351,908 photos, all users tag search for Iran located 267,847 results. So a huge number and the photos were not more relevant, there were just less found. Maybe if everyone used tags it would be more effective. Or maybe I have missed the point. I need to look into this further.