#35 Micro or Mini Blogging

I like the concept of mini blogging but I'm not online enough to want to start up my own account. I know there are people who spend a lot of time online and, especially if you're on Facebook, I think having the mini blog to update your status adds another dimension to your virtual identity. In terms of use in the library I was thinking that on the Kid's Catalogue we could have a virtual library cat answering questions (instead of a librarian). The cat could live in the Kid's Catalogue and give regular updates on it's movements throughout the day via a mini blog...

#34 Using the Web for Better Health

I had a look at FitDay and I really liked this site and found it very informative. I walk 4kms about 4 times a week and was interested to see that this doesn't burn a whole heap of calories. I may have to get back on the treadmill. It was good to see what nutrients I don't get enough of on a normal day. The only drawback was the Americanism (chocolate biscuits weren't listed - I had to search for 'crackers'). Listing all the foods you have eaten in a day keeps it "real" as well - you can't whinge that you're not losing weight when you've got it in black and white in front of you that you've eaten two chocolate-coated crackers and a meat pie with tomato sauce that day... hypothetically speaking. I have already recommended this site to my colleagues because I was very impressed by it.

#33 Express yourself through online art

What can I say about this? The Picassohead tool was kind of fun but, as we were warned, totally had no purpose. I looked at the Snowflake one because I thought that sounded kind of interesting but it was a massive disappointment!

#32 Online File Storage

I wasn't a big fan of this site because I don't think I'd want to share my files with other people. In terms of saving my files on eSnips (the tool I explored) so that I can access them later I think I'd prefer to just use my memory stick and carry that around with me. I suppose it could be useful for travelling if you don't want to carry anything with you but I think it's just as easy to email documents to your web-based email account. For me I couldn't see any benefit to using these tools.

#31 Get organised with Plaxo

I really like this tool - I think it's really nifty that you can have different calendars (eg work and social) but overlap them so that you can see both at the same time. The task list is good as well and the scheduling of birthdays. I liked it as a personal organisational tool but I wasn't a huge fan of the connections and sharing your calendar with others. It's nice to have one place to view all the things that you need to remember. Having said that I probably will continue for now using my old fashioned diaries (two seperate diaries for work and social) and my Outlook calendar which we have to use for work. If we didn't have to use Outlook I would consider using Plaxo but having two online calendars seems excessive. I do like the concept though and found it really easy to use.

#30 LOLcats

To be honest I find this whole thing a bit bizarre. I quite like cats (being one myself) but most of the pictures weren't that funny. I don't know - maybe I'm a little non-receptive as it's Friday afternoon. Anyway, here is a link to a LOLcat that I created myself and one other image that I came across that I liked because it is sooooo cute!

http://kscakes.com.nyud.net:8080/LolCats/Uploads/Saved/unz-u-pop-i-dant-stop.jpg


more animals

#29 Scrapblog

It took me some time to work this one out but after a fair bit of playing around I really love this tool. It requires very little creativity and I love the "stickers" concept - it's like you're reliving your childhood! Lots of fun once I'd worked it out. I thought it was a shame that the scrapblog once it's done can't be saved onto a memory stick - to access it again I'd have to get into the net and play it through Scrapblog or Flickr.

#28 Well we're big rock stars

I'm a bit too introverted to be a rock star and I don't have any personal photos on my computer or in an online account so I've been a bit boring and used another photo from Flickr to put on a "National Geographic" cover. I like this tool though - it is easy to use (although I noticed it didn't really cope with gif images) and I will probably use it again.

#27 Photobucket

Definitely a lot of pictures on there and possibly with a better tagging system than Flickr? I know that when I searched on Flickr I got a lot of not very relevant results whereas when I searched on Photobucket the results were spot on. The idea of putting up my own photos kind of scares me and I'm not sure why you'd want to use other people's images in a slideshow. I tried to explore these options in My Album but I needed to restart my computer before the Flash Player installation would complete and, as it is drawing close to the end of the working day, I think I will leave it for now and trust that I will be exploring it some more in future weeks.

#26 Your Minis

I thought that the information and tools available on YourMinis was a little sad. However it was interesting for me to learn about widgets as I have them on my new laptop and have been ignoring them because I didn't know what they were. I think it would be useful to have a select few widgets on my desktop and I will have a closer look at what I have on my laptop next time I use it now.

#25 LetterPop

Hopefully here is a link to my newsletter. I found LetterPop really frustrating to begin with - I had a lot of issues trying to load photos from my computer and in the end I gave up once I worked out how to put in photos from the internet. Once I worked out how to do this things were smooth sailing and I got into it a bit more. Some of the templates are definitely better than others but I think there is potential to use this in the library. Staff have talked about creating a newsletter for the public with staff reviews in it in the past so this might be a good tool to use for that.

http://letterpop.com/newsletters/?id=86007-983ac3

#24 Zamzar

This is a really neat tool and very timely for me because I had some Publisher documents that I needed to convert to Word. The only thing is that when I completed the last step on Zamzar an error message came up - this happened each time I tried to convert a document. I thought that meant the conversion hadn't worked but the next day they were all in my email account - so it was a bit confusing but worked out alright in the end. Have added Zamzar to my del.icio.us account!