#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!

#21 Podcasts

I had a look at the three directories listed - the one I liked the best was podcastalley because it had more book review podcasts. It was a good idea to have us add a podcast as an RSS feed to our bloglines account because I found I'd forgotten how to do it. I had to go back and check and hopefully now I'll remember. I think having podcasted book reviews or book discussions on the library website is a great idea. There are probably many news sources that avid readers listen to for reviews so if they are available from our website it gives people one place to access all those things. There are also a number of online book groups now so we could perhaps look at linking to their discussions from our website.

# 20 YouTube

I have chosen to add the video of Kevin Rudd eating ear wax during question time because I seem to be the only person in the country who hasn't seen it yet. I have added it to my blog just in case there are one or two other people out there who haven't seen it either. YouTube could be used to add topical videos to the library website - just feature one each week or something. There is plenty to choose from following on from the election. It was really slow to load up on the council network and I couldn't really watch the video properly because of this but that's not anything to do with YouTube. I think it would be better if there was a little description of the video so you could choose whether or not you want to view it but I think this is the way it works - it plays on the shock or surprise factor and you get drawn in because you're curious.