Shhhh....

Podcasts. Audio files... audio being the operative word here. As in SOUND (ok, and video), which is not the most popular thing in the more traditional of library settings!
Tell you what chaps, (is anyone even reading this?), I will put the whole Podcast/RSS feed thing on my To Do List, which I have yet to create on account of being a bit busy.
(Memo to self: Make a To Do List, add Podcasts to it.)

Maybe not so Delicious

Sorry, guys, but this is just not going to happen. It's not that I don't see the purpose/usefulness of the social tagging phenomenon, it's just that frankly it's all getting rather much at the moment and having access to other people's networks and having to pay attention to them as well as the RSS feeds from everywhere and all the other stuff which is now at my fingertips is actually beginning to eat into the time I am supposed to spend WORKING! I consider myself to have investigated Thing 10 and found it wanting, which is not the same as not having tried. Maybe when the Web 2.0 Directory (which I will bookmark for further use, thanks) has a few more libraries on there then I might decide I want to know, but feigning interest in the activities of an institution which I have no connection with or need to know about is beyond me today. If I have time between work/studying/life/sleep I will attempt to muster the enthusiasm for more of the same. I am pleased to see that next week's Things look a bit less involved. Thanks all the same, but no thanks.

Delicious?

Social tagging... Hmmm. I'd seen the little icon on the pages of various websites which I browse and had never (as usual) looked into it any further, so once again I am being forced to find this stuff out and, also once again, I am finding that I sort of like it...
The concept of being able to share bookmarks for things which are useful/fun/vaguely entertaining is appealing, not only from the point of view of using other computers (although as long as I have Firefox I can use XMarks for that), but also because sometimes you just come across something which you have to show your Mum! I imported all my bookmarks to Delicious automatically (have I mentioned here how much I love Firefox?? I don't know what I was thinking wasting my time on IE for so long...), and will therefore have to do some tidying, but I did add the url for the Theban Mapping Project as that is one of my favourite Web resources; a wonderful source of information about the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
I will expand on this at some other time, for now I am happy to have started finding out about Delicious, and will explore further when I have time later in the week.

Editing Photos with Picnik

I think Picnik might actually be the "thing" which convinces me to use Flickr! It's a lovely site (I liked the bit on the progress bar where it said it was buttering sandwiches), and the basic editing tools are really easy to use.
Problems which I incurred were mostly due to the nature of my pictures; being taken indoors and in most cases with a flash, so things like exposure were slightly tricky. The tool which alters colours was very strange and did not get on at all with the bright colours I used in my patterns so I undid that sharpish! Above is a cropped version of my first cushions picture, which conveniently hides the fact that they are languishing on my fur bedspread.
The beauty of Firefox is that it already knows me, so I did not need to log into Picnik or create an account, which saved time and remembering where I put the printout with my login details. All in all a positive experience!

Photos on Flickr

I agonised for about twenty minutes about what I should do about this Thing. I was very prolific with my camera a few years back and have hundreds of pictures I could have used, but they are mostly on my PC at home, or on discs in random places, which wasn't ideal.
Anyway, having decided to go for the esoteric option of posting a couple of pictures of my other obsession (besides books), I have successfully uploaded four shots of exciting cross-stitch patterns!
I don't know if I will use Flickr for other pictures; I may decide to use it, but as I am also on Facebook I might use that instead. I'm not really one for publicising... maybe I need to go through my hundreds of pictures and share some of the better ones with the wider world!

Time...

I have a minor grumble about RSS feeds. How am I supposed to find the time to keep track?! Sometimes I open Google Reader and discover 73 unread posts, which is almost enough to put me off completely. I've admittedly not spent that long playing this week, having had work-related stuff to keep me busy. Perhaps I will have a look at home over the weekend.
I have managed to work out how to subscribe to feeds from my fellow 23 Things participants (Martha Braithwaite, I know who you are...), but it took me a while to realise that this was done through the little Atom link at the bottom of the screen. There are so many of us now that I have only looked at a few (mostly people I know, or intriguing names) as again, time is against me.
I look forward with anticipation to next weeks Things, although as I am a good little Library Assistant I don't have many photos on my PC at work so I will have to bring some in or do the Flikr stuff at home.

Feed me...

Ahh, another grey Tuesday morning... must be time for more of the Things!
I had heard of RSS Feeds, but was not sure what to do with them, so once again had to be forced to learn... The instructions on the 23 Things blog are excellent; very simple to follow and broken down into a step-by-step sequence that makes it almost impossible to get wrong. I must admit, though, I have subscribed to several feeds from the BBC website (mostly concerning sport) as those were fairly easy to set up!
Once I get the hang of this I will try to subscribe to a few participants' blogs (just so they get paranoid...) too.
I have had the added complication of this week of switching my browser from the deplorable IE6 to the much nicer Mozilla Firefox, which has a handy function of remembering who I am and saving tabs when I close the page so that I can find all my stuff again straight away. Unfortunately something went wrong with this over the weekend so I had to load all my bookmarks again, but that was fairly straightforward thanks to XMarks, which is a facility for migrating bookmarks from other browsers. I still need to work out how to get iGoogle back as my homepage, but as I am actually working most of the time this has not been a priority! Still, for the purpose of Thing 5, the fact that the browser already had my details meant I only had to sign into Google Reader, rather than re-typing everything. Bonus!