Twittttttttttter

I have been tweeting on and off (mainly off)for almost a year, simply to find out all the fuss about it! Is it useful, most of the time NO, except if you were in Iran last year during the political unrest, tweets helped the rest of the world know the truth! Also, I believe tweets were used to locate trapped people during the Haitian earthquake early this year. So, I am glad I am aware of this technology, and can use it, but honestly, do I really need to follow the lives of celebrities?

Read About Twitter, and various CPL tweets: 10 min.
Reading and writing blog: 3 min
Total time: 13 min

LibraryThing

The tour was easy and simple, and the site is easy to navigate. I searched for the Breadwinner, and it was easy, reviews were easy to read.
I will not be using this site, as I have been using The GoodReads for over a year, and find it equally good.

Reading/writing blog: 5 min
Tour/navigation of Library thing: 10 min
Total time: 15 min

Online productivity tools

I checked Google documents and I loved it! The customers should know about this tool. Also, it has amazing templates for resumes, accounts, etc.
I would continue to use Microsoft Office Programmes, as long as they are available to me, however, I would like to save my 'important' documents in Google documents. Often, when more than one person is working on a report, this tool is highly useful.

Reading and writing the blog: 5 min
Time spent touring Google documents/checking out templates
and creating document: 35 min
Total time spent: 40 min

Flickr and You Tube

I use both of these sites for my personal use. Both sites are very easy to use. Just like the Facebook, You tube can be a great time-waster, but I do like to use it for complicated recipes.

Flickr tour: 3 min
You Tube videos: 10 min
This blog: 1 min
Total time: 14 min

RSS

Surprisingly, it was very easy to set up the RSS feed at Bloglines. And I managed to add BBC/CBC news and a number of other sites. However, I do NOT like the Bloglines interface! It is really cluttered, and I would not be using it for my information gathering!!!!

Read and understand the assignment: 10 min.
Set up Bloglines account: 1 min
Add web sites: 3 min
Look at the websites on bloglines: 5 min
Totak time: 19 min

GOOOOOOOOOOGLE!

I like Google! It definitely helps me at the INFO desk to look up the correct spelling of an author/singer! Only if Symphony was half as intuitive as Google... we can only wish!!!!
I have used Google Earth since it started, it really is a cool programme. If you have friends and family living at far out places, you can almost see houses on the Google Earth.
For this assignment, I checked Google Chrome, and read a bit about it.
I checked out Google labs, and especially Script Converter, and Google Transliteration. Script converter is a wonderful tool which converts text and web pages written in one script to its phonetic equivalent in another script. Right now, only a few languages are available. I tried English to Hindi conversion, and it worked very well. This can be a valuable tool for the ESL purposes when all languages are included. With Google Transliteration, I could very easily type in Hindi using the English keyboard. Both of these tools need some work done (esp. the language database is limited), but I think would be highly valuable. I would highly recommend both of these tools to my friends. I am hoping Google will create a programme for libraries, and that surely would be great!!!!

Google Chrome: 5 min
Google Labs: 20 min
Writing this blog 5 min.
Total time: 30 min.

Facebooking!

This was an easy assignment for me as I do spend a LOT of time on the FB! I got on the FB to look for a long lost friend...unfortunately, I haven't yet located her.

So, the question: is FB good for me: not sure. I still use e-mail and phone to keep in touch. It is good for sharing pictures, but the addiction part is not good!!

Time spent on the CPL FB page: 5 min.
Writing this blog: 5 min. (too many interruptions today)
Total time: 10 min.

Wikipedia

It was not an easy task for me to find an article I wanted to edit: as that required proper references, and due to time restraints, it was not possible. As there was nothing about my branch in the Wikipedia, I thought about creating an article, however, once again I was prevented from doing that as I did not have proper references! So, I tried to find a cooking article where two different spellings of a food item were used, and I easily edited that. It was a fun exercise indeed, and quite useful.

To the Anonymous in the Delicious comments, from now on, I will be keeping a note of the time spent during these exercises:
Reading About Wikipedia: 10 min.
Searching for an article about my branch or prairie gardening to edit: 5 min.
Reading how to edit/create: 10 min.
Searching for another article, and editing it: 10 min.
Writing this blog: 5 min.Total time: 40 min.

Delicious NOT!

I think Caribbean Papaya is delicious, but my son doesn't think so, he finds SideKicks delicious, and I cannot stand the smell of it!! You can guess where I am going with this...many may love delicious, but not me! Sure, it is great place to store bookmarks, but is it user friendly? I find it NOT! It was good to go through the CPL delicious site, and learn a lot more about this site, thanks to my colleagues. Would I use it...depends!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Learning as we age!

We all need to keep up with the new technology around us. But sometimes people chase after hype which I have issues with! But then I have issues with a lot of things...no I am not Miss negative, I do think the glass is half full (well mine is full to the brim).

During the CPL 2.0, I would like to learn more about Delicious (as upto now I 've found it useless), and try to understand RSS.