I, I, I, I, I, I love my ipod

It's been a while since I posted and I just had to let you know that I love my ipod touch. My family gave it to me for my birthday recently and me and ipod are now inseparable.

Yes, I know it has its limitations and there's always something better out there almost instantly. Yet, it's so simple and easy to operate. I've got some family photos and videos on it, some audio books, podcasts, music and wifi connection to the net when I'm near a hotspot.

Had some fun yesterday when I went into my local shopping centre. I walked half way through it and found sixteen wireless networks there, four of which were unsecured which makes for easy browsing in my lunch hour or any other time that I want to check my email.

Love walking to work each day listening to the latest podcasts, too.

I'm still a PC user at heart and I'm not impressed by the Apple Cult Speak that's out there. However, Apple does have my attention and I even considered a mac for my next laptop. Their promotional strategies are very good. It'll just depend on how much bang I can get for my buck when the time comes.

But wait, again....now there's even less!

Some of you may already know about these great little tools, but thanks to the effing librarian for alerting me to Portable Apps, a suite of cut down applications that can be used on any PC. Coincidentally, it's also a featured app on the download blog this week. It must be a sign!

Download blog describes it this way,

"the PortableApps Suite approach to mobile computing feels more Web 0.5 than 2.0. Instead of hosting programs online, PortableApps is a comprehensive application suite that fits onto and runs from almost any thumbdrive with at least 512MB of space, and can be shrunk down even further if need be."

Download.com has a range of reviews on it, too. Here's the blurb from the Portable Apps site, also.

Convenient
Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

Open
PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform that works with any hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc). It's open source built around an open format that any hardware vendor or software developer can use.

Free
The Portable Apps Suite™ is free. It contains no spyware. There are no advertisements. It isn't a limited or trial version. There is no additional hardware or software to buy. You don't even have to give out your email address. It's 100% free to use, free to copy and free to share.

Neat, eh? Could be useful on our public PCs at the library, too.

But wait... there's more!

Now that I've finished the course, I've had a bit of time to have a look at some other learning 2.0 blogs. You've really got to check out:

1. Atticus Mockingbird - thanks for the 'free use' Flickr group and 12 Free Online Collaboration Tools tips

2. Bambino's Bloggerama - thanks for "Get A First Life" parody site and NetLingo

Both of these blogs have well considered thoughts about their experiences of the web 2.0 stuff we've been doing. Hope you guys keep on blogging.

I'm embracing the new adventure, too. Been participating in an MBTI forum on LibraryThing. It's mostly US members so far and the odd UK one. If you're interested in psychological type and personality styles by all means join me and double the oz contingent there. If you've signed up for LibraryThing then you will have noticed that there are a lot of interesting groups to join there. Not many based on my library for some reason. I wonder what that says about my reading tastes?

Anyway, I'll start going through some more learning 2.0 blogs and see what other goodies I can find.

PS - I couldn't resist the Tim Shaw graphic. Google images has a lot to answer for. Sorry, no free steak knives with this blog, yet. This, of course, is a dead give away that I'm a member of Gen D - the Demtel generation.

PPS - the Demtel page is just waiting to be written on wikipedia - any takers?

Finished! What's for dessert?

Well, finished the course. Had a great time exploring this stuff. Now participating in some LibraryThing discussions, setting up another blog, fiddling with code in blog templates, and other neat things.

Got this weeks email newsletter from download.com which keeps me up to date with new and interesting software developments and what should the lead story be but........web 2.0 software. And not just that, but a site devoted to keeping you up to date on it, Webware. And what is their latest thing...... Webware Top 100, the 100 top Web 2.0 apps, 10 each in 10 categories, according to Webware users and the fans. I've already subscribed to the feed for the site. Check it out. It also has a range of newbie guides to web 2.0 stuff which i will explore later.

While there, I also found an article on Dilbert meets Web 2.0, how Scott Adams is adapting his Dilbert comic strip to include web 2.0 elements, hence the graphic above. How good is that?

So, thanks to the State Library team for getting all this going. Well done guys.

And now........roll on Web 3.0, whatever that may be!

Get a life, will ya!

Social networking sites can certainly be useful for promotion and any sort of communication, feedback, interaction, engagement with customers. As long as, like any other strategy, you're sure about the objective that you want to achieve by using it and you commit enough resources to do it well rather than doing it half arsed. Certainly myspace has been used by libraries, especially US ones, to reach youth segments. The Library Success Wiki has a page on successful Public Library MySpace sites for teens which seems to be the market that uses it. My 18 year old used to spend a lot of time on it but he seems to be over it now. Phone and IM seems to be more the go.

Online polling options on some of these sites also give you the ability to do some basic market research as well.

Second life? Puhlease.....get a real life not a second hand one. I think I'd rather watch paint dry or watch grass grow.

I am obviously not the demographic for second life. Do we have to serve the people who are? They look happy enough there without us interrupting them. I'm sure if we tiptoe away.....ever so quietly...... they won't even notice us. Run for your lives!!!!!

I'm free!

Free productivity tools are fine, but I still like 'em on my desktop. For free, I can get OpenOffice and have it on my PC. The project management software on Zoho is limited to one project. Anyway, I got a great little project manager on a computer magazine disc for the price of the magazine. The next month I also got a mind mapping program that integrates with it. It seems like there is a free photo editor or video editor on almost every computer magazine disc that I see these days. When I'm looking for free software or shareware, I also go to download.com and usually find something, including pdf converters.

Slideshare is OK. Now that I have a Google account, though, in the interests of simplicity I'll stick with Google docs. Zoho's wiki interface has the best range of toolbar functions of all the free wikis that I've looked at but the lack of responses on their help page is a worry, especially as they have left them there for all to see for months. Not a good sign. Have a look at Nexo. It combines blog, wiki, docs storage (including photos and video), chat/forums etc in one site. Privacy settings are a bit complicated , though, but worth a look.

Overall, I'm experimenting with these free productivity tools, but they still have some way to go before they are really compelling to use. Having said that, they certainly have some potential to become compelling. In the workplace, I think the security factor may work against them. Setting up similar file sharing on an intranet using something like MS Sharepoint may appeal more to the Council IT dept. For sharing non sensitive and non confidential stuff, especially over many sites using virtual teams, these tools will be fine. I've even put up one of my favourite marketing planning documents on Google docs. It was published in 1996 but I think it still has a lot to offer today.

Mash me up, Scotty.

Checked out the big huge labs stuff. It's OK. Reminds me a bit of Publisher style stuff. Created the billboard there. Got the photo from Flickr. Has possibilities for promotional stuff and fooling around with staff photos on the intranet. Free is free, I suppose, but I still prefer some good software on my desktop rather than the web based stuff. And I don't mind paying for it if its good and it does what I want, especially if I can get it cheap on a computer magazine disc.

Mashups article in wikipedia says

"Mashups currently come in three general flavors: consumer mashups, data mashups, and business mashups.

The best known type is the consumer mashup, best exemplified by the many Google Maps applications. Consumer mashups combine data elements from multiple sources, hiding this behind a simple unified graphical interface.

Other common types are "data mashups" and "enterprise mashups".

A data mashup mixes data of similar types from different sources (see Yahoo Pipes), as for example combining the data from multiple RSS feeds into a single feed with a graphical front end. An enterprise mashup (see Denodo Technologies & JackBe), usually integrates data from internal and external sources - for example, it could create a market share report by combining an external list of all houses sold in the last week with internal data about which houses one agency sold.

A business mashup is a combination of all the above, focusing on both data aggregation and presentation, and additionally adding collaborative functionality, making the end result suitable for use as a business application."

There's a lot of other info there including links to other mashup sites. The data and business mashups sound like they are worth investigating but I'm not sure that they will do anything for me that some good desktop software won't do anyway.