Widgets from My Library Thing

Taking a bite out of Delicious

Courtesy of Hannah Eve on Flickr

Having not heard of Delicious (like a good many other Cam 23 things), my first thought was that it was not what I expected. I still am at a loss to know why delicious is called delicious. Anyway, that aside, I took the plunge and signed up for a Delicious account. I got side-tracked trying to hunt down a website I had used for downloading free sheet music and realised how messy my own browser's bookmarks were. It made me think how bookmarks are good if you only have a few, but if you keep on adding them at a ferocious pace (or your wife does) they do become less useful. My wife thought Delicious sounded like a wonderful idea, so having created my account, I decided to transfer all of our bookmarks automatically into Delicious and then sort through them there, rather than trying to tackle the bookmarks themselves in my browser. I haven't been able to face going through all 222 bookmarks before coming to write this post, but I can already see how useful this can be. I have started adding my own simple tags to the webpages which I know will make it much easier to keep track of them. It also appealed to my strange cataloguing mind so was actually quite fun. I hope to make use of Delicious now in the future as a way of managing my bookmarks and as it is available on any local computer, this will be very useful as well. I don't as yet quite see the point of searching Delicious for webpages and seeing how popular they have been with other people as I don't tend to ask this question before adding something as a bookmark. If it's helpful for me, then that is usually the only criteria. But maybe I will learn more about this, the more I make use of Delicious.

To say that Delicious is delicious is probably going a bit too far, but I certainly thought it was rather good.

Slides Seem To Be Back In

Slideshare seems a very straight-forward kind of resource. You want a PowerPoint presentation? Then you'll probably be able to find one on Slideshare. No problems so far. The point is though, how often would you want to find somebody else's PowerPoint? I've used PowerPoint in a number of presentations and have attended many more where it has been used. I can see the benefit of getting hold of a PowerPoint presentation after an event, in order to refresh your memory about what you were able to learn (although obviously it won't have your own notes scribbled all over it). But would I want to use somebody else's PowerPoint myself? Presentations are very personal things and PowerPoint has to reflect the logical progression in the mind of the presenter. I would find using somebody else's PowerPoint too constraining. Also, looking at a silent PowerPoint for the benefit of learning about something, seems mostly a fruitless exercise. For example the first three Slideshare items I looked at, I could not work out particularly what they were about or what the logical progression of the slides was. One from Andy Priestner illustrates the point well (sorry Andy - I'm sure you made it into a great presentation when you delivered it).

The Inspector Morse Factor; faculty engagement at Oxford (and Cambridge) University

View more presentations from priestcam.

Clearly, this is in need of a speaker to bring the PowerPoint alive and fill in the gaps. I find the kind of video clips available in a lot of online 'helps' very useful because they are designed as a whole package, often including voiceovers or text instructions, but Slideshare does not seem to match this level of usefulness.

My library is often responsible for hosting lectures and talks, many of which may involve PowerPoint presentations. It might be worth using Slideshare to make these available after such events, to the people who attended. Otherwise, because of the limitations I've been describing I can't see a huge role for Slideshare in my library or libraries at large. Having read some of the Cam23 blogger posts, there seems to be a general consensus that Slideshare is a bit limited although thanks to Catherine's 23 Blog for pointing out that it is a good way for getting ideas about what is possible in PowerPoint.

Flickr (better than Twitter)

Thank you Girl in the Moon

Flickr. I love beautiful images, so I am excited about looking at Flickr, which I can't say I had ever done before. I'm very used to uploading my own images onto facebook and had assumed this was something very similar. The main difference which strikes me however, is the difference in audience. On facebook, I upload photos which I hope my 'friends' are going to enjoy. Usually they are pictures of me or of mutual friends. I sometimes include pictures of 'things' (eg. some pretty flowers or a famous landmark), which help to give some context to the album, but generally I know people aren't going to be interested in them. I use facebook photos to keep people up to date with my life and family, so moreabstract images are not going to be used. But Flickr is about sharing absolutely anything with a much larger audience - the interests of which are going to me much more varied - in fact, the one thing they probably won't be interested in is me!

A lot of the images I've looked at on Flickr have been beautiful. However, limiting searches to Creative Commons only, does seem to take a lot of the nice ones away in some of my searches. For example, my hometown of Ulverston was magically transformed into the most delightful place imaginable when I first searched, but adding the Creative Commons limitation, suddenly made it look much more familiar. Searching under 'violin' however, didn't seem to make too much difference. There were still some good crisp arty shots which I thought very stylish. The difference between searching under tags and under full text also brings up different results. For my violin example, the full text certainly seemed more helpful for what I had in mind.

'Violin' search under full text and all images

'Violin' search under full text and Creative Commons

'Violin' search under tags and Creative Commons

Flickr seems to be a good tool for finding images which are definitely free for use by searching under the Creative Commons. Librarywanderer has commented on the fact that as a tool for actually finding images, Google images is actually preferable. I would certainly agree that Google does seem to perform better when it comes to finding exactly what I'm looking for, just under one keyword. My violin search yielded the following result on Google which even a brief glance of the screenshot below will show you that basic, literal violins feature much more prominently.

Google images results for 'violin'

There are some beautiful and useful images out there on Flickr and I'm glad I've finally got round to using it.

By the way, the lovely water droplet picture was courtesy of Tanya Puntii on Flickr. However, I have been having problems adding any kind of captions to my images despite a thorough search on Google and Blogger Help for an answer. Does anyone know how to do this, and also how to add nice tidy borders to images such as appear on everyone else's Cam23 blogs?