Rollyo

OK, so I'm doing these a little out of order. I Rollyoed a business information search and love it. I used some of the sites I'd saved in Delicious (we'll get to that) when I took an online business sources class. I then searched for (without the quotes) "balance sheet" and then for "Spokane demographics." Both got several hits. Cool. Here's the link: http://rollyo.com/brunra/business_information/. I can certainly see a use for this little tool. It can be used to search sites that the user already knows and trusts. It can also provide a far more focused search than, say, Google. The results are also a little more manageable than Google, with tens of thousands of alleged hits rather than tens of millions.

Image Generation

Other Learning 2.0 websites are a good resource. I used one to find the image generator that let me make this cartoon.

... the behinder you don't get

I've been having scads of fun helping my colleagues with Learning 2.0, but we all get super busy sometimes. Fortunately, Learning 2.0 is self paced. Just because the "things" go up every week doesn't mean they have to be done that week.

Help

Teaching others is a great way to learn. Right now, I'm showing a collegue how to upload pictures to a blogger post.

Dogs

These are, from left to right, Ezra, Jaden, and Leo. Ezra is a terrier mix, Jaden a Portuguese Water Dog (one of Pres. Obama's possible breed picks), and Leo a Chow Chow. The captioning was done using fd's LOLCat Flickr tool.

A New Favorite Reference Question

The patron had a paper with a picture and some information: it's the second largest memorial in the nation, it's a veteran's memorial, it was begun in 1925 and dedicated by FDR on June 14, 1936, and has 16 doric columns that are 39 feet high and weigh 98 tons each. It's round and looks a bit like the Jefferson Memorial. What is it? It's the George Rogers Clark Memorial, that's what it is! I found the info not in one of the day-by-day books, the almanacs, or the FDR info in Biography Resource Center. I looked all those places before heading to Google. After a couple of failed searches I hit on memorials doric "39 feet" as the winning search strategy. It's not a veteran's memorial, though it commemorates an American Revolution battle, and it got the green light in 1928 rather than 1925. But those columns are 39 feet high, thank goodness. I love this question, and I love that I was able to answer it. (The poor patron had been searching the internet himself for hours on end, which made victory even sweeter.)

Bloglines

I made a brief, unsuccessful foray into the world of RSS some time ago. Here's hoping this time goes better. I'm pretty sure it will. I already feel more confident about using it, which is half to two-thirds of the battle. I found the "related feeds" tool useful. I subscribed to Library Link of the Day, and Bloglines suggested several related feeds. Some of them I'd just unsubscribed from, but I did find Librarians Internet Index, which I like. That site let you choose which RSS reader to use for subscribing, which was nice. Some of the others I looked at didn't give a choice when I clicked on the feed button. Bloglines wasn't able to find the feed for our Learning 2.0 blog. I suspect it's because its on the intranet, so can't be accessed by "outside" tools. Sydic8 let me find Libraryman. There is apparently a new librarian Horde guild, for those WoWers who might be interested. Barrens chat.

LOLFlickr

OK, I admit it. I like the LOLCats tool. (If you're not familiar with LOLCats, check them out here: http://icanhascheezburger.com/.) Find your picture, add your caption, and LOL away.