Friday, May 23, 2008

Forums

Forums are the core of popular opinion, common folklore and a really good way of getting an interesting answer to a query. I've been a daily fan of message boards, often spanning my interests in music, technology, industry type questions being a big drawcard for me going back and back and back.

I often find that sometimes people online can take themselves slightly too serious, serial message spamers...I guess thats what the anonymity of the online culture allows you to do. Say what you want, where you want and whenever you want to.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Very Cool

On a side note, this is one of the most ingenious online marketing campaigns I've ever had the chance to experience.

http://www.42entertainment.com/YearZero/

Library Thing

Everything I have discovered thus far has been about the management and integration. Once again I like the idea of having a single location, much like a repository where I can whatever it is I'm looking for. At the moment I'm finding it a bit hard to keep tabs on what exactly I've subscribed to. How so? Well you start to realized that once you've subscribed to one site, and another, you have this growth pattern of subscriptions,logins, passwords and other details.

Library Thing to me come as using the same underlying principle as bookmarking. I read a lot of online articles, Internet based blogs and mostly anything relevant to technology, music, digital media etc, which brings me to the dilemma again, that I'd be more akin of using the good old fashion bookmarking system on a browser than a website to add my favorite titles. That being said however, I have added a few tittles to my Library Thing account.


What would be cool is to have one site that manages all these accounts and utilities. ALL you would require is a single log-in.

del.icio.us

Is del.icio.us really delicious?

I've been a big fan of using bookmarks for a long time, however I can't really say I would use delicious all that much personally. I think in the general scheme of things online, it's good to have something to be able to categorize bookmarks, links, favorites and all the other derivatives. It never ceases to amaze me the innovation that web creators and developers go to, to integrate the the morass of information that exists of the web.

Navigation and finding what you need, when you need, can be a major hurdle. However, I see such as system as del.icio.us, as being more advantageous to mobile users who commute between computer terminals. These days most mobile users, house their bookmarks for use on one machine which will usually be a primary computer. I couldn't see myself personally using del.icio.us on a frequent basis, although I would be interested to see if it provides a more seamless integration in a user's web browser environment.

As it can be seen, del.icio.us has taken the best parts of managing a series of bookmarks and expanded the concept into shaping our view of how we can share our favorites - get it share our favorites - ha-ha. The use of terminology and semantics in tagging is revolutionary and all-encompassing (at least it tries to be). It's a big mission to try and categorize everything and anything. In today's current technological era, everyone has a different opinion of how something is expressed, classified and defined.

For me del.icio.us, takes the step to try to meet the needs towards a more organized and personal bookmarking system, and it does so well.

Some interesting things relating to NIN @ del.icio.us

Anything interesting to check out is Digg.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

1984



Something cool!

RSS

RSS and newsreaders in principle and appearance reminds me of the little ticker bar that you see when you watch the morning news. Whether it is listings of stock prices, or current and breaking events, delivering information in snippets and byte size scrolls, is convenient and efficient. I like the ability to be able to be kept informed, in the know, on the go, and that’s exactly how I view the function of RSS.

I often find myself dedicated to certain websites. As such, I would occasionally check the site for the latest news and updates. I remember the days when I would have to refresh the page continually to see what was being served up next. With the RSS/newsreaders I get the same advantages of a news ticker without the fuss of having to check multiple sites. It’s even easier using software these days to manage and integrate all your favourite sites that enable a RSS feed.

For this part of the learning course, I used a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox that delivers the RSS feed under the status bar of my browser.

Sites that I subscribed to primarily technology, music and news sites. In our workplace, RSS would be a versatile Tool to broadcast updates on what current events that are occurring at our library. It would also provide a greater reach of target audience,and provide a source to be more appealing to library patrons from all walks of life.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Applelution


What interests me? Technology and everything about it. I decided to do my daily thing as I usually do every night and Flickr through Flickr literally and find something that was kind of symbolic and reflective of my current mindset. I've been quite a avid fan of the Windows platform, ever since its early conception I have been engaged with it, learning about it and trying to master it. Recently however in the last few months, my consuming interest has been strayed away towards a switch. A switch that’s requires me to change my frame of reference, take myself out of my comfort zone, and re-immerse, coming out afresh and anew.

What is this switch...APPLE.

I've decided that in the next few months I will try the MAC XPerience! (Ha-ha, sorry i thought that was a bit clever). Anyhow this image kind of juxtaposes my mindset.