Thing 31: MORE TWITTER!

Oh how I do love Twitter. Getting to play with it for an hour and get paid for it is a sweet, sweet reward.

I think I'm starting to evolve to the next level of twitter. If this was JUST me and people I already knew I would still probably feel this rush of excitement, but I think there's even more to it than that. I'm starting to understand the appeal behind building a network, like so many of these twitter sites talk about. I could potentially MEET NEW PEOPLE through twitter. I could have contacts all over the country from this website. Interestingly, the presence of celebrities on twitter facilitates this somewhat - a bunch of people are attracted to the famous person, but in so doing become aware of each other and slowly build these other followers into their own network.

I adedd Mr. Tweet, who will recommend users to me that I should follow. I added a bunch more big power users. I checked my twitter ranking - turns out I have more "influence" than about half the community. Most of those are probably dead or one-time-use accounts, but still, I got some clout. I pledge to build this up.

Thing 30 and the Temple of Doom

Well. I have my delicious and my RSS feed all set up. To be honest I'm kind of underwhelmed by it. First of all I apparently misunderstood the mechanism of RSS feeds this whole time. Apparently you can't just put in any old website you want and get updated as to when it has new content. The website has to have a specific RSS site feed you subscribe to. So basically a lot of really big websites are cool, but a lot of the smaller or independently operated ones I like don't have this option.

Beyond that, I guess I don't spend so much time looking at websites that I don't have time to check them all. I have a bookmarks list in my browser like I always have, and it's not too strenuous to go through and check stuff out when I need to. The one thing I'd like to have an RSS feed for is all the web comics I read, so that I could see when updates happened instead of checking them all individually, but the ones I like didn't all have RSS feeds available, so that's kinda out the window. Beyond that I don't really need to have alerts for every update on cnn.com, for example. I can just go there when I want to read the news.

Considering my lack of utility for these RSS feeds, I don't see how I'm going to use a lot of the featured tools. I definitely don't want to forward all the updates to my e-mail; my inbox gets cluttered up enough as it is. I kind of like the one that will forward updates to my twitter, if only because it gives me another excuse to use twitter. And the one that gives you personal reminders would be GREAT if I were more organized. Which I'm not, but maybe this will help.

I don't know if this one's gonna make the cut for long term use, either. I'll have to see. In the mean time I am going to move on to other Things and give this one a proper wrap up some time in the future.

Thing 30: Raiders of the Lost Ark

(Note: this will be a 3 part entry, hence the Indiana Jones titles, which was also a trilogy. I may add a fourth joke entry to complement that joke of a 4th movie, but do not hold your breath).

So, as this Thing requires that you have Delicious and/or RSS feeds to make it work, I spent my time today setting this up. I put a few bookmarks into delicious and I'm trying to figure out this "popular" section, although it doesn't actually seem to give you THE most popular followed websites, just some ones the webmaster apparently thought were cool.

This seems to be a problem with a lot of these "Web 2.0" sites. They get so caught up in how you can connect everything to everything else that they make it hard to do basic things by "Web 1.0" standards. And I grew up in web 1.0, so I demand the old stuff, dammit. I don't think it would be that hard to have a way to sort the popular followed websites so I could see what everyone else thinks is cool, but apparently you can only see what is new or what specific people think is best? Also, having your tagged items page called "Inbox" is REALLY confusing, since EVERYWHERE ELSE on the ENTIRE INTERNET uses this name for messages you've received. Who decided this?

Anyway, I will finish fleshing it out and using the RSS at home, then Part 2 will be initial observations on the Thing 30 tools.

PS new profile image, someone else made it so the eye color is wrong but I don't know where she did it and I think it's neat so it stays.

Things 28 & 29: google wrap up

I gotta say I didn't enjoy this as much as I have been some of the other Things (like Twitter!). I found iGoogle to be the same as it was last time I used it, which is to say it would've been useful if I didn't have all the stuff it offered me already in other areas. It's nice to have everything right there for you, but if I think about wanting movie times or wanting to see what the weather is I can just go to a website for that purpose, instead of changing my homepage from the one I've had for a long time (a comic I like). A lot of the other applications had pretty limited or novelty use, so I just couldn't get myself into it. I could see this being a lot more helpful for people who don't necessarily know a lot of websites with content they might want, or are uncomfortable using search engines. Then they could have everything right where they need it instead of having to search. For me, though, it just wasn't that great.

Google tools, then suffered from the same kind of problem. They're useful little gadgets that can work if you just want basic information, but none of it is necessarily stellar to me as far as calendars, schedulers and etc. I still like some of the "beta" programs, though.

Thing 29 Part 1: Google Tools

Since I only started up the iGoogle experiment yesterday and I had more Things time today, I'm moving on to the next one and will post a thing 28 follow up later.

I'm having a lot of fun with the Google Labs section of the tools, where they let you try out a bunch of programs or tools that they're developing but haven't necessarily released for ful public consumption yet. Some of these have been around for a while, but might keep their place in the "Labs" section because they aren't as practical as the tools on the main page. For example, there's one called Google Trends which lets you look at which search terms have been the most popular over the past day or so. It's really cool to see how many searches have been done on something, and there's a little sidebar linking to relevant to news sites with relevant content explaining why something is suddenly popular -for example, one of the top searches was on "Ryan Adams", and when I clicked there were a bunch of links to his and Mandy Moore's announcement that they're engaged. I hadn't heard about this yet, but apparently a lot of people have. This could be a really useful tool to measure what MOST people think is noteworthy or what they want to know more about. I think Google is going to give a pretty accurate cross section of America's population.

Other than that, some of the other features I used were a bit dull. I experimented with SearchWiki, which lets you organize your google search results based on websites you like or dislike, and saves this information for when you search for the same term again. I couldn't really see any great use for this one. I don't know why I'd be searching for the same information over and over again, and if I find a website I like I'll more than likely just save it to my favorites. I guess if you have a computer you only use for specific jobs you could potentially use this to keep relevant stuff on top? But I'd rather just use del.icio.us or something if I really needed that.

I already have gmail, so I don't feel exactly right saying that's a new tool I tried, but I do like it and consider it easy to use, so it has that going for it.

My main goal this time, then, is going to be to continue to root around in the google tools until I find something I feel I can use in my everyday life.

Thing 28: iGoogle

This one isn't nearly as much of a mystery to me, as I'm pretty familiar with customized home pages from the past. I actually used an iGoogle in the past but didn't care for it, but as long as we're required to do this for the program I may as well throw myself into it. So here we go!

First, I cut out a lot off the gimmicky gadgets I put on there a couple years ago. They get old prrrrretty fast and then they just take up a lot of room looking dumb. So comics and Pac-Man went away, along with the 7 or so new sources I had on there because, let's be honest, I'm not gonna read all that. Sorry.

I kept weather, movie times, gmail box and the wikipedia link, and I added the dictionary and free iTunes downloads. All of this will hopefully cut down on a little bit of running around online (for example, I usually just type dictionary.com every time I want to look something up, same with movies). I'm not sure how the service is, because I don't necessarily know where the widgets come from. So I'll see how I like the results.

So, goals for next time:
1) I will change my google.com bookmark at home to igoogle.com and try it out.
2) I will make an effort to add an outside widget to the homepage (I couldn't find where to add html, and my allotted time was running out).

A little simpler this time because I know what I'm doing, it's just to test drive this and see if I like it more pared-down.

Thing 27 Part 2: What have I done?!

Oh, man. Even I could not have foreseen how much I enjoy using twitter. How could I have? It's little one sentence things! But for some reason it's way more awesome than it sounds. Plus you don't feel as bad as if you update your facebook status all the time because that's the whole POINT of twitter. I'm following all kinds of famous people and friends, and making people sign up, and checking and updating several times a day. It's pretty awesome.

So let's look at my goals:
1) Expand the twitter feeds I'm following to 5
-Try 13.
2) Update my status daily for a week
-In 4 days I have updated 18 times.
3) Find out about embedding twitter feeds on here
-This should probably have read "embedding tweets on here" but who the hell knows. Anyway as you can see, there's one right up in the upper right corner.
4)Unrelated, but I need a new avatar or picture for this blog, too.
-Eh. I'll get to it.

So, this Thing was pretty exciting for me personally and has entered into my life. It was a success. I'm not sure how we can use this at our library right now, because most of the patrons aren't technological enough to know or care how to use it, but if anyone asks I will def. be recommending it.

Thing 27: Starting Twitter

Well, I have one. God help me, I have a twitter.

Reading through the descriptions, it seems pretty similar to setting your status on facebook. And almost everyone I know is on facebook. So I'm wondering if this works pretty much the same way for people who don't have a facebook, or if it will all seem different after I work this out for a while.

For one thing, I don't know anyone else who's on twitter. I know one blog I read has a little twitter feed embedded on the side, so I'm following that, and I also added Barack Obama's twitter feed (Although it seems not to have updated in a while). I tried to find something that would let me add a widget to my own blog here, but I'm not seeing anything. I'm also wary about adding this to my phone, because I don't know how many texts I could end up receiving.

However, I've heard so much about twitter that I want to make a real effort to utilize it fully. I read a little piece online about the ways people use twitter, and you can do crazy stuff if you code it right. It seems that in the recent snowstorms across the country, someone set something up where people would update their twitter status (with an @reply to this guy's feed) with a report of how bad the weather was where they were, and he used all this data to create an up-to-the-minute weather patterns map, all of which was supplied by users. This sounds like some crazy powerful futuristic stuff, which is exciting.

I'm thinking that as long as I split the posts up into two sections, I might as well start setting goals for the next post I make. This will give me something to work on in between scheduled times. On that note, my goals for Thing 27 are:
1) Expand the twitter feeds I'm following to 5
2) Update my status daily for a week. (I may get another Things session before then, but I want to do it anyway).
3) Find out about embedding twitter feeds on here
4) Unrelated, but I need a new avatar or picture for this blog, too.

Thing 26 Part 2

And now, in keeping with my new format, I"ll finish up my thoughts on Thing 26 as they have evolved over the past couple days.

Looks like the picture I uploaded only got 4 views, and the video just one (thanks, whoever you are). I'm guessing people aren't going back to this site much to peruse content, but I guess I haven't much either and I think it's all because of the lack of organization. Obviously we've got a fairly limited scope of usage, so there might not be a lot of action in the comments section, etc. The forums move a little quicker, but not by much. Maybe a lot of people just aren't used to online forum and BBS systems?

In any case, maybe as more people get to this stage of the Things it'll pick up more. I maintain that it'll probably be useful if people start to run into problems on later Things, so I will make an effort to keep checking back and add momentum to discussion.

Thing 26 Part 1

So here's my idea for a format. Since we're scheduled to work on these blogs an hour at a time during work, I don't necessarily have 100% flexibility on when I get all this going. So I think at the end of an hour of experimentation with the Thing I'm working on I'll write a part 1 with initial impressions and experiences. Then as I mess with it over a couple days and let it sink in, I'll prepare a part 2 that I post later on. That way if some kind of application for its use comes to me, or something goes wrong with it that I have to fix, I can add that to the later entry.

So anyway, Ning. Initial impressions.

It seems kind of like facebook or other kinds of social networking types, but way toned down. You can set up a profile and add pictures and stuff, but it seems kinda haphazard and not organized too well - the videos and pictures are all just kind of dumped onto their own pages in a pile. You can sort through them, and you can search if you need to, but it seems like a weird setup.
That said, I think the idea of a social networking site for all the Things users to group together is a GREAT idea. This way if anyone has questions or problems we can check it out there. I hope we all continue visiting throughout the process. Deal?

Thing 25 Wrap-up

Surprise! It turns out if you add the wrong kind of widget (or something) blogger thinks you're a spam blog and shuts you down! So you have to appeal to have it reopened and convince them you're a real person. Anyway, I'm back up now and comin' atcha live.

I hope this is okay for the purposes of the Things on a Stick project but I deleted all the widgets I had put on because I didn't know which one made them think I was a malicious program. I'll add a few back up later as I need them, but I'll try different ones I guess, and make sure they're necessary.

I guess, here's a warning to all you others: verify the source of your widgets before slappin' em on here. You might get deleted.

Also, comments are working. Go nuts.