Thing 8, +13+22 +99 reasons why I haven't done my homework

I started this post at 5 minutes before closing last night. Now it's Saturday and I am finishing it on my own time.

Did it say anywhere that we needed to do the Things in order? Because I realized in looking over the list of Things that I had managed to jump around a bit. Sorry if that causes any inconvenience.

I thought last week was the crazy busy week. I was wrong. I did not get 45 minutes to truly play with any fun new toys at work this week. However, I did some stuff that was at least related.

My co-worker Molly and I set up a flickr account for our branch, and I showed Molly how to upload and tag pix. Our username is LakesideLibrary. Molly discovered some really great shots of our mural celebration on what must be a local photographer's flickr account, Joy Elizabeth. So we "friended" (aka added as a contact) her. We also created an avatar for our account, using the photo of LK on the SDCL.org site. So I think this counts as fulfilling Thing 22. Molly is just full of ideas for using flickr. She wants to do librarian trading cards for all the staff. This does seem like fun, and good PR.

I'm kind of amazed--I've been using flickr for like five years, and I had not begun to explore/exploit its interestingness. I have to remember to order photo paper. I want to print a set of Joy Elizabeth's mural pix for my mural documentation folder, with attribution of course!

I have to think more about how we are tagging them, since they aren't coming up when you search Lakeside Library. We put in the tags LakesideBranch and SDCL. Need to rethink.

I've now read all of the posts on all of the blogs my fellow 23 Thingsers have set up. I think that was 73 posts. Most were pretty short, but it was pretty interesting. I got to see lots of mashups, a little bit on image generators (which I look forward to trying since I think my current avatar looks anorexic). I also looked at Oddcast, but I couldn't find the way to do a trial. Oh well, maybe someone will post a link.

I accidentally ended up reading a bunch of Information Wants To Be Free from a reference to the survey there. I tripped over IWTBF ages ago, and always find Meredith's thinking useful. A recent post posed questions about why people blog. I think I will think about that over at my main blog. I recently had comments there from two of my old online friends, which made me realize how much I value that contact.

I also spent a lot of time this week looking at the Nashville Public Library site and their implementation of Encore. I was one of the people asked to evaluate it for potential for SDCL. Encore uses de.licio.us style tag clouds, but they are based on Library of Congress Subject Headings. It almost goes without saying this makes for some weird results.

And yet another Thing I worked on this week. I've opened a de.licio.us account for the reference committee. We are going to try to put together a set of reference bookmarks that will be useful for the entire system. Several of the people involved are also 23 Thingers, so I have to say this course/competition is certainly having some consequences. I have also been posting and getting more comments on my other blogs. Kick-starting those was one of my personal goals. So I am rather happy, even if I did spend substantially more than 45 minutes writing this post (it is now Sunday morning). So I will slog onward!