Week 4 : Books and social networking

GoodReads is another good website that I should add into my collections. It'll be useful for customers reference or myself.

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Freebirdworld's bookshelf: read




More of Freebirdworld's books »

Week 3 : Twitter - micro-blogging at a glance

I'm proudly to say that I already followed Manukau Libraries since it started on twitter although I haven't twitted a lot. I have 4 followers and I know one of them I guess. Manukau Libraries can promote our events and things like that which we already did anyway.

Week 2 : Zamzar - converting file formats

I tried to convert a word doc to a pdf with Zamzar. Then I got the email links to download. It's really helpful in our job because I got customer with .docx before and couldn't open with our learn.net computers. Now we have another tool to help them. Good stuff.

Week 1 : Blogger - set up your own blog

Another round of Web 2.0 training. Hopefully I can get more familiar with it and appy them in my daily job.

End for begining

Finally I got to task 23 (phew!!!).
As many people will say I learned a looooot from this Web 2.0 training. RSS, flickr, Wikis, Podcasts are not stranger to me any more. Blogging becomes part of my life now.
I know there are so many new techniques out on the internet. I have to keep on learning. But always we have excuse for ourselves not learning new things. This Web 2.0 training really pushed me to read, digest and learn the new stuff. I have to say That July 2008 has been the month that I read most since I left Uni.
I want to thank people who prepare this programme and made it as interesting as possible. I look forward some similar training in the near future.

ebooks

I quite like the idea of Netlibrary to allow customer borrow ebooks (there is expiration date set up) and renew them if needed (certainly you have to be a member). The problem with ebooks on Netlibrary sound like too big. ebooks got a lot of new stuff and best sellers. But you have to pay it otherwise you can only read the excerpt.
Project Gutenburg, on the contrary, provides old/classic stuff (but they're free!!!). I found Pride and prejudice, Ulysses, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer etc. on Top 100 EBooks yesterday(7-27-2008).
The book I may want to read is called Stories of Birds by Lenore Elizabeth Mulets. I can either read online or download from main site, mirror sites or P2P in plain text or HTML format.
Talking about ebook reader such as Amazon's Kindle I think it's only an option or a toy for those busy, wealthy businessmen to relax during their flights. For the real book-lovers I'm sure they still like the black letters on white paper feeling.

Podcasts & Vodcasts

I don't need an iPod now because of Podcasts although I never had one (I have a MP4 player instead).

Couldn't open Podcast.net. Couldn't find any Podcasts directories on Yahoo Podcasts. Finally tried Podcastalley.com successfully. Listened to couple of Comedy podcasts from Comedy section. Ironically none of them can make me laugh. I searched podcasts on "Auckland" and guess what, AUT (not Auckland University) got a lecture podcast on it. None on "Manukau".

I found another podcasts directory--Education Podcast Network from Podcast TECHTORIAL. Obviously all podcasts on this site are for education which I think Podcast is best used for. For example learning Mandarin with Serge Melnyk. Some podcasts that I'm interested don't have feeds on them. So I couldn't add them to my bloglines. But I managed add some finally.

Again we can use podcast or vodcast for our library orientation, reading stories for children or reading books for people with hearing problems etc. (anything to do with tutorial or entertainment for people who like or need to listen over and over again).