Sunday, August 16, 2009

Zoho Success


A couple of days ago a woman using our Public Access computers wanted to type something, save it to the computer, then send it somewhere else. Since that can't be done on our system, we needed another "place" to put it.
Flash, it came to me: Zoho!
And Gues What? It worked. How cool is that?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The 27th Thing

The "27th Thing" asked that we blog our experiences and feelings about technology. First of all, even though I was very dubious when I started, I'm very happy I participated. What a great way to learn about the uses of the many tools we explored.

For example: Zoho will enable us to share work over the Internet. I'll be able to create something at work and finish it at home on a rather old and cranky computer.

I'm a podcast lover. Wouldn't it be cool if we recorded Steve Lopez' program and podcast it? And YouTube. Everytime I look for something on YouTube, I find it. It's good for recreation, publicity (and I'm thinking of a children's program here)and can illuminate and bring to life what might otherwise seem boring. A video stream is easily worth a tousand words.

As a library user, I would love to be on a Twitter list for program announcements or for a reminder of the preschool story time that I normally attend or a class I signed up for. How great would that be?

I'm not into Technorati, but Yelp is another great site that I like and use. There are reviews of SPL there. It's a good place to get unedited feedback for the library to tap into. Yelp also looks to be very useful for finding businesses on a local basis. I checked the ratings for several in Woodland where I live and they seemed spot on.

That's enough for now. I think I'll keep this thing going. Maybe it will lead me to more discoveries.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Blogging Zoho

Right now I'm using Zoho writer to do my blog entry. This seems like a really good idea. Create a document or presentation and save within the site. Seems like this would be ideal for collaboration or travel. Functionally it seems like a pretty normal word processor and looks a whole lot like the current Word that we use here at SPL. I also noticed that it posts to a blog. I'm going to try that in a minute.

OK, it's been more than a minute and it's not published yet. Hmmmmm.....


Oh! There it is!


I think Zoho would be very useful for "transporting" docs between home and work. Unfortunately, my home computer no longer understands the young whippersnapper sitting on my desk in the library. I want to create documents in both places and edit them elsewhere. It's not possible for me to do that right now unless I save stuff in either .txt or .rtf formats.





I found this on facebook - I think it's stunning!

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Mango!! Rhymes with Tango!

Mango looks really good. It's got repetition, which I need, clear pronunciation, great explanations - everything one needs to learn a language. The only other thing required is the discipline to use it regularly. I would like to see the number of languages available increase, but I imagine that is a function of time (and other things, like money). I'm going to try to work on my Spanish which is in the "poquito" range and needs to improve.

Twitter et al.

One of the things on the 27 things list is to tweet something. OK, I signed up for Twitter so I can get my kids' tweets, but I'm not really interested in sending any. I sent a tweet, but I'd rather receive them than send another. I can really see some really cool uses for twitter though, especially here in the library. What a great way to let subscribers know about an event they might be interested in. e.g.: painting class at fair oaks lib. scheduled for nov. 11. sign up now. (Not a real class!!!)


I like the logo though, since I've always been partial to turquoise.


Thingfo still isn't available, so I couldn't try it out. The website is clean though and looks user-friendly. Hopefully. The Civil Librarian blog is using it and I like the fact that all the apps are right there. That's a time saver.