The end is nigh!

After a bit of a roundabout route and a last minute dash I've made it to the 23rd thing!  I'm really glad I tried out all the things, even if it would not use all of them again.  I'm not planning to use LinkedIn in the near future or delicious.  It is good to know they are there and how they work, maybe they will be useful one day.  I'm keeping my iGoogle page and will try to build up my RSS feeds - all the 23 things feeds will disappear so I can add some more library blogs.

It has been useful to find out more about how other libraries use web 2.0 and has made me think about how tools can be used in a library setting.  It was also nice to do the activities as a good and has been a good talking point in the office.  I am grateful for the assistance provided by my colleagues when I got stuck!  Hopefully this knowledge will be useful when I go to study at UWE in the autumn.

Widgets

Rather than add a delicious widget, I have played around with my existing widgets and added a word cloud.  I tried out delicious from home and ended up with a long list of hairdressers, which isn't very useful for this site! I have also got rid of my flickr stream because my photos were not very exciting.  I might add it again if I create an album of photos about my thesis project.

I have had a go with Wordle to make this cloud.  It is not a tag cloud, I have copied and pasted the text from my blogs into the site.  This came up with more interesting results than the option to make a cloud based on the URL of my blog.  Phil Bradley suggests using Tagxedo and I am going to try that from home because it requires a Microsoft Silverlight and I don't want to download things like that to a work PC.

I also tried to personalise my template using Blogger in draft but the page would not open properly - I wondered if this was because the work PCs use an old form of IE?

Wikis

To confuse people further, I am doing another entry out of sync - this time about wikis.  I did not like the format of the OULS wetpaint wiki because I found the animated adverts distracting - I suppose that they allow users to have sites for free, but it's a shame that they are not static.  Also it was a shame that the layout of the site was not more attractive or personal like the format of our blogs. 

I did not contribute to the wet paint wiki but I did add a sentence to the wikipedia entry for the SSL to note our name change.  To edit the blog I had to type in a window with html-type bits which was a bit daunting.  I really like using wikipedia to find out bits and bobs, but I always try to remember that it is not an authoritative source and that I cannot rely on it to be correct or up to date.  As a collaborative tool, the most interesting wiki I have found is the Library Routes Project about library careers. I am glad I tried wikis because I think they might pop up again in future jobs.

Clouds and slow documents

Quite a few other 23 things bloggers have complained about the slowness of ThinkFree Office, especially in comparison to Google Docs.  Another point that I found to add was that I found Google Docs easier to navigate around.  I liked the templates that were available and would consider using them for future projects - eg planners and photo albums.  I tried uploading a few different types of document and found that my Powerpoints even when converted were good but that a Word doc with pictures, arrows and text boxes lost the arrows and text boxes.  When I kept the Word document in its original format it was displayed correctly but I found the text more difficult to read.

I think Google Docs is a good idea, especially for people who have to move about and still access documents but they would need to be confident that they had access to the internet. I know that it is possible to work offline with some sites, but you would need to connect to save changes eventually.  Also more complicated formats don't seem to work when uploaded so I'm not sure what would happen in the other direction if you wanted to save a document created in Google Docs back to Microsoft Office.  Perhaps it would be useful as an emergency back up storage site.  Also I do worry about these things just floating about in the ether, so won't put up those top secret bank heist plans!