Week 8: Googlemaniac

Part I:
Today I learned that you can make Powerpoint presentations with Googledocs. I suppose they're no longer Powerpoint though, and those word processing documents are no longer Word documents. Soon everything we make on a PC will be able to have a Google prefix. We will GoogleBuzz on Googlespace and Googlemark it to our GoogleCals.

Behold my Googlepoint presentation:



Part II:
I browsed through the award-winning Web Applications and found Colorblender, an online colour mixer which I liked, because the blog interface only offers so many colours and I like to have more choice. For example, there was no HOT PINK! A great improvement for link colours, wouldn't you agree? And I can see how this its great for people who like to know what the HTML codes for all the variations of colours are.

Week 7: Wikiwiki

Before this exercise, my familiarity with wikis was solely through my use of Wikipedia. Being a skeptic, I don't take everything to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, however, it is very useful for finding out general information and it is on and will remain on my Del.icio.us site forever.
Today was the first time I have contributed to a wiki, the Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki . I must say it was a dreadfully straightfoward task. Yet I did find that the whole layout of the wiki rather like a messy desk used by many and tidied by few, and I imagine that the more people who contribute to a wiki, the more chaotic it must become. Perhaps wikis are better suited to very specific topics, to keep things easy to navigate minimize sprawl...

Week 6: Claims to infame

Unfortunately, the technorati site is not very appealing - jam-packed with Before and After ads claiming to improve your physical defects! I just claimed my blog and got the hell out of there. Many thanks to XXXholic, with their blogpost on how to actually do this.

I didn't have any luck finding "Learning 2.0" on any of the blogs or directory. But looking at XXXholic, perhaps it wasn't just me... However, all is not gone to waste, my account of much tastier bookmarks can be reached here.

I wonder whether if once my 'claim' has been approved, one could search for my blog on technorati and see my criticism of it, drowning in a swamp of Before and After ads. I'm not sure if I could bear to find out.

Week 6: Delicious chaotic order

I set up a delicious account and imported all remotely interesting saved bookmarks from my Internet Explorer. Tagging them is a bit strange because what's obviously relevant to one person is completely different to another. Take the TED talks website for example, which has been saved over 43,800 times (unsurprisingly because its fantastic). Some people get all pragmatic about the formal aspects, tagging things like "conference" and "speeches", some call it "education", whereas other users tag it simply "psychology". I guess it is the mere quantity of users that create any kind of order in this ever-expansive mass of tags...

I think delicious would be beneficial to categorising sites relating to more specific topics, like shopping for a specific product, or looking for a particular field of psychology, because the tags would be like a more complex way of organising than putting them in folders in your Browser's "Favourites" bar. They can be in multiple folders, so to speak.

Week 4: Tweet treats

I signed up to Twitter and am currently following 4 tweeters. Initial response: It seems to be like the facebook feed except with famous-famous people, rather than people-who-should-be-famous-who-are-your-friends.

At this point I can't imagine why anyone would follow an average non-famous tweeter. But again, like facebook feed, its a good way to advertise events and find out about events hosted by institutions or musicians etc.

Week 5: Library Thing Stuff

I set up an account and explored the Library Thing site. It was very easy to use. Books you load are matched with books in other members' libraries which could be good for social networking and getting recommendations.

The 'Gallery' function was nice, featuring the author portraits of books in your library. Author portraits happen to be a favourite of mine. Here's a good one: Banana Yoshimoto (pictured)

Unfortunately, I could not get the search widget to appear on my blog.

Week 4: Feeding time

Well that was super. I had had this RSS thing explained to me a couple times by various people, and I had nodded "I see, I see..." yet had NOT seen. I didn't get it. Now I have seen.

I can immediately see the value in subscribing to blogs. I have often found an interesting blog and saved it to my 'Favourites' folder on my browser only to find myself on a different computer and having no way of finding my way back to the blog. Never again.

I subscribed to a bunch of art and fashion blogs because I like to see the pictures. I rarely read blogs, but enjoy skimming through them. Also subscribed to this Good News site because I hate bad news, some friends' blogs and library news feeds but I guess there's little need to spell it out when it is so conveniently illustrated on my list of shared items.