Excited about Maps

The next task we're looking at are Maps and Mashups!

I love GOOGLE MAPS and can't wait to play around with it and share some stuff on my blog..

I don't really know what 'mashups' refers to as yet but I guess I'll soon find out!

I'm also thinking about making this blog a permanent online journal of the rest of my studies here at RMIT. Something I guess to keep and use for my final portfolio which is coming up in about a year and a half. *_*

Yummy Delicious Bookmarks

Thanks Anne for saying that Delicious is boring! Why do you say that? Since this weeks' task says to investigate Delicious, we're doing it. Anne, I'd love to hear about the other social bookmarking tools that are out there. Tell me all about it!

In the meantime, I'll have a shot at answering the questions we need to cover.

Here's a video I found on Youtube:


I'm already a member of Delicious with the username jcordi. You can check me out here: http://delicious.com/jcordi
Once joining, a plug in gets added to the browser being used, in my case FireFox which provides me with 3 buttons to use for tagging and adding bookmarks. A toolbar also gets added, but can be removed if desired. I like to keep it all there.
The first thing I did while opening up my old account was add more bookmarks that I thought were relevant to this assignment. I've added Twitter, Blogger, ResearchBuzz and TechCrunch there to he list of IKM sites I've added in the past. I included a note just to remind myself of what the site is, then added tags that would help me categorise these bookmarks if ever I do a search in future. What I found very useful was that there tags which the site recommends and those which are popular. I assume they are tags which other people used for the site. Very handy, unlike here on Blogger where making labels for the post has to come from the author of the blog himself.


The good thing about Social Bookmarking such as Delicious I guess is the social aspect. Being able to see what others are bookmarking with the numbers of people who've bookmarked sites can help in finding interesting new things that are out there. But if collaborating with others or if doing research, finding sites which people have added themselves might be more useful than doing a Google search! After tagging a site, it becomes shared with all the other users of Delicious who may benefit from the bookmark that was saved. This happens, unless of course the bookmark is chosen as private so that others cannot view it.
Another thing that I find a benefit of the program is being able to access your bookmarks on other computers than your own, as bookmarks are saved online, not on the PC.

In going through the settings, I discovered that it IS possible to import/upload to and from the browser and even export bookmarks to a PC. I have to be honest that I use bookmarks alot on my laptop and have gotten so used to it that I never would consider Delicious. But for research purposes, I think it would be a great place to save sites that I find on a uni PC that I could later access at home! I imported my Firefox bookmarks to Delicious was a quick and easy process. I went to Settings and selected Import/Upload bookmarks and made the selection of custom settings. I ensured I selected for my bookmarks to be private and only viewable by me and clicked the import button. It took roughly 2 minutes and sent me an email stating its completion. Tags were automatically given to the sites, most with an 'imported' tag included. That is so handy. Now all my bookmarks can be accessed and found in one place!

Now, if I went to a library or overseas on a holiday and wanted to access a site that I forgot the address for and couldn't be bothered searching for it on Google - it's all there on my Delicious bookmarks! That would be a further use for me and I would be confident in using it as it's an easy format to understand and access. I will try this for myself in the next few days at uni to experience the possibility of making Social Bookmarking a useful tool in my day to day internet and study life.

I'd love to hear what you guys have experienced / learnt from using delicious or any other social bookmarking tool...and any other features you've discovered that are useful?

Some other benefits of Twitter..

I'm now following a variety of people - some from our class, (no friends - none of mine use Twitter), some other random interesting twitter sites, a celebrity (Ashton Kutcher), Kevin Rudd (is it really Kevin Rudd?), and many of the suggested IKM gurus. My main page is now flooded! Does that mean I am to log in as much as I can to keep updated??

In looking further into Twitter and the possiblities out there of following people related to a particular profession or area, I believe that Twitter can provide the benefit of being up to date with the very latest. I heard on the radio the other day that some news items are posted first on Twitter before they reach other sites and cable news stations. Insiders, witnesses etc. have that ability of letting the world know things before they reach the Channel 7 news update on TV.

Yes, Twitter can be used for stalking , but for businesses, many benefits can come from the use of Twitter. My local Library wasn't easy to find. They use a pseudonym! I found them through the search function as Yarra Plenty Regional Library doesn't come up in the username search. There are only 39 people following the whole organisation..Is that a worry? I'm guessing they're mostly made up of employees that were asked to join! They area also on my Facebook account and I can see how such an organisation can publicise events. Other organisations can do something similar to keep their clients informed. It's just another avenue (and cost effective way) for them to keep connected with their customers. Money can be saved by promoting online and you can reach a large amount of people.

So now that I follow YPRL, I find it to be useful as it's my local library and I may be interested at an event that they post up there. I no longer need to physically go to the library to see their posters up or the YPRL website. It's all fed through my twitter updates like all the rest. Very neat!

I'm all Twittered out now! And this is time consuming. Can I add one more benefit to Twitter? --- saves TIME! You can say what you want to say without all the blabbering on on blogging sites like this. And honestly, I think Twitter is more user friendly than this Blogger site. Following just seems so much more easier there than here.

A cool site that I found called Twitip which is a blog of a guy in Melbourne who came up with 5 benefits to Twitter in his experience. Address: http://www.twitip.com/benefits-twitter/
Heaps of comments are at the bottom where people share what they think about Twitter and how it's benefited them!

Reviewing Twitter, exciting or not?

Well Twitter is quite exciting with its 140 limit with characters. But other than that I don't see what the hype is all about. Unless you like to follow celebrities and people that are "out of reach", it appears that Twitter is not all that exciting.

I'm sure it is a challenge for people who talk a lot (like Anne) to use Twitter. What tends to happen is that these people send post after post of these 'comments' which flood the screen. Within 5 minutes, you're screen is full of ANNE comments and you have to read them all to find which is intended for you. Plus reading them all gives the reader an idea of what's on that persons mind. A little disturbing when some people devote a tutorial to more than following the Tutor Huan, but pretty much stalking.

This worries me with the issues of privacy and harassment. I'm sure there are ways to block/delete or settings to control who follows you, but I have yet to explore these at this stage. But the problem is, the default is for people to follow whoever they want, which in real life doesn't happen unless you're stalking them. Things can get out of hand and if you're a celebrity and someone doesn't like you and follows you, you wouldn't want the world to see this. Next thing you know there'll be something in the magazines or the news about someone famous getting stalked or harassed. If it happens to celebrities, I'm pretty sure it can happen to ordinary people too.

Anyway one thing's for sure...I like Facebook better! It supports the features I enjoy more such as images...photo galleries..and I find it more user friendly = exciting and fun!

Twitter is like Facebook but a simpler and more basic version. I can use it but don't know if I'll really get hooked. Hardly any of my contacts use Twitter and until they do, I doubt I'll be using it as often as Facebook..

Is Twitter the future of Social Networking? Are things going to get more basic? I'm happy to go along with it (if i must), if Facebook dies. This happened already with Myspace. I guess these sites aren't made to last forever...

Any thoughts guys?

Twittering as JasonKMTech

Already lots of fun. Was going to create it tonight but Anne's hooked and nagged me to join in class - so I did!
I can see that Twitter is kinda a mix of Facebook and Blogger. We have to "follow" each other to view our tweets.

I'll blog again tonight when this wears off a little and I have more to say...
Now it's back to work in creating websites on Expression Web. Not as easy as I thought with all the codes...but I'm starting to understand the structure and rules involved. Will be getting back to it now...

Wiki - What have I done?!

I never thought I'd bother doing this but I've joined Wikipedia! For so long I have taken Wikipedia for granted as containing 100% truth, but in my search for a poorly written Wikipedia article, I've come across various issues which surround Wikipedia.

Where not to find a poorly written Wikipedia article..
Well I noticed a handy link on the left side of the screen which is 'Random article'. You can come across some pretty bazarre articles through that link! I continued to click it until I found something - then I noticed I was getting side tracked to what I was supposed to do!

Debates regarding the inaccuracies in Wikipedia
There's a link also on the left side of the screen called 'Recent changes', which shows a long list of articles which have recently been updated, or where discussions have recently occurred. I then discovered that behind the face of articles on Wikipedia are heated debates on various things such as missing citations, citations which aren't reliable and relevant information. I click on one of them: 'Catholic_Church', where I found numerous discussions on dividing views on what should be included, such as one person who stated that there was too much of recent history in the history section and that there should be a balance with pre-19th century events and more recent history. I've seen how some people have edited some text but found them to be later changed - some improved further, whereas some were not happy with the changes.

Where to find poorly written Wikipedia articles?
Well where's the poorly written wiki then? I found a link somewhere on the 'Recent changes' page titled 'Wikipedia:Challenges'. It's the perfect place to find articles which need updating!

The first on the list in need of changes was Pleasure. It was said that the Wikipedia article on Pain is much more privileged as it has more information. I won't attempt updating it as they're requesting an expert on the topic to fix it up and maybe start it from scratch. Therefore, I opened the 'Edit the Web 2.0 Adventure' task on the Learning Hub to make a few changes on one of the pages there.

Giving editing a go
Editing is EASY! It's just like me editing this blog in future (like I have edited my previous blogs). I could see there were other contributors from the class and so I went into the Unit 4 of the blog to edit a few sentences. Some of the changes I made were:

Previous:
Social bookmarking can help solve some of these problems.
Current:
Social bookmarking can help you solve some of these problems.

Previous:
They are a good way to keep track of websites you like so that you can return to them later.
Current:
They are a good way to keep track of websites which you would like to return to at a later date.

Previous:
Social bookmarking can help solve some of these problems. As well as storing your bookmarks on a website, it allows you use 'tags' or keywords as a way of describing what a site is about, or its relevance to you.
Current:
Social bookmarking can help solve some of these problems. As well as storing your bookmarks on a website, it allows you to use 'tags' or keywords as a way of describing what a site is about, or its relevance to you.

Enough proof-reading and fixing up of other people's work....it's reminding me too much of my dark past (Education degree)!! Bring on twittering!

Nancy, Anne, Sal - have you guys got Twitter accounts yet? Let me know once you do so we can all be connected and read each others miniblogs.

IKM Tech RSS Feed

In choosing a blog to follow, it has to be something entertaining. I'm not going to sit and reading something that looks or reads like an essay when I could be reading something informative and entertaining at the same time. That's the good thing about most popular blogs I think and which is why I've chosen one which interests me:
Research Buzz ; http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/

Visually, it doesn't look very exciting but it covers news about search engines, databases and other information collections. When Google for example has a new feature, this blog is sure to talk about it. One thing I dislike about the site is that it doesn't allow readers to comment. I think that eliminates one interactive aspect of blogging. The site provides many ways of finding something you might like to read, either through a search box, listed categories or tags which are a feature on most blogs I can imagine. It also helps viewers with options of staying connected. There's the option button "RSS Feeds" at the top right side which is in the image on the right. It allowed me to subscribe straight onto my Google reader which I found to be helpful. They also allow for email subscriptions which I think are for those who don't use RSS feeds and prefer receiving the occassional junk mail!

What I found interesting is that in 2 days, there were 3 blogs related to new search offerings on Flickr, Delicious and Google. It amazes me how often search engines update their features. Most of the time it happens without me noticing!

Aside from adding this to my Google Reader, I've added Sal's blog feed. Unfortunately I can't add Nancy and Anne's because their blogs aren't registering as feeds, just websites. There has to be something we're missing - I've tried using Feedburner to resolve the issue but it won't create a feed for it because Blogger isn't saying that it's a feed. Looking through all the settings in Blogger, the help files in Blogger they all say to have Feed Settings on Full. I've tried making my blog public to see if it does anything, but no. I think that if the technology works how it's supposed to, it can be a very useful tool especially when working as a virtual team or groups work work from home and share their work, documents, ideas etc. through blogs. I can see how it would work and in upcoming weeks when everyone gets to the tasks I think it can be a benefitial experience.

RSS Feeding & Google Reader

I've had quite an exciting experience with Google Reader. It's a completely new concept to me this idea of receiving updates from all the sites that I've subscribed to, and it's one that I find quite enjoyable already.
Firstly logging on to Google Reader without subscribing to the site was very easy since I already had a 'Google' account. It turns out the Gmail email address I created a while ago is becoming more useful after all.. Then, I went searching through categories to explore what was available. I added one category on Christianity which I thought would be nice as it had a few feeds of daily Bible verses - some words for the soul each day! I found it to be quick and easy to find what I wanted. I then added other subscriptions including news sites such as news.com.au, and other international news sites which means I can read all the latest news from both Australia and elsewhere in one place!
I think that's what makes RSS feeds useful - being able to access everything you're interested in on a single website.

RSS Feeds in a way reminds me of the topic of 'linking' from last week. I see the feeds as a link which constantly updates in a reader and whatever gets published on the blog or news site for eg. then gets updated on my reader. A link indeed ey?

All that being good, I still can't get over the fact that I haven't worked out why my KMTech Blog as well as Nancy's and Anne's won't show up as feeds for me to subscribe to...will I ever get over it!?

Still getting used to this...

Everyone's having problems! I can't get this Google Reader feed working either. Why is it that Sal's the only one that I receive update for? What does Sal have that Nancy and Anne don't have?

I only have one follower! Isn't that sad? I wish I had more so that I could feel like I was blogging something that people can read...

Nancy - I can't comment on your blog! It says that it's restricted to members of your blog. Fix up your settings!

I will give this a rest since I think Sal and Nancy need to catch up.. But by next class I'll have Unit 2's tasks done...wish me luck!

In class...

Well this week we're learning about Object Linking and Embedding. I've tried these out before but never knew how these actually work.

Still waiting on Sal and Nancy for their first blogs!! They're both not here today so I'll guess I'll check in the next few days.

Losing track

In my quest to find an interesting blog out of the list given, I came across one which got my side tracked into reading and reading the many postings in "TechCrunch"
[Address: http://www.techcrunch.com/]
My first impression was "This isn't a blog, it's some sort of news service on technology"...This is because of the countless posts from today and yesterday alone. (The first thing I look at is the date to see how current it is...if it isn't regularly updated - I get bored already and don't read it).

TechCrunch calls itself a 'weblog' with a number of authors or contributors. Reading the posts distinguishes them from regular news articles as they generally have a personal almost journal-like feel with more opinions and thoughts. It also allows readers to ask questions and give feedback on posts, which often open into debates such as the latest post about the rivalry between Google and Microsoft. TechCrunch covers a wide range of topics in online technology from the latest hit iPhone apps, to legal issues with Facebook, to new features with Google Image Search. Many blogs include Youtube video attachments and images/logos/screenshots which make the site more interactive. Another helpful feature for people like me is that after each blog, an area provided by the site gives background information about the companies which are discussed in the blog with a link to that site. This means that if there's an article about the war between Google and Microsoft, it will include links to those two sites and a brief description on each site.

A very interesting site if you're into the latest in web technology :)

Back to Blogging

It has been quite a while since I posted a blog. It was sometime in June last year when I was overseas and I created a travel blog - which I didn't end up maintaining very much!
But hey, I am in a way excited to be doing this again. Especially for Web 2.0 which I find to be an exciting bunch of tools available on the internet. I've used a few of them before and have definitely come across the others. The good thing about these weekly activities is that they allow me to explore and learn about these interactive online tools. It's really different when you don't have a purpose or a guide to follow or buddies to help!
One thing is for sure, this will require determination. I honestly attempted to complete 9 or something weeks of "Learning 2.0", which didn't last long for me. I think I only reached week 4. It was hard because there wasn't much of a guide and support there, like what we have in this assignment and it was all new technology to us. This was in 2006 when I was still working in libraries. 80% of the staff participated but most didn't finish it. Back then I had no idea of what Wiki or tagging meant!
Here's a link to show how they run it: http://www.yprl.vic.gov.au/Learning_2.0/index.htm

I remember from IKM Environments 1 last Semester that statistics show that blogs in general don't last. When I heard that, I was glad in a sense as my blogs have never lasted. I've now made 4 accounts in the last 4 years! I'm sure others are worse than me..

Sal, Nancy, Anne - Here's to 5 or so weeks of blogging fun!
Don't forget to comment guys!