Who are you calling "Common"?

As well as Flickr, another great use of Creative Commons can be found in the publication output of (for example)the think-tank Demos. Makes life much easier for students, and disseminates the original work without the usual financial barriers.


I guess I'm ambivalent about Youtube - the content is amazing, but every time I have a look, I suddenly realise that several hours have passed.


This is one of my favourite clips. Don't try this at work, much as you know you want to...

Featuring not flash photography

I've been aware of Flickr, and have occasionally grabbed images, but have never especially felt the need to post my photos. I still have that old-fashioned feeling that I'd rather store my photos on CD, my laptop or (gasp) paper rather than leave them at the mercy of the cloud. I *have* got rid of vinyl now, though.

  by  Better Than Bacon 

Wall / head interface scenario

Endnote Web is a familiar and not-at-all-loved thing for me already. It's flakey (and not in a nice Cadburyish way) and has caused me much angst in training sessions when it suddenly decides not to work at all unless I sacrifice a goat in the room before-hand. It may, however, have proved useful for any theatre students thinking of a career in acting - it's not every day that they get to study closely somebody turning purple, with foam coming out of his mouth.

So, to Zotero. I've heard students mention the name, but nobody has been so enthusiastic as to make me particularly want to try it, so 23Things is (cliche alert) again proving to be the tipping point. Installation was easy enough, and I like the simple way of grabbing references out of our catalogue. JSTOR is mentioned in one of the help documents as a database which talks to Zotero, and so it does. Total failure, though with Business Source Premier and Project Muse. Attempts a couple of hours apart gave me the same error message, which linked me to a page of known problems. Un-nervingly, the list includes Springerlink & Science Direct, so already I've lost 4 of my major databases. Further problem attempting to install the word processor plug-in - Firefox tells me that the plug-in is there, but no toolbar is appearing in Word. Perhaps I'm not technically savvy enough to make this work, but then nor are lots of our students.

Endnote has presented me with plenty of equally annoying challenges, and perhaps these are temporary problems, but as with the Diigo / Delicious choice, I needed a more positive experience to make me dump Endnote and migrate. Why swap one box of problems for another? Of course, the elephant in the room is Refworks, an option which is apparently not open to us.

  by  David Blackwell. 

Fresh out of Diigo puns

There is now a worldwide shortage of unused Diigo puns, so I won't even try...

I've used Delicious / del.icio.us / deli.ciou.s or whatever silly configuration they're using at the moment, and have been perfectly happy. Assuming that Yahoo don't sell the product on to a mega-corporation who will only grant access via a package which forces me to watch Jeremy Clarkson and listen to TalkSport with Kelvin Mackenzie, Andy Gray, Richard Keys and other heroes of the enlightenment, Diigo was going to have to offer something special to tempt me away. And to be honest, refusing to respond to my request for an account purely because I have a Warwick email address immediately put me off.

I persevered and used my personal RichardBransonislovelyreally.net account, and since I'm a techno-idiot went to the help video on the Diigo welcome page. Wow - how much information can they throw at you in a shortish clip? A lesson for us there as we go video-crazy. I quickly lost the will to live, so just dabbled.

Verdict? Virtual post-it notes don't really do it for me, so I can't see that I'll be moving away from Delirious unless forced to.

  by  staminaplus100 

Reflection time

Reflection time.

I've been lucky so far in that I've been already reasonably well-versed in Things 1-12. Challenges to come, I think, in future weeks.

As you'll be able to tell from the brevity of this post, my main problem is that I don't have nearly as much time to devote to following up as I'd like. I'm sure I'm not using RSS or Twitter as smartly as I could, and hoped to use 23 Things to push me to explore more. but no time. And I still haven't got over the nagging suspicion that Twitter, Facebook, RSS et al are creating an extra flow of stuff coming at me. Much of it is interesting, but where does the extra time come from? Maybe ignorance is still bliss.

Pearls of wisdom?

I've been on Twitter for a while, and follow an odd mixture of library people, arts organisations and comedians. The Twitter god must be very confused trying to profile me...I see the value of having a network of people who may spot and alert me to interesting stuff, but I do question the Twitter diarrhoea of some people who can't wait to update the world about their every move. Thankfully not bowel movements. Unless I'm following the wrong people. Why do they think anybody is interested?

I set up a Facebook account a few years ago to lurk and see if students were dissing the Library, so we could respond. I found the delightful groups "I hate the Library and its various staff members" and "The Fat Woman in the Coffee Bar Puts Me Off My Food". I'm not sure my desire to use Facebook actively ever really recovered from this appalling stuff. As an old codger I find Facebook protocol rather mystifying: some students will ask to be my Facebook friend minutes after I've run a training session for a group.

As others have said, these are just channels of communication, so I'm happy with the idea of throwing stuff out there to see what sticks.

Fox on the run

At the risk of turning into Mr Me Too, I've also been the recipient of a Doodle poll, so the pressure of the 23 Things project has pushed me into doing what I should have done before - use Doodle. So I mailed another participant to set up an entirely fictitious meeting. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Slight irritation that in order to use Doodle I'm pulled yet further into the embrace of Google. A bit like having to have a Yahoo account to use Delicious...

I've also previously been called into meetings by others using Outlook to schedule time based on individual calendars, although this of course does rather rely on people keeping theirs up to date. Cough.

So to Firefox. I've been asking myself why I've stayed loyal to IE. Inertia? Annoyance that Answer no.2 from IT people (after No.1 Have you tried switching it off and on again?) has become "Have you tried it with Firefox?" Minor irritations with Firefox like needing an extra click to change a small part of the page URL? 

Just recently a couple of things in IE are starting to irritate me: locally, I can't seem to set my preferred homepage (the option is greyed out) so I'm stuck with the University homepage (is this Big Brother?). Firefox is allowing me to use whatever I want. Then yesterday IE decided (apparently unilaterally) to change font and font size on some websites, especially Google. Not that I use that much  :) Is this nature's way of telling me to migrate? Since I have tried switching it off and on again, I clearly need to move to Step 2, so I'm giving Firefox a go. I just migrated my favourites to the Fox (incidentally this made me notice how many of them are very far from favourites, so a weeding exercise is well overdue here).



Is that Michael McIntyre on guitar???