All about Mii

Far be it from me to pass up another opportunity to self-deprecate. So, without further ado, I present to you my Mii. This Mii looks nothing like me. I suppose my face is better suited to Simpson's caricatures.

In the meantime, I have wasted time looking at this site of famous Miis http://www.famousmii.com/mii/. As for the identity of the Mii posted above, if you guessed, Kim Jong Il, you'd be correct.

Thing 10: Chatting with Skype and Meebo

Skype and Meebo -- both are applications I have used before. Currently, I have Meebo on my computer and have used it as my primary chat application. I used it mostly for AIM, though I thought that our UCI accounts would be linked up with Meebo too.

I've also used Skype . . . for my annual baseball drafts. I've also seen cousins use Skype to talk to family back in the homeland of Vietnam. With international internet cafes, they use Skype and other software to save hundreds of dollars and to talk to family. Pretty neat.

Thing 9: Personalization with iGoogle

I'm going out of order here (again). But that's the beauty of the online world, liberating individuals from the slavery of sequential order.

On to igoogle, which isn't really for me. The personalized boxes and the Japanese tea garden are okay, but I was most excited about the ability to add a Pac Man application to my igoogle. Other widgets I added were the weather channel, the LA Times, and a UCLA Bruins reader.

I also did a search on igoogle and found the perfect gift for me. I wonder how long it took to convince this man to model this hoodie.

Thing 7: Social Bookmarking and Folksonomies

Yummmm. . . delicious: http://del.icio.us/jnovak001

So I created my own delicious account and have to say, I really like it. I think it's the application with firefox that won me over, for before, it seemed odd that you had to go to a site to access your bookmarks. Now it seems a part of your browser, even if it is online.

Learning outcomes. . . in keeping a theme, I bookmarked some videologs (vlogs) and blogs about food and cooking. I read about these last week in the LA Times, and used the Times own site to upload the article as a link (delicious icons are everywhere).

For me, the most useful part is not the tagging, but reading what others who bookmarked the same site have done. By following a serendipitous chain, I discovered those who have bookmarked LA food sites and other interesting restaurant reviews. It was interesting and I can see wasting many hours going through different links.

Folksonomies -- I suppose you can find related links and I like the generated suggested tags that delicious comes up with. However, I'm not yet convinced how useful these may be.

For libraries -- setting up bookmarks that one can import would be of great help to researchers. Also, the freedom to organize bookmarks on one's own can allow me or any librarian to mark sites that may not be suitable for our site.

Thing 6: Social Networks - Facebook & More

I truly am on a roll. I have a facebook and have added and deleted applications like JSTOR and Antpac. Outside of humanizing a librarian, I don't see much utility for librarians in this virtual forum. With fun applications to install, I can't imagine many students willing to give up that real estate for a librarian chat box, especially since we are so easy to find on our own Web site. But then again, I never thought facebook would be appealing as it is before I signed up. One never knows.

Thing 4: Tagging Using Technorati

So, I've done it. I Pinged and Technorati'd, and yet my site doesn't show up on the searches. Actually, I'm grateful for this, for I haven't said anything relevant over the past few months I've been blogging here. But I will now consider this Thing complete and move more towards the 10+ things I need to do.

Thing 5: RSS Feeds & Readers

Okay, so I'm skipping thing 4 about Pinging. Why? Well, I've waited two hours and I can't wait anymore. My blog has yet to appear in technorati and its ilk, so I went ahead and tried out bloglines.

It looks to be a good service, especially for those blogs that update infrequently (like this one). I can see a professional use for this, especially for the literature blogs I'm interested (not so much the ALA ones, which usually email the same information).