Week 5, Thing 12

I'm definitely going to be using Rollyo with my students - making a search roll for specific topics and then having them search through them on their own is a cool idea. I had to run through this one fairly quickly, so the search roll I created isn't very interesting or detailed, but I plan to revisit this as soon as I have a free minute.
http://rollyo.com/notharrysmom/book_summary_info1/

Week 5, Thing 11 Update

Still on a musical bent, so I went and tried Pandora. Excellent! All I have to do is type in my favorite band (or at least the favorite of the minute), and it will create a radio station for me based on similar bands. They need to make something this easy to use for books.

Week 5, Thing 11

Lately I've been dissatisfied with my exposure to new music. Even with a satellite radio, I never seem to find a lot of stuff that I really like. I've been reduced to emailing a friend who lives in range of a good radio station and asking him for suggestions. Rather than pester him constantly in a fit of college-radio nostalgia, I decided to hit the Web 2.0 winners in the music category. I'm thinking that Last.fm might be what I need! I can look up and add bands that I'm interested in, add them to my playlist, and have songs automatically downloaded (they call it scrobbling - I'm not even going to venture a guess at why). They offer up a sort of "if you like these guys, try this band" feature - like novelist, but for music. Once I create my library of artists, I can play it - a radio station of stuff that I love, without all of the filler I can't stand! Then I can share the station with others. Wooo hooo!

**And before anyone feels the need to point out the obvious (oh, right, someone would have to be reading this for that to happen...), I know this doesn't have anything to do with my professional life. I may not be using this for work (I haven't tried using this from work, but I'm willing to place a bet for a year's salary that it's blocked there anyway), but if it makes me happier in my non-professional life, that's got to be a good thing, right? The whole "if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy" thing. Good music=happy librarian=happy students. Viola!

Week 4, Things 8 & 9

A little frustration this week trying to set up a bloglines account. I never received a confirmation email (despite repeatedly checking my email account and returning to bloglines to request that a new confirmation be sent), so I couldn't get the account up and running. I moved over to google reader, which is easy enough to set up (and which I'm sure means that the next time I check, the confirmation from bloglines will be sitting in my inbox). I now have feeds coming in from YALSA, AASL, and SLJ as well as some news and weather sites. I think the SLJ book news feed could be helpful - I might be able to stay more on top of all of the new books coming out if I don't have to wait to find the time to read through all of the issues of the magazine that pile up around my desk. However, part of me thinks that I just won't find the time to read the feed either. It will wind up sitting around waiting for me to find a spare moment just like the print version does.