Most useful....hmm. It's probably last.fm.com If I had a way to hear that throughout the house (instead of just at the computer) I'd probably buy a subscription so it could play all the time.

The site Makeuseof has a good guide for navigating Photoshop. It's call the complete idiots guide to Photoshop. I think even those who have some experience with photo editing programs would find it helpful. Getting the most out of this complex photo program as painlessly as possible - ah, what a relief.

Lifehacker has clever little bits of information (snack size) that just might fill the need to learn something new and useful. There's a post on getting the best out of gift cards. Some of the comments were helpful additions to the original post and some were useless - par for the course.

As for blogs I read, I don't subscribe to any. Between the listservers and the other e-mail subscriptions I have that's about all I can work with at the moment.

Some days the cats take over.

Yes, I did this with Picnik. They have some very clever tools (the messages that appear as a file is loading are funny!) and it is easy to use.

I can see that this would be really handy for touching up snapshots.

Another site with lots of information (Mesa County). I did go on the Assessor's page and found our house. The information listed was interesting even though I didn't know what all of it meant. That page would certainly be easier to use than the alternative, which is probably going to the Assessor's office and trying to explain what you're looking for.

The home page had a link to a page about the H1N1 flu - everything from statistics to freqently asked questions to if, when and where you can get the vaccination. And it seems to be updated frequently.

As for the Colorado page...that's one busy page. It even has this winning Lotto numbers. The site has some good information for small business that might be hard to locate any other way. It is however, a site that's almost overwhelming.

100%!

There is a boat load of information on our wiki. Thank goodness for the search function and I'm so glad that we're not trying to keep all that information up to date in paper format. What a mess that would be.

I've seen tinyURLs in postings on various listservers, I never knew it was so easy to do.

Here's the one I made: http://tinyurl.com/yje8shl

It started out like this: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food-network-videos-from-alton-brown/videos/index.html

The link goes to the page on Food Network's website that has some of the coolest Alton Brown stuff. There are several short videos about cooking. One of them I saw was on how to cook hard boiled eggs with less energy! How's that for going green?

With Zamzar I change a file from jpg to btm. Kinda clever! I can see how this would be really helpful for the bewildered library patron who can't figure out why they can't see the attachment that some one sent them.

What a nice grouping of fun stuff!

Although I belong to several library listservers, this list provides a different way to find out what's going on.

The blog by Helene Blowers, LibraryBytes, has some thoughtful writing about a variety of topics. I particularly like the picture she included of the 101 year old woman with a iPhone. The comments posted by readers of the blog also add to the quality of the blog.

The ResourceShelf had quite a few articles about people reading text from things like iPhones and Kindles. I find this quite interesting as it might have an impact on our holdings. Not this year, maybe not even next year, of course. However, it might be sooner than we think.

Good site. I bookmarked it.

Open Source

Open Office sounds like a fantastic idea. Why spend so much of our cash to support Microsoft is Open Source does the same thing and is less of an aggravation. If I had never worked with any Open Source products I'd be on board with this and how. Their Open Source Definition is fantastic.

However, my experience with Open Source was moderately ugly. A library I know purchased a thin client computer system that used Open Source software. It was a disaster with everything from grade school kids in tears because their report/project wouldn't print out as it was supposed to up to and including very angry older patrons who reported spending huge amounts of time on a resume, document, etc. only to have it reformat itself into something utterly useless.

From what I can tell, Open Source sure looks like Word, Excel, etc., however, it is not. As long as what you're doing is fairly uncomplicated, it works well enough and it certainly is a whole lot cheaper than Microsoft products.

I can't recommend it.

That's clever....kind of. I posted some two images to my FB page and thought it would actually put the image on my wall. It put a link that takes them to the clipped image. Hmm. Not quite what I had in mind.

I can see how this would be helpful as sometimes cutting and pasting just doesn't work.

Whata disappointment.

After several attempts I'm still getting the message: Error OXCOD278: A problem has occurred in retrieving the Digital Rights Management identification. Contact Microsoft product support.

SNORT! Microsoft.

Putting that aside, there is a substantial collection of audio and video available. Some of the videos are even in Spanish.

Who puts all of these sounds on soundsnap? What variety! What descriptions! And what's with that guy who has all of those sounds for a DC-3 and none of them are engine sounds?

I went to last.fm.com and found some free downloads. Again, the tags for some of the songs are hilarious: crazy, not reggae, viking rock.

Some of the stuff I found that I like was from a band in Iceland called Bang Gang. Despite their name, it's kind of new age (perhaps similar to Dancing Fantasy). Certainly not some thing I would have come across on the local radio stations.

Okey dokey, I finished the website. Wow, too easy.

http://backcountryairguides.weebly.com

I search for that series by Dean Koontz. The first one was called Fear Nothing. Well, I thought it was a series. Not according to Novelist. Harrumph.

So I looked up Star Trek. Wow. It's even in Manga.

For a read-alike I looked up Tony Hillerman. I was expecting a list of authors to try and found a nice essay instead. That might really appeal to some readers.

In the Recommended Reads I chose science fiction. They have a terrible choice for a graphic on this section. They need to update that to something more reasonable. Ick. The categories that they had were interesting and did a good job of covering the possibilities. Now if it would just list the items in print and on CD.....

The Book Reporter has to be one of the best sites for tying current releases with reviews all up in one place. What a great help it must be for readers advisory! There's even a section on books that have been made into movies. Current movies, too!

I looked up Dean Koontz in the biography database. There were nine articles listed and found one that was updated just this month. The top of the article listed all of his pen names. I didn't know he wrote under Deanna Dwyer. They also had a picture of him - not one of his best.

Although I've not read any of this books in several years, he is still writing quite a bit. It doesn't look as if he's written more with the character of Chris Snow. The dialogue and interactions with the dog, Orson, were so well done in those books.

I search Consumer Reports for a review of paint brushes. They had one that was done in 1993 for a new disposable type of brush called "Newstroke". The review said they weren't all that great, so it comes as no surprise that I've never seen them in a hardware store. Must have been a flop.

The other part of this task asked me to search the Biography Resource Center. I found five articles about Chuck Yeager. The most recent was dated 2000 and the oldest was 1990. The browsing categories and the ability to search by occupation or place of death could be really handy for school kids.

Now we're getting out of order. I've been off on a few days of vacation and it's time to get caught up. I liked the Weebly site. How easy is it to make a web page with that? Of course, it's not a really fancy one, however, if your objective is to have a page to provide information about a service or product...it's great!

I have the beginnings of a modest webpage for Gary's business - Backcountry Airguides.

As soon as I get the password to make a contribution to the page I'll do that and finish up this task.

I used Google as the interface when I searched Creative Commons. The first thing I looked for was Native American music. I found several selections. The next thing I looked for were images. Quite a few turned up. There were some on flickr and some on more commercial type sites. I even found an old black and white film clip.

Pretty clever stuff.

I had heard that Nine Inch Nails was so fed up with the record company mentality that they decided to release their new album on the web. Considering some of the other problems the big record companies are having, if NIN has even a moderate success (with this method of getting their music out) it will be another kick in the pants for Sony and the like.

I've had an account with GoodReads for a couple of years now. It's been interesting to see what friends are reading and what they thought of some titles. It's also been helpful to find something to read that I might not have come across without seeing a review from a friend who read it first.

LitLovers seems to be the most elabourate of the sites listed. They have some enticing and clever pages.

Boulder PL's page on GoodReads is interesting. Depending upon how long it's been up and running, it could be something their readers would appreciate. I'm wondering how much staff time it takes to keep it freshened up. Would it replace the blog? Probably not. Would it work in conjunction with the blog? Yes.

It's hard to say how many of the staff would be regular contributors to a GoodReads page. Maybe if it included movie reviews......

One of the blogs I read, TechCrunch, had an extensive listing of sources for music on the web as part of their post on Sunday (the 23rd of August). If you liked last.fm you might like some of these, too:

Pandora is a service that can be used only in a specific locale, this one being within the U.S. Luckily, I had the chance to test the service when it was first released and became available to everyone. Launched way back in July 2005, the project had been in the initial testing phases for five years prior to launch date. Pandora recommends music to you by matching similar musical attributes. All you really need to do is choose an artist or a band you like, and Pandora will do the rest. Pandora delivers high quality 128Kbps audio streams, offering recommendations similar to the artists you have chosen. Pandora’s player looks like a radio, you can open up to 100 stations and navigate through them quickly. Registering for Pandora will provide you with a free account (advertising-supported). Free Pandora accounts will play up to 40 hours of music for free per month, you also have the option to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening hours for the rest of that month, or pay $36 to upgrade Pandora for one year. If you want to download music from Pandora, you can do it through iTunes or Amazon.

With almost 3 million unique visitors a day, Last.fm is one of the most powerful social music communities on the Web today. Like Pandora, the service allows you to enjoy music that you like, but unlike Pandora, Last.fm analyses what you and your friends listen to and like, and then suggests more music based on that analysis. When you recommend music to a friend or you tag it, or you write about it, or simply just listen to it - you shift the song’s importance on the site, and will in turn get recommended to more people. Based on the music [UTF-8?]you’ve already listened to, Last.fm will recommend new music you might like, as well as suggest other users with a similar music taste to yours, which you might be interested in friending, and you can also easily communicate with them. If you live outside the U.S., U.K. or Germany, you can listen with a free 30-track trial or subscribe for a low price of $3/month for unlimited radio streaming.

This is how BlogMusik, looked in 2006, and this is how Deezer (formerly BlogMusik) looks today - pretty impressive change, don’t you think? The French-based service is one of the largest and happens to also be a very successful music recommendation search engine. Once registered here, you can create your personal profile and reach the Deezer community. You can create playlists, send messages to your contacts, leave comments, add artists and albums to your favorites, and more. But here’s what I like the most - The SmartRadio, which is an intelligent radio that automatically generates 3 hours(!) of continuous listening based on one artist - completely free. Priceless!

I think the first Adobe AIR application that I ever tried was Finetune. Finetune provides you with the most interesting new playlists of related music from your choice of artists. Besides the site’s community where you can browse, listen to music, create a profile, connect with other users and more, Finefune also has some cool feautures to complete their suite, and each tool gives you an extraordinary music experience. Take for example the Finetune Wii project (which can be played also over the web), it’s a great sight and sound for the eyes and ears. Just enter an artist’s name and Finetune will create a playlist with similar music that will play for hours. Best of all it’s free, and you also get an iPhone, Facebook and a Desktop app that all sync with your music playlist, no matter where you play it from.

Also worth mentioning in this same topic group are, of course: Ilike.com (acquired by Myspace), and music.strands.tv

Independent Music:

Amie Street is a home for musicians. The service allows music fans to discover new and independent music. Visitors at the site can search for new music based on genre, region, or recommendations. Fans can also search for music according to its price - Amie Street is actually the only marketplace where listeners determine the price of the music. How does it work? Every song is originally priced free or very inexpensive and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more users purchase it. Musicians then get 70% of the revenue from each sale. Additionally, Amie Street matches you with music that you might like, for example: I couldn’t locate Coldplay on the site, but I got more than 70 results that sound similar to the band. Obviously, this exposes me to music that I’ve never heard before, which is always a welcomed experience.

Why is Jamendo one of my favorite music services? It offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses - worldwide. And, not only are all of the albums free to download, there’s also a large chance you won’t know any of the artists. If you already have an open mind about music, surely it won’t stop you from listening to some new albums, right? The best way to find music at this site is to search by the genre tags. Found something that you like? You can review, comment, rate, share and as I’ve said download it for free. The service is available in seven languages, and has an iPhone app that you can download for free.

SoundCloud is by far the best looking music application there is today. It offers a great interface, a great user-experience and above these all, great music! SoundCloud lets music professionals receive, send and distribute their music. The service allows professionals (and non-professionals) to exchange, and follow music and musicians at the site. It’s a full community where people can easily communicate with each other based on shared tastes, but it is also a place where musicians can store and showcase their music using high quality standards. With the free account, you can only upload 5 tracks maximum per month, but if you are an industry fanatic and you find this plan to be somewhat lacking, you can check the pro page for packages that are more suitable to your needs.

TheSixtyOne allows artists to upload their songs and lets thousands of listeners decide whether they like it or not. The most popular songs hit the front page. Think about it as a Digg for music, the more people heart a song, the higher it goes. The site connects musicians and fans, giving them all the tools to communicate with each other. For artists, it’s good place to promote their work. For anyone else, it’s a wonderful place to discover and support new music.

Create & Listen to Playlist:

I’ve never been very much of a Project Playlist fan, but I have to say it’s a good service. Ultimately, it’s a community based on playlists. You don’t have to register to be able to listen to the music, but once you do, you can start building your playlist and enjoy more features such as the Playlist IM, which is a chat system similar to Facebook where you can connect your ‘playlist’ friends or even friends from AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, etc. What else? You can write blog entries, upload photos, privately connect with other members, browse thousands of other music playlists, comment, share, and much more. My guess is that people use this site mostly to share their playlist on their blog/site or social network. Playlist allows you to grab a playlist code and embed it anywhere you want. One thing that bugs me though is that the member’s search feature is missing. Today, when everything is so connected to your identity, this is a must have feature.

Jiwa.fm allows you to create personalize playlist and share it in the Jiwa.fm community or with friends & family. As a member, you are able to share, exchange, and explore music. You can also expand your tastes with the SmartRadio tool. I found this service to be unique in a way because no matter what you are doing at the site, it won’t prevent you from listening to your playlist, it just plays in the background. Amazingly, when you click on an artist from within a mixed artists playlist, it will automatically create an album playlist of that artist. You might find the site to be a bit cluttered at first time, but once you get it, it works like a charm - highly recommended.

At Jogli, you don’t really need to create a playlist - they create it for you. Think about it as a giant web-based CD store where you can search for an artist, see all of his/her albums, and then listen to them exactly as listed in original CD Let’s take Michael Jackson for example: Here you can find all his discography, and listen to his CDs one by one. Clicking on the button ‘Play Radio’ will open a radio station generated from music you might like from similar artists. As a registered member, you are able to save playlists, write reviews, and more. You can also import your playlists to Last.fm or iTunes to make it a video playlist.

MixTube would have been better and easier if they allowed you to search for Youtube videos on their site to create a playlist. But no, you have to supply them with a Youtube URL, which means, you’ll have to go directly to Youtube, search for a song, then copy-paste that song URL back into MixTube. Thus, I found it to be frustrating. But looking at the bright side, you can always search for someone else’s playlist, and save yourself time and agony. One word about the Youtube music integration - lots of services use it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you much control of your playlist, and what plays today, may not play tomorrow..

Lala is another great music store/playlist maker that we’ve covered extensively since the site relaunched last year. It allows users to listen to any song they want one time. If you want to listen to a song more than that, you buy a 10 cent ‘web song’ that lets you stream the song from the cloud as many times as you want (you can also purchase a full download of the song as you would from iTunes or Amazon). The site has a great integrated music player and a variety of pre-made playlists built by other users.

Worth mentioning: Imeem, and Maestro.fm

Music Visualization:

There’s no doubt in my mind that Musicovery has a strong following of avid users. The site is an interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in a few clicks a musical program adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences. Their unique mood matrix proposes a relationship between music and mood in an ergonomic and attractive manner. I’ve submitted this item about the service to Digg in 2006 and it’s good to see the site still works . But things have changed. You have limited navigation if you’re not a pro user ($15/3 months or $48/12 months), but once you are - the sky is the limit. In any case, this service will blow you away.

CitySounds.fm is perhaps just a mashup site, but it’s a good one! CitySounds.fm collects music from SoundCloud and pictures from Flickr to create a wonderful music experience from a single page. You can listen to the latest music from cities all around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list is constantly changing as new music is being created.

Web-Radio:

Very similar to Last.fm in concept, Jango allows you to create your own custom radio stations and share them with friends. Just type in what you want to hear - and your station will immediately play the music you want along with similar favorites of other Jango users who share your tastes. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs. Each artist get a page, containing the web-radio, the music playlist, biographies, events list, comments from members at the site, and fan list for easy communication. The service claims to be legal and says it pays royalties due to all labels/artists every time a song is played. Moreover, Jango runs a program called Jango Airplay. This program gives emerging artists an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to the millions of visitors at the site.

RadioBeta is an efficient way to locate radio stations in your area or around the globe. You can search stations by geography, genre, band, language or tags. You can listen without signing up, or you can log in and create your personal dashboard with favorite stations that you can then listen to on a daily basis. We mostly hear radio on the go, but now you can easily track your favorite radio stations on the web. All the radio stations are public so you aren’t asked to pay anything to use the site.

OK, TheRadio is also one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Entering an artist or a genre gets you custom channel, but if you go over the channel listing, you will find much more interesting suggestions. I don’t know about you but I actually like when someone else picks the music as long is it in the range of my request. Anyway, TheRadio does a great job on finding music that I like - it simply works.

Aupeo fits in the Recommendation list as well as this category. The service lets you experience music in a fours different ways: by Stations, Artist, Mood, and Personal. The Stations area is pretty limited if you don’t have a pro account, but you can still get the feel of it. In the Artist zone, you enter your favorite name and choose from a variety stations suggested. The coolest way is the Mode area, which plays music based on your chosen mode. These stations are created by music experts, says Aupeo. The Personal station streams music based on your music behavior at the site. Overall, very intensive and powerful!

Worth mentioning: Tun3r, Mugasha, and Play.fm

The New Staff Orientation is interesting. They put a good bit of time and thought into developing those pages. The sections about library users and confidentiality were written in a friendly manner and yet communicated some serious points.

Customer Service 123 does more in-depth writing on the ideas that make up customer service. They remind the reader that patrons (or users or whatever you want to call them) have choices about coming in or not. They even go as far as giving some ideas for handling conflicts.

I think a combination of the two websites would be useful for new staff. They each have helpful things to say and together they would be even stronger.

Hands down, the book bag feature is the easiest. And it is possibly the easiest way for a patron to add multiple items from home, too.

For some users, it might seem a bit intimidating at first. However, it seems friendly enough to work your way though with a little encouragement.

In some ways it reminds me of learning to use self-check. You have to be willing to learn something new (it's that bell curve of early adopters, etc.). The reward is a certain amount of empowerment to be able to do things for yourself.

And they do this sometime between midnight and 5:45 am. At least that's what happens at our house. How about yours?

As I have a My Space page, I looked at the pages for Coca-Cola and The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery on FB.

Coke was the first soft drink in space. How about that. Must have put a kink in the day of the other soft drink manufacturers.

When Gary and I go out for a walk we pick up the aluminum cans we find. It's one of those recycling things, you know. We find lots of beer cans, of course, and a some pop cans. Of the pop cans we pick up darn few of them are Coke cans. What do you suppose that means?

As for the Smithsonian, that is one of the few that I miss about living back east. The collections that make up the Smithsonian are absolutely breath taking. The Hope Diamond. The Moon Rocks. Chuck's plane.

Their FB page is so jammed with all kinds of information (hours of operation), acknowledgment of the loss of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and what exhibits are currently on display. Nice work.

If you're a business or an organization trying to get the word out about your product, FB is a good place to do some fairly elabourate advertising with minimal expense.

Well la-dee-dah. I received a perfect score on the quiz. Some of the answers were not easy to find, still, they were all there.

I went to last.fm as I've had an account on Pandora for several years now (and they do a good job).

Firstly, they use the British spellings. Yep. Favourite not Favorite. Not seen very often.

So far, the features I'm seeing on last.fm are more.....elabourate than the ones on Pandora. They offer a listing of concerts for the person you're listening to and make quite a variety of suggestions for other things you might like as well.

Very nice.

One of my heroes.

Darn, I played around and came up with a survey and the default background/text colours make it really hard to read. I even found the place to change some colours, but it's not working out the way I'd like it to look. Grrr.

What? You're surprised that the background is pink?

So here we are with the first task compleated.