I dig a pony

Thing 18: Social Bookmarking

I held off doing this week of things so that my husband could participate. He has been asking me about Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg and I told him it was an upcoming thing. I didn't find having someone by my side helped. However it helped him because he had never seen any of the common craft videos. Those videos are good.

I already had a Delicious account (set up in another 2.0 class). It took me a little while to remember my account name, but once I found that I remembered the password. I have plans for that account, but first I have to finish tagging the hundreds of bookmarks that I’ve imported. I’m hoping that I can find some widgets that’ll allow me to finally replace my old web site with something that is easier to maintain. I know the code is around there somewhere.

Perhaps it was having someone look over my shoulder, but stumbling and digging weren’t very attractive. I did not find the StumbleUpon interface intuitively obvious and the Digg screen was awfully busy and off-putting. Maybe I’ll come back and do some more stumbling and digging another time. Unfortunately, both of these accounts rejected my 23things password so I had to create another, I’ve written them down, but it makes it less likely that I’ll remember them when I come back.

Ah, I've lost my hanger-on.

Went back to Digg and started customizing, maybe that'll clean it up some. Ew, I see it announces how old I am. I don't need that to appear on my Digg home page! Sure, I can see a service wanting to know the demographics of their users, but displaying that info? Have never seen that kind of labeling before. Thought I turned that off in the privacy settings, but it is still displaying. More than ick, these are some of the most dugg appearing even after I've edited my topic preferences.

• Moron Gets Probation for Sodomizing Dog to Death
• 11 die in crash between truck, church van headed to wedding
• 1st Person View of Getting Hit In The Nuts By A Football watch!

Those are the most egregious of the suggestions, but I'm not really interested in any of the others either. Even the ones that are barely of interest, I had already heard about through traditional news channels. Okay I'm done with Digg.

StumbleUpon is making better suggestions. Sometimes, when I'm looking to kill a little time I'll go to Wikipedia and click on the Random Article link; I've learned some interesting stuff doing that. And so I've often wished there were a similar Random Article button for the web. StumbleUpon is it without the worry that the random video will be porn.

Domo arigato

Thing 17: Animoto

Made a quick Animoto video using photos of W.K.H. "Pief" Panofsky, SLAC's first director. Quick is the word, I picked photos quickly from our photo database, tried to use only ones that SLAC owns outright. The server was hiccupy so searching for the photos was the longest part. Uploading the photos to Animoto was quick and easy, arranging them in an order was easy. Selecting the music was a little more difficult because the SLAC Archives doesn't have any recordings I could use. So I turned to the Animoto offerings. Their free choices are heavy on current and vocal music while the classical selections are pretty trite. But once the choices were made Animoto took over and it was all done pretty quickly. And uploading to YouTube was quick too.



We still miss Pief.

Movin' right along

Thing 16: Video Sharing

I have used YouTube before (who with a computer hasn't at this point? at the very least you've seen kitten on the keys or some such silliness). And I've uploaded videos on a home account (most videos are my husband's) so that I could embed them in one of my other blogs (careful about watching that video if you are prone to motion sickness). However, for thing 16 I set up a separate account, searched, subscribed to a couple of channels, and favorited a couple of videos.

Figuring out how to find those digitized historical videos is a project. I tried using keywords historical and archival with some sort of subject such as physics or Oak Ridge or whaling and got plenty of hits, but not what I was looking for. So I decided to approach the search from a different tack. I thought "What archives is most likely to have posted digitized film from their collection?" and immediately thought of the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California. They're cool and hip and have a huge volunteer base (they have to with their professional staff waxing and waning over the years because of funding). So I searched for GLBTHS and behold, they have a whole channel which includes tours of the archives, digitized historical material, and events. I was particularly taken with the series of videos about the archives based on a tour given by the director to a group of school kids. He covers so much ground, interspersed with examples of what they hold. The segment here is How the Archives Works and he covers issues of preservation and respect des fonds with the school children (not sure what type of class they are from: diversity? history?). The next segment goes into aspects of historical research and why to collect and what is so cool about original material. Be sure to go to YouTube and check out the whole series.



I looked but didn't see a way to favorite a whole channel so I subscribed to it. I am guessing that subscribing means that when I log in I will get notification of new videos from my subscribed channels. I then wanted to find a video to favorite so I searched for "archivist" and found a video from a visual resources archivist at the Beinecke about how he became an archivist (love that he includes the image credits at the end), but it was part of the Yale Archives channel so I subscribed to that too. Hmm, finding I keep wishing to favorite whole channels rather than just individual videos.

And I haven't really seen a lot of digitized historical films and I'd like to include one in this blog post. Finally, somehow (and now I can't reconstruct how, grr!), I hit upon a bunch of 'em and noticed that they are from the usnationalarchives. D'oh! of course NARA would be a goldmine of historic films. So I skimmed through the listing and hit on one about TVA. I grew up in TVA country so I take a look. I notice that NARA provides quite a bit more info about their videos than the average user of YouTube. It is clearly from their catalog and I appreciate it. I wonder if it improves their traffic. And in the related videos I spot another from NARA about the Smokies so I watch that. Pretty cool reminder of the good that came out of the Depression like the WPA state histories and the FSA photography.

Do the mashed potato

Thing Thirteen: Mashups

I could have used something a little more high level about mashups before being dumped right into creating specific mashups. One mashup I keep meaning to get around to is something with our memorial tree web page, something map based. I'm sure it is doable, possibly using Google maps. Another geographically- minded mashup is to combine the SCA membership directory with a map, that would be so useful when trying to find folks for local arrangements.

Thing Fourteen: Widgets

I added the Twitter widget to my blog. It behaved kind of funky, not loading the tweets, just doing the little rotating flower petal thing to show it was trying. So first I logged out of my Twitter window. That helped, but the little tool icons for the blog owner still showed even though I had signed out of the blog and was trying to view it as a reader. So I closed out all of my browser windows, but when I returned I still had the tool icons. Finally I went to my Google Reader, ah, that had kept me logged in despite having exited the browser. Signed out of Reader and returned to the blog without signing in. Success. But now I see that one of my other widgets is lining up to the left rather than under the heading. Unfortunately that is a blogger-defined widget; justification is not a setting option and it won't let me into the code to fix it. Guess I have to ignore my inner obcom and live with it for now. Nope, realize now that widget adds little value, it's outta here!

Will have to explore other widgets and badges later. Like those places-I-have-been things that you can embed in your web site. I remember the Great Turtle Race having some fun widgets in the past for tracking the race and your chosen turtle, but the site seems to have retreated in functionality, perhaps it's just that the race is not on at the moment.

Motherless child

Thing Ten: Photo Sharing (Flickr, Photobucket, etc.)
Thing Eleven: Geotagging
Thing Twelve: Creative Commons

I was all ready to sign up for a Flickr account and instead got dumped into Yahoo, didn't realize Yahoo had acquired Flickr. When I tried to sign up for a Yahoo account I was refused until I got parental permission and to give permission, they have to have a Yahoo account. WTF, WTF WTF! In the past I've suggested my father join Flickr so he can share his photos without emailing us huge files. Wonder how he would get his parental permission, Nana died ten years before the web existed. Sure it is amusing to be occasionally carded at the store, but this is a little ridiculous. Assuming it's a glitch on the Yahoo end, maybe I'll come back later, but I'm trying to do all my catchup now. Well, at least I've poked around Flickr as a viewer many times before and I've participated in some image tagging projects elsewhere.

I would have liked to play with geotagging, but see problem with Flickr above. The cheesy music at the end of the Flickr Help Screencast video earned a snort.