Cocktail Builder

For the second part of the exercise this week I chose to explore the site, Cocktail Builder. It kind of reminds me of the iPhone app my sister has, Epicurious, which lets you enter ingredients or even moods and it gives you recipes that match. On Cocktail Builder you tell it what you have in your liquor cabinet and it gives you relevant drink recipes. Sounds like a good idea and the site does have some recipes posted; however, it looks like the site is under construction. Some of the tabs dont work, and it isn't really telling me what to do with the ingredients I entered. In fact, at the bottom of the page is a link that says: "Designer Needed: this site is looking for a talented designer to take Cocktail Builder to the next level". Oh well, sounded like a good idea, guess I'll have to come up with some drinks of my own.

Since Cocktail Builder didn't really work, I decided to try HairMixer. This site lets you see what you would look like with different hairstyles. You can choose from their gallery of celebrity hairstyles or upload your own photo. I probably should have used a different photo for mine, but I think the result is pretty hilarious.

Gooogle docs

I had used Google docs a few times before using it for our group project, but I have started using a lot more since them. I refuse to spend over one hundred dollars on Microsoft Office and so have resorted to various other free/open source programs. I have been using Open Office for a few years and like it a lot. However, it is sometimes frustrating to keep emailing myself documents or loading and unloading them from my flash drive. I have been using Google docs to take notes in some of my classes and to write drafts of papers. All of my information is saved in one place and I don't have to worry about remembering to save it. It also means that I don't have to worry about tons of documents piling up in my folders and taking up space on my computer. I also had a great experience using it for our group project. It was so easy to edit the information and we didn't have to worry about sending each other successive versions of the document. I know that tons of people are already using Google docs and similar things like Zoho writer, but I hope that more start to realize that it is so much easier and cheaper to use than Microsoft Office.

Wikis

This week, I have been wondering what anyone ever talked at Library school before there were things like Google, Wikipedia, et al. They even dropped the name Library from the name of our school, and I know that other schools around the country simply refer the their MLIS programs as the "iSchool". Discussion of internet resources and Web 2.0 technologies seem to apply to and be discussed in every class that I am taking (for good reason of course!) but it just makes me wonder what it was like.

Anyways, Wikis.

Of course, everyone is familiar with the most famous of these, Wikipedia. In fact, I was talking to a friend the other day and she didn't even realize that the word "wiki" refers to a type of software that allows multiple people to edit and add/remove content and create collaborative pages. She just though it was the name of the site (Wikipedia). I remember in undergrad when Wikipedia was beginning to get very popular, we had lectures in class about how the information isn't reliable, anyone can edit it and add whatever they want, who knows who these people are! We were assigned to read articles warning us of the dangers of using Wikipedia as a source in our papers and warned that any one caught plagiarizing from the cite would be severely punished.

At first, I didn't see Wikipedia as reliable either. In fact, I felt embarrassed using it, like a wasn't doing "real" research. And to an extent, this is true, using it for a paper and not going any further isn't enough. But it is good as a starting point for research. Also, it is awesome for other things, would a traditional encyclopedia include detailed descriptions of every Pokemon character and what game the appear in? Or would they list every Phish show ever played and what songs they played at each show? No. And that is why Wikipedia is great, it's user generated content that is of interest to millions of people, just not to traditional encyclopedia writers/compilers. Furthermore, now that the site has grown, many subjects of substance have appointed moderators and no on could change the site to say that water is H5O and not H2O.

Personally, I have never participated in another wiki. My friends and I used to add each other as "notable residents" in our hometown along with descriptions of various careers that made us famous. But even those were taken down pretty quickly, and this is a relatively small neighborhood in San Diego. But, I can see how they could be very useful on a smaller scale. I liked Tommy's example, that they used it for instructions. I wish I had that at owrk sometimes...

Library 2.0

One of the comments in the "away from icebergs" article really struck a chord with me, "We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning". I think that the general perception of librarians by many people is still the charicature that we see in TV shows and movies. Often the librarian is shown as a crabby old woman and I can't recall ever really seeing male librarians on tv or in a movie. I don't know if anyone ever watched the show "All That" on Nickelodean (if not, think something like SNL for kids. It had skits and a musical guest at the end). There was one recurring skit set in a library where this librarian would scream "SHHH! This is a Liiibrraaary" and sound an air horn every time she heard someone talking or if someone tried to ask her a question. Though that might be a little dramatic, I do think that this is one way many people see the library--as a place for quiet study where you'll get in trouble if you talk too loudly or ask a question. Oftentimes, the library isn't seen as a place to discuss, to discover, a place where it's ok if you don't know the answer to the question. I think that with libraries adopting Web 2.0 technologies and other things, that this perception is beginning to change, but I do think that there is a lot of work to be done to change the general public's idea of what a librarian and a library is.

I had a lot of fun playing around with the image generators this week. The one I liked the best was the "Hockneyizer" on bighugelabs.com, which turns any picture into a photo collage á la David Hockney. I did one of my house in Portland, I think it turned out pretty well, though I imagine it would work better for things like landscapes. I think I will use this one in the future, it will be an easy way to create some fun pictures for people.


In terms of Rollyo, I seem to have had the same problems that a lot of others had. After waiting for the various pages to load, I decided to give up. Later that day, I was doing reading for another class and came across a discussion of "bailout rates", or the rate at which people leave a site before it loads, which gets higher and higher the longer it takes a page to load. Definitely true, if the page doesn't load quickly, I'm out of there, no patience most of the time. However,the concept behind Rollyo is great. I can imagine myself creating a couple of these personalized search tools for different categories of things for which I constantly search. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this before.

I also thought Library Thing was pretty cool. I love books. I have hundreds of them. Sometimes I sell them when I'm done, but if I really liked it I keep it, or if someone gave it to me or even if I only liked it a little bit, oftentimes I keep it. I also read them over and over again. Some of my favorites I have definitely read upwards of 5-10 times. Again I have a lot of them, a whole bunch of boxes in a storage space in San Diego, a couple of boxes in my mom's apartment, and I recently left a few in my sister's basement in Portland; my carry-on suitcase on the way to New Jersey was full of, you guessed it, books. Often I use amazon to look for new books to read. Usually I'll just type in a title or author I like and click on, "people who bought this book also bought..." or also "people who viewed this book also viewed..." and go from there. Amazon also has an application where people can create lists of books and categorize them for people to look through to get ideas. I think that Library Thing could be a good way for me to find new things to read. I created a personal catalog and added a few all-time favorites. It was also kind of funny to see the amount of books that some people have added to their catalogs, I don't think I will be adding all of the books I've ever read, maybe only the ones I think others should read too.