www.slideshare.net

 This online website enables you sharing your slides with others. You can also find slides for your own purposes.

 www.zamzar.com

 This site can help you convert a file from one type to another, for example, you can convert a doc to pdf format.

 www.zoho.com

 This site provides heaps apps for you, for free. You can do jobs like doc, spreadsheet, presentation, project, report etc.

 If that’s not enough, you can go to this site to fine 27 free online tools

http://crazeegeekchick.com/blog/27%2Dfree%2Dmust%2Dhave%2Donline%2Dcollaboration%2Dtools/

 If that is still not enough then you can have a look at this site: top 100 websites which covers a lot free online applications.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2350558,00.asp

 Now we arrive at the end of our learning. It’s fun, it’s exciting and it’s also challenging. We learn it, we survive. Otherwise we let ourselves down, out of information service gradually.

 Your comment?

You can go to www.google.com and first to have a browse, see what’s there on the top tool bar and then what’s there on ‘ more…’

Google docs

‘Since its introduction in 2006 Google docs has changed the way people think about office productivity tools – first word-prcessing documents and spreadsheets and then slideshow –style presentations.’ (‘google docs 4 everyone by Steve & Nancy Holzner, 2009)

The differences between Google docs and other office products are that Google docs is free, it doesn’t need software installation, its web based. It means you can access it wherever you’d like as it’s stored on the website. It enables others to share your docs, to edit it as well.

Google photos

If you have a gmail account you know you can use Picasa to share you photos with the others. If you haven’t tried, it’s worth your effort. When you sign in you can see the top toolbar. You can come up with a title for your new album and write description of your photos. Don’t forget to tag it then others can search for it. Or if you only want to show your photos to your friends, do a selection.

Google calendar

 Google calendar enables you to share your calendar with others. It has similar feature as outlook. But usually you can only open your outlook calendar on your own PC. Google calendar allows you to open and share your calendar wherever you go.

 Google books

 Google books enables you to save some online books that has provided by google. You can read them whenever you like later on or wherever you have access of a PC.

 Google Pack

 Google Pack is a bunch of softwares for you to download. What’s on Google Pack now? Go to google site and take a look.

Why always pay for the use if you can easily use free softwares/applications/tools? Web 2.0 is all about free for everyone, free access, isn’t it?

Mashups also can be multi media files but not necessary online applications.

Go to

www.bighugelabs.com and try to use one or two feature, for example, do a calendar with your favorite photos on it. Then create a new image and send it to your blog.

http://voicethread.com/#home — it is another mashup tool that you can use.

Of course you shouldn’t forget google map. It allows you mashup with a place on the map. Take a look at it. Take a look at how to get there on The Power House Museum and you get ideas how the map works: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/visit/howtogethere.asp

Think about

How can library use mashup tools for its services?

Podcast can be played on MP3 or Ipod, but it is not necessary. As long as you have a computer then you can listen podcast.

Podcast can be short, for a few minutes, or long, like interview.

To do
Listen to a podcast from the British Library and one from the ABC. [Hint use the subject option to see what is available].

Listen to some of the podcasts linked on the Library Success wiki.

Listen to one of the podcasts on the Online Education Database.

To search for other podcasts use ‘podcast’ as a keyword in your search engine or you can use Yahoo podcasts search.

Please have a look at this video that explains this question in plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

From Wikipedia it defines ‘Twitter’

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet“  since the use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.

Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexa’s web traffic analysis. Although estimates of the number of daily users vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts, a February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, Zimbio of 240 percent, followed by Facebook with an increase of 228 percent. However, only 40 percent of Twitter’s users are retained.

More information please go to www.wikipedia.com

To do

• Go to http://twitter.com/ and do a search and see who’s there and what do they twitter about
• Sign up an account and define yourself accordingly
• Find each other in twitter 

Send a comment to this post after practice.

LibraryThing was developed by booklovers, for booklovers and its basic function is to quickly and painlessly create an online catalog of your personal book collection. What makes it even more special is its social networking component – once you’ve entered your books, you get to see everyone elses via book titles, authors, and the tags you assign to each entry.

To do

• Go to www.librarything.com and get an account
• Browsing around and add five titles of your own books into the catalogue

Delicioius

In addition to having an excellent name (yes, that’s a real URL – the .us at the end stands for United States), Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking site that lets you save bookmarks to a central location (no more copying them to multiple browsers on multiple computers) and classify them all with tags. Take a look around Del.icio.us.  How are libraries using Del.icio.us?

To do

• Open up an account on http://del.cio.us
• Look around and see what are most popular bookmarks there
• Bookmark five articles for yourself
• Bookmark this site http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2350554,00.asp

Comment on this site and what do you think about those two sites.

There are millions videos on youtube as easy use technologies enable people to record and send videos to the websites. Youtube enables one embed a video clip to a blog by providing an URL or an embeding code.

Parramatta City Library is on youtube. Please go to this link http://www.youtube.com/parracitylib to see the videos. Also you can search by topics and find a lot other videos as you wish.

Now, please understand that it’s not just serious stuff – reporting, politics, web 2.0. There’s thousands and thousands of fun, even useless, videos on YouTube for your watching pleasure.

Now find YouTube video you like and embed it in your blog. Here are the instructions:
1. Go to http://www.youtube.com/ and find the video. You can use parralib video.

2. Look for the box to the right of the video

3. Copy the code in the box marked Embed [make sure you have all the text – it is a long line].

4. Log into your blog and compose a new message.

5. Click on the Edit Html link.
6. Paste in the code you copied from the YouTube embed link in step 2. [hint: make sure that you are on “Edit Html” and that you don’t switch back to the “Compose” mode.]
7. “Publish” your post.
8. Click “View Blog” to see your video.

Comment on this session – what do you think about online video