Using Zoho

 I haven't found any opportunity to use Zoho applications at work or at home. All the applications that Zoho provides is available in MS Office or elsewhere. In the past year I haven't been tempted to use it. Though it could be useful if away from your desk while travelling. You could save work "in the cloud" that Zoho provides. ""  

Podcasts

I have recently started to use podcasts to learn french. I've noticed my facility with the language has started to improve a good bit. French is a language that you don't hear often on the streets of Sydney (where I live). Hearing the language is vital to developing confidence with speaking french. You can only go so far with learning a language by reading it. Listening to podcasts prepare you for real converstion when the time comes. There is no substitute for hearing the spoken word.

Mashups

Mashups could be a lot of fun. I've made a quick attempt at using one of the templates at Big Huge Labs website. See the jigsaw 'Australia - its full of real men' at the side.

Delicious in a sole-person library

I can see the potential for Delicious, the social network website organiser, for my work in the library. I could use Delicious to organise websites and make them searchable with tags. Most of my work involves searching on the internet for information. I work in a sole-person library, supporting 60 or so professional staff who have interests unrelated to the acquisition of information. My bookmarks would be of interest to nobody but me. At this stage, I can't see my bookmarks being useful to others at my workplace. That is, the social networking function of Delicious would be little use to me.

I used what I learnt about embedding Youtube videos and applied it to a Powerpoint presentation that I gave to staff. It was frustrating. The video didn't embed. Apparently you need to convert the video to movie format in order to show it in a Powerpoint presentation. Lucky I was prepared on the day, and had an internet connection through the labtop. I simply connected to a browser and showed the audience the YouTube video that way. It worked, but wasn't as seemless. This is the video that I tried to embed. The audience responded well when they viewed it. The comic theme of the video is how not to serve library users.

Embeding videos

I have been preparing a presentation for work. The staff in another section of our organisation have asked me to talk about my work. I'm pleased to be able to share this information with them and saw it as an opportunity to imporve our understanding of each other. I chose a YouTube video (not the video below)to include in the PowerPoint presentation to add a touch of humour at the finish of my talk.

The Web 2.0 lession has been a timely review of the process of embeding videos.

RSS would be useful at work to keep me abreast of changes on the political and policy front. I could include these happens in the webpage newletter I produce in the library.