Technology

Technology can help you lose weight instantly. Today Stacey helped me erase at least half of my behind in a picture using paint. We had these great pictures of our kids from storytime dressed up in their costumes and in about half of them was me handing them their bubbles or stickers. Did I mention that I'm dressed as Thing 1 and wearing bright red sweat pants? Not a pretty sight, but technology saved me and our pictures! Yeah Stacey!!

Mash-ups

I went to the Mashup of the day site and discovered a site that is going to track the elections. Twitterday vote report, the Mashup of the day winner, is designed for voters to record their voting experience. They can tell the site about long lines, machine problems and will be able to enter their zip code and address so that I could choose a site on the map and see what issues are being talked about in my area. This site is designed to help people help the others in their neighborhood, and I think it's a great idea. I'm going to check it out on Tuesday!

Technology

I'm going to date myself and tell everyone that for my internship in graduate school, I worked at a small library in Ypsilanti, MI that did not have an online catalog, and still used the paper version of the Reader's Guide. I had a teacher just last week tell me that she missed the card catalog. I DO NOT! Some of the first online catalogs I used were cumbersome and difficult, but to me they still far outweighed the card catalog. When I first started my job in GA in 1996, we had an online catalog without the circulation module! We had to file cards. I'll never forget watching our pages sit in front of rows of cards for hours filing and pulling cards for books. Let's not even talk about pulling holds and keeping up with new books! At times, technology seems to be viewed as something that will consume libraries. I see that technology has greatly enhanced our abilities to serve. I was so excited when we got our first direct connection to the Internet. I was in Marquette, MI in my first professional job, and the Internet was just amazing to me. We would type in an address and then wait, and wait, and wait, sometimes for 5 minutes, but the results were worth it (sometimes).

Lately, it seems to me that many of the new technologies are used for social purposes. I find that I am interested in technologies that help me during my work day, but I am not really very interested in going to the computer for my social outlets. Shopping however...

#5 Flickr and geotagging

I believe that one could become lost in Flickr. I started to look at pictures one day and found myself in the same position a half an hour later. I clicked on geotagged today and found that you can type in a subject, I tried animals, then the pictures will pop up and when you choose a picture, it will link the picture to a spot on the map. I think I could use this to share pictures of my kids with my parents.