Month: April 2008

Online Photo Sharing Services

This week I played around with photo sharing services. I already had accounts with Flickr and Photobucket; and since I had used Photobucket most recently to share pictures I had taken at the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, I decided to use those to upload to my Facebook account. This was a piece of cake. Uploading to this blog was a little trickier because I wanted to upload an avatar I had created to the sidebar area–not to a blog post or separate photo section of my blog. I read the help FAQs and figured out how to upload the avatar but had trouble with the alignment. I finally centered it but I’m not all that satisfied with it. But it’ll do for now.

Having photo albums online to share is a great marketing tool for libraries. In fact, a lot of libraries have photos on Flickr. It’s a wonderful way to present your library staff to current users or introduce them to potential users. The public library where I work as a part-time substitute placed a link to its Flickr account on the home page and explained that different library staff would be profiled regularly. It’s fun to get to know the people working at the library. Plus it’s a good way to show folks what the library is up to. Why not put up photos of library programs and events? It’s a very inexpensive way to market services. A friend of mine put up pictures of her library on her Facebook page. Very cool! And at one library where I worked, Facebook is a very popular site among the residents. I wonder how they would react to seeing their hospital librarians on Facebook!!

Online Web Office Applications

This past week I tried Google Apps and Zoho. I had already tried both. In Google Apps, I had used the word processing and spreadsheet programs and liked them. I tried Zoho when I was looking for an online database application, so this time I tried its presentation application. I really like the design templates that Zoho offers; however, I had a difficult time with Zoho. Using Safari, I received a warning that Zoho wasn’t compatible with my browser; but I decided to try it anyway. The templates didn’t display as shown and getting all of the tool bars to show up was impossible–even after resizing the window, the objects palette was still cut off the right side. Using Zoho in Firefox was a lot better, and I was able to view the objects palette. But the display still did some unexpected things. I liked Zoho’s look but it was frustrating to use. That was surprising to me since I had no such issues when I used Zoho’s database application.

Web-based office applications are definitely very useful for collaborating on documents, and I’ve used them to work on documents and share them with other staff. Having offline access to these documents is something that would be useful for those times that Internet access isn’t available. I’m glad that Google made this improvement.

Tagging and del.icio.us

I love this service! I’m adding links like crazy. I had heard of it before but had never used it. But it’s just what I need since my bookmarks aren’t tied to any one computer. I also have learned about other web resources by looking at other’s tags. I can see this service being used within the library among staff. But this would also be a great service for a group of people with like interests–maybe getting a group account to add links and tags for whatever topic the group is interested in.