Closest book meme

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water ...

A challenge from Eleanor - the closest book meme. Here's how it works:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.

* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I've had a look around my desk and the closest book to me is Good omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I've had this verified by two independent observers.

"I mean d'you know what eternity is? There's this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there's this little bird-"

"What little bird?" said Aziraphale suspiciously.

"This little bird I'm talking about. And every thousand years-"

"The same bird every thousand years?"

Crowley hesitated.

If you want to know what happens next, you'll have to read the book :)

Parting is such sweet sorrow

So. The end is nigh.

In the past, there have been mutterings about the length of my posts. How to summarize the entirety of this experience without drowning others in a sea of words - now there's a challenge. I think the Japanese do it best ...

Iceberg tip glistens

Calling me to jewelled depths

Whole worlds to explore

Thanks 23 things. It's been fun.

Talking books

I like talking books. I like listening to them in the car, during long journeys. To me, audiobooks mean road trips. Happy memories.

Books that I can download to my mp3 player to listen to in the car? No more changing CDs or - heaven help me - rewinding cassettes? This is a concept I'm willing to embrace!

Unfortunately the PLCMC NetLibrary link appears to have vanished, but I set up a NetLibrary account anyway. I browsed the list of e-audiobooks but only one was available for download, a catchy little number with the title The Morning After, a romantic suspense novel about a serial killer in Savannah. Not something I would have ordinarily been overly interested in but beggars can't be choosers. Sadly however The Morning After, despite saying it was available for download, was not available for download, so now we'll never know who did it, or indeed what, in fact, they did in the first place to have dunnit at all.

My first foray into e-audiobooks wasn't completely successful, but I think I'll be back. Next big trip, it'll be me and Savannah serial killers. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Sounds unlimited

It's a pity there isn't a YouTube equivalent for podcasts. One giant podcast site. There are so many out there, but they're spread far and wide, so it can be a bit tricky to find what you're looking for. Or maybe that's just me.

So I was really interested in trying out a few podcast directories, to see what's out there waiting for me to listen to it. Sadly two of the three suggested - Podcast.net and Yahoo Podcasts - no longer seem to exist, but Podcast Alley does so I had a hunt through there. There's a few to choose from. The site's statistics list 63,458 different podcasts comprised of 4,231,676 episodes, a small sample of what's available on the web but possibly enough to be going along with.

I played around with listing podcasts by genre and had a bit of fun exploring with that, and then I began the serious business of finding a podcast to blog about. I'm sure it will surprise no-one to learn that I found more than one.

Survivalphrases is a series of podcasts, which teaches a few basic phrases in a variety of languages; Spanish, Arabic, Swedish, Bulgarian, Italian, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese and French. Each specific language podcast has a number of episodes, which concentrate on useful phrases for specific situations, and they're simple and easy to follow. I listened to the Arabic "Thank you" episode and will now be able to thank library clients in faulty but sincere Arabic. Not that they'll be able to understand my accent. Now I need to master it in all the other languages available to me.

I really like these podcasts. I've often thought that everyone should know a few basic phrases in other languages. Hello, goodbye, please, thank you, you're welcome and I'm sorry will take you a long way.

YouTube MeTube UsTube

I love YouTube. Of all the Web 2.0 tools available to us, I think it's the most valuable. A microcosm of society and all we deem of value and interest. Late 20th century and early 21st century life, captured on camera, uploaded and available to anyone with an internet connection. An immeasurably important archive of huge significance that we take completely for granted.

Think about it. What's on YouTube? Old TV shows, yes. Nostalgic ads, music videos, blooper reels, funny videos about animals, strange Japanese quiz shows. We've all seen them, enjoyed them, laughed at them. But what else is on YouTube? Home movies, breaking news, video blogs, pieces to camera. Everyday people filming what they see, what they think and what they regard as important. And let's be honest, most of it is rubbish. It's ephemera - video junk mail, if you like. But, as librarians, we know the value of ephemera. Yesterday's pamphlets, bill posts and scribbled on scraps of paper are today's invaluable primary sources for social historians and anthropologists. YouTube is a primary source gold mine.

I'm supposed to post a video and blog about it. There's millions out there. Here's a couple.

I can't embed this, because it's a channel, but have a look at citizentube.

And here's a natural history documentary about that strange and elusive creature, the librarian.



Finally, an honourable mention for one of my favourite videos, the Death Star Canteen. Warning, strong language ahead :)

Centre of the universe

This week's challenge was to select any site from the list of Web 2.o Awards nominees, explore it and then blog about it. Sounds simple, but with 147 sites to choose from picking just one took a bit of deciding.

I was already familiar with many sites - VuFind, Facebook, flickr, del.icio.us, Bloglines - so I didn't bother with those. Others looked interesting, like Biblio.com (look for out of print books), Cocktail Builder (what cocktails can you make with the bar ingredients you have) and urbanspoon (look for restaurants in your area) but were a bit limited once I went into them and looked around. Still others I liked a lot, but were costing me money - thanks Threadless!

I finally settled on Galaxiki, a virtual galaxy with over a million stars, along with their planets, moons and other orbital objects. What I really liked about it is that the galaxy is created along scientific lines, and there were discussions around such things as what is the maximum percentage of oxygen you can have in the atmosphere before it is spontaneously ignited by lightning (apparently this depends on the gravity of each planet and the resulting atmospheric pressure, for those who are interested). Yes, I confess, I'm a bit of a science nerd.

Solar systems can be claimed and edited by community members, who can then name their system, create lifeforms, and describe their history. Members can participate as much, or as little, as they like. You can edit a system and leave it at that. Others create complex histories for their systems, and write stories based around them which they can post on a community blog. I kept things very simple and claimed a solar system for 23 things.

The star is, of course, named Eleanor, around whom we all rotate :) You can find out which planet is named after you, along with a description of it and how many moons you have, by clicking on the image. Celine's planet is named after her username. Apparently there's already a celestial body called Celine out there somewhere :)

Would this application be useful in libraries? Hmmmm. I think not, really. But another application on the list - .dotstock - would be. It's a really interesting site which lists over 3 million public documents and could potentially be very useful. It just wasn't quite as much fun.

Zo ho ho and away we go

This week, I've been exploring two web-based word processing applications, Zoho Writer and Google Docs. They're both not bad and allow you to create and save documents, format your text, spell check, insert tables and images, email your document, publish to a blog - in fact there's not a lot you can't do.

Zoho Writer has the most tools and looks and feels very similar to Microsoft Word, so it's an easy transition to make between the two. Unlike Word, Zoho Writer is freely available (no software buying required), doesn't require downloading, and isn't restricted to living on your PC. It lives on the web, so you can access your documents from anywhere. It would probably be wise to keep a backup of them on your PC, or to email a copy of them to yourself, just in case Zoho writer 'disappears' in the time honoured fashion of web based tools, but taht's standard practice.

Google Docs has less tools, and is more similar in looks and feel to older versions of Word, but it has the benefit of hanging off your Google account so it's very, very convenient.

I couldn't add anything to last week's favourites blog in the sandbox, so here one of my favourite poems, created and published using Zoho Writer. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The down side of Zoho Writer is that it appears to strip out all of my formatting in my blog post. True to my previous form of making sure my posts are as long as possible, I did originally post this with paragraphs. I've edited it numerous times to put the paragraphs back in, but they keep being stripped on posting. Don't know what is is about publishing using Zoho Writer that's causing this, as the paragraphs are in both the draft and the original pre-published document, but it's an interesting problem.