There is a happy land - RSS feeds

I'm really looking forward to working out how to use RSS feeds. I had a go a few months back and couldn't work it out at all, ao I gave up. This is one of the main reasons why I wanted to partake in this programme.

Love you till Tuesday - Flickr success!

Well I've now posted a bunch of my personal family photos and excellent pictures of Sydney Harbour (as my sister-in-law lives in South Australia) in a couple of sets. She's viewed them last night and added me to her contact list. I've discovered she is already a Flickr member, so i've also been able to view her family photos too. She's a keen photographer too, so interesting times ahead!

Rubber band - Flickr

I've finally mastered Flickr. I've been trying to find a way for my sister-in-law in South Australia to view some of my photos, but other than emailing them to her, wasn't sure how to go about it.

Now that i've got a Flickr account, I'll be uploading some of my photos for her to see.

I've noticed some of the library pictures on Flickr are fun, so he're my first library picture taken at the end of last year. The dog was known to the dog-catcher, so must have escaped from home on prior occasions. He had a great time running through the library.

Looking around Flickr I've noticed there are a lot of arty photos and some really great photos and even photos I would have deleted from my camera if I had taken them.

I love high dynamic range pictures, so I looked up hdr and found this 500 series Shinkansen. When I was in Japan around 9 years ago I was in a suburban train and saw an ad for this train on the wall. I ended up ugrading my cross country ticket so I could ride on it.

Sell me a coat

Stephen Fry mentioned how he missed a Dr Who episode when he was younger and at the time he couldn't do anything about it except look at the TV guide each week for a re-run.

That reminded me of the same situation I was in. I was watching an episode of Star Trek (the original series) many years ago when half way through the episode the picture went blank. For a long time afterwards I checked the guide for a repeat of that episode, till I forgot which one it was. Since then we've had the DVDs available and I was able to watch all the episodes again.

It is amazing how much old stuff from when we were growing up is now available, either on the web or on DVD. At the time it was all fairly transient, you'd watch it once then move on. Now we can re-live a fair bit of it whenever we want.

As much of this content is available on the web, libraries need to get in on the act, possibly by becoming a portal and making access easy.

It will be interesting to see what our council's will let us do. Some appear to be more open-minded than others. I know our council is frightened at the prospect of the public being able to interact on our site "What if they say something negative about council and it's there on our site for all to see?"

Looks like there are some exciting times ahead for libraries.

Uncle Arthur - where it all began

I liked the way there was a link to Wikipedia for the definition of Lifelong learning. A number of years ago many students wern't able to reference Wikipedia as a source of information in asignments, however now we are finding it is one of the first ports of call.

I've found when researching subjects I have a vast knowledge of, the printed encyclopaedias sometimes have factual errors or ommissions (possible due to space limitations) which make articles somewhat misleading. Wikipedia on the other hand appears to be more comprehensive.

It goes to show you how the internet has evolved over the last few years and the input of many individuals is helping to produce a very useful information source.