Deltadixie's Weblog

My Avatar

Creating my avatar was lots of fun. I chose to create my avatar in both Meez and in Gaia, because they both offered different options. Meez offers many more options for both appearance, animations and backgrounds than Gaia, but it is primarily for creating and exporting your avatar to many familiar websites. On Gaia, one can not only create an avatar, but choose a number of options for a creating a virtual life such as buying clothes for your avatar, furnishing a tiny room, playing games, wandering around in a virtual town, and chatting with other “Gaians.” You make gold coins by most anything you do on Gaia and by posting on forums. The more money you have, the more interesting you can make your virtual life. There is also an option to pay real money to buy some very neat things to add to your virtual world.

RSS feeds

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is an XML format created to syndicate news and to be a means to share content on the Web. For those who use the web regularly, subscribing to RSS feeds is a way to stay informed by retrieving in one place the latest content from sites of interest without having to visit each site individually. Sites offering RSS feeds are growing rapidly and may be identified mainly by a small icon with the acronym RSS.

Bloglines & Google Reader

Both Bloglines & Google Reader are both web-based RSS feed readers or aggregators and in many ways very similar. The layout of Google Reader looks less cluttered to me, but I like the sentence summary in Bloglines and it also offers a Blog option. Personally, I find Bloglines easier to use and to navigate.

Podcast

The term Podcast is combining of the words “Pod” meaning “portable on demand” and “broadcast.” Podcasts are radio style shows distributed over the Internet for playback on portable media players and personal computers. A podcast is different from other digital media formats due to its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added by use of an aggregator or feed reader.

“Transformation Lab” and “Library Ninja” from Youtube

Transformation Lab was a fascinating video about what may well be the future of libraries. The ideas seemed quite revolutionary given where libraries are today and very expensive. Lots of food for thought about the look of libraries in the future. Library Ninja was a short, entertaining video comparing the time used in answering a question over the Internet as opposed to looking it up. The book was found to be faster.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has both pros and cons. On the pro side; it covers practically anything you could think to look up especially current and cult terms that may not be found in the typical dictionary; it’s current and can be changed as often as needed to keep current; and it offers varying points of view. On the con side, some entries may not be accurate as it can be edited by anyone regardless of knowledge about subject. I find it a great resource especially because I can find a definition the latest terms.

Mashup

A mashup is a mixture of content or elements. For our purposes, a mashup is a web application that combines data and/or scripts from multiple web sources into a single integrated tool. A new and distinct web service is created that was not originally provided by either source.

Flickr, Photobucket, and Picturetrail

Flickr is probably the most popular online photo management and sharing application on the Internet. On Flickr you can upload your photos, organize them into collections and sets, share them with family and friends, use your photos for blogs, share the location of your photos with geotagging, find photos of other Flickr users and post comments, and many, many more features. Flickr even supports RSS feeds, with ability to add comments and notes to photos. Needless to say, it is by far my favorite of the three with so many options.

Photobucket is one of the most popular video hosting sites. You can upload your photos, videos, and images for free and find lots of MySpace icons. You can also make photo slide shows to share with friends and family as well as search Photobucket’s digital media library for photos and animated images.. Photobucket just launched application for a mobile phone where you can browse your albums, upload, and share.

In Picturetrail you can upload photos in batch mode, customize your albums and create a slideshow from your albums to share, rotate pictures in your album, add music to your albums, and send digital postcards of pictures from album. Picturetrail provides support to manage auction photos for Ebay and Yahoo auctions from your photo account.