CPL 2.0: the home stretch

Can you believe that we're already half way through our Web 2.0 project? Let's give ourselves a pat on the back!

Here's what you can expect in the final five weeks:
- Flickr / YouTube
- Online Productivity Tools
- LibraryThing
- Twitter
- Wrap-Up

CPL 2.0: RSS

“Really Simple Syndication.” Humph. I understand the concept of RSS, I just don't think that I really need a Bloglines account. But I signed up for one, to do this week's assignment. Here are the websites that I tried to add to my RSS Bloglines feed:

- http://yyclibrary.blogspot.com/ (me!)
- http://cpl20.blogspot.com/ (the blog for the project that I've made this blog for!)
- http://dilbert.com/ (lols!)
- http://jezebel.com/ (a great feminist blog, which I read each and every day!)
- http://laineygossip.com/ ("advanced celebrity gossip")
- http://icanhascheezburger.com/ (more lols!)

The Dilbert comic strip was suggested by the Bloglines site, and the others are sites that I visit on a regular basis.

So... the questions:

• Were you able to successfully set up your RSS feed? If not, where did you run into problems? If you were successful, does this make information-gathering more convenient for you?

I did successfully set up the Bloglines account and subscribe to a few RSS feeds. I ran into problems with the last two (Lainey Gossip & I can has cheezburger) perhaps because those websites are not organized in a true blog fashion, and don't have the wee RSS buttons on their sites. Perhaps if I read 30 blogs on a regular basis, and those 30 didn't update frequently, I would find Bloglines useful. I have a MacBook at home, and my browser has a neat tool that when you open a new tab, a screen pops up with the sites that you frequent most. If the site has a new post, there will be a blue triangle in one corner with a star... so you know to click on it and read the new blog posting. I don't think that I read enough blogs to need RSS, but perhaps I will try Google Reader on my own at home. Another reason why Bloglines turns me off is the extremely dated logo, and cluttered appearance of the site.

Changes in Facebook

One of the things that I really dislike about Facebook is the applications... Farmville/Garden/Pirate/whatever, I don't care for any of it. Months ago I blocked Farmville updates from appearing in my news feed, but no longer remember how I did it, and Farmville updates have been creeping back in, along with ones about fake gardens and hunting pirate booty. On the rare occasion that I check Facebook, I'd rather not see them.

If you're one of the 81 million (!) Facebook users that have the Farmville application, or any other application, and you're interested in dropping it, read this article:

http://ow.ly/1BRcW

CPL 2.0 Google & Fried Chicken

I am quite keen on Google, the subject of this week's assignment. I regularly use many of Google's products: News, Blog search, Images, Gmail for my personal email, Google Docs and Calendar for sharing information with a short film that I'm lending a hand too, Blogger for this here assignment, Video Chat to save on my long distance phone bill, Directory when teaching technology programs, Books and Scholar for reference at work, Google maps, etc.

This week's assignment: Try out one of the Google programs or services, and write a brief blog post reviewing it. What do you like about the Google product? What do you dislike? Would you recommend the product to friends and colleagues?

I decided to explore the Trends product since I'd never seen it before. Trends is a search and news volume index that after you plug in a search term, it gives you a graph that follows how popular that term has been in Internet searches for the past few years. It provides a bit of insight as to the fluctuations in an item's popularity, and also links spikes in popularity with news stories from that time. I did a search for "fried chicken" and the graphs are below:

The top blue line is represents the number of searches made for "fried chicken." As you can see, there was a big spike in popularity in early 2009, and the "E" links to a news story about KFC honouring Oprah's grilled chicken coupons...

Google Trends also ranks the search term by popularity of searching in Regions, Cities and Languages. Who knew that fried chicken was so popular in South Africa?

Even better, you can enter more than one search term into the box (which I love), and compare two different things, or perhaps track the popularity of similar things. For example, you could see if "high cholesterol, fast food" have anything to do with each other... or see just how popular something new is, like KFC's new Double Down sandwich, which features two pieces of fried chicken where the pieces of the bun would usually be.

Google Trends will only get better with age, because the longer we are using the Internet, the longer the search results will be in terms of date. Currently, we can only go back about six years, but in ten years from now we'll have data for sixteen years! I would definitely recommend this to folks interested in tracking the popularity of something, or even if they just had to do a bit of research on something specific.

Try it out for yourself: http://www.google.ca/trends

Three Weekends of Awesome

The most wonderful days of the year are coming up! It is a tragedy, but I have to work on two of these days and might be missing out on them completely.

First is Record Store Day. Independent stores and musicians come together for this really awesome day that celebrates music. Stores often host live performances and meet & greets AND, many, many amazing artists are supporting the cause, including some of my favourites: Neil Young, Modest Mouse, Phoenix, Great Lake Swimmers, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Iver, Wilco, Drive-by Truckers, and on & on. My favourite stores in Calgary are the Inner Sleeve in Marda Loop, Sloth Records on 17th Avenue, and Melodiya, which is also on 17th Ave but much further west. Also, if you're having your own record store day, be sure to go to Recordland in Inglewood. I don't think it's participating, but it would be a shame to leave Recordland out of your RSD.

http://www.recordstoreday.com/Home

Two weeks after Record Store Day, is Free Comic Book Day. Comic book shops across North America participate in this glorious day, in which you can get a free comic by JUST SHOWING UP. Five (and maybe more) stores in Calgary are participating, including my fave Another Dimension comics in Kensington. I'll be sneaking over during my lunch break to Great White Entertainment in South Centre Mall to see what they've got going on.

http://www.freecomicbookday.com/

Sandwiched in between those weekends on April 24 & 25th is the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, which is basically Calgary's "Comic Con," and this is the one that I'll get to go to (YES!) It's located in one of the Round-up Centre buildings, on the Stampede grounds. Really, it has something for every kind of nerd out there, from the young "Twilight" kids, to fans of the original Star Trek series (Leonard Nimoy is going to be there!) The child in me is excited about seeing the Olympic mascots. And I am most excited about Jeffrey Brown. I've slowly found all of Jeffrey Brown's comics in stores here and there, and love them all. He'll be at some sort of Panel Spotlight on Sunday at 11:00 am. Now I just have to decide which of Brown's books I'll take for him to sign.

http://www.calgaryexpo.com/
http://www.jeffreybrowncomics.com/

CPL 2.0 Social Networking

This week's assignment is all about social networking. I've been a user of a few different social networking sites for quite a while now. I had a Friendster account in high school, migrated to Myspace in college and at some point in University switched to Facebook. Then, after moving back to Calgary after finishing University, the friends that I left behind convinced me to join Twitter. I currently use Twitter primarily, and I love that it keeps me up to date with friends who live in different parts of the country. I think we'll explore Twitter a bit more in a few weeks, so I won't go in to any more detail about it.

On to this week's question:

• For you, is Facebook useful or a time-waster?

For me, it is both of these things. I use Facebook more than I'd like. I should change the e-mail notifications that I get, so that I receive less. I tend to log in to the site after I've received a notification about something (an event invite, comment, or message.) I really don't need to be checking it more than once a week, and when I check it I tend to look over my whole news feed, which is a huge time-waster. Curiousity kills Katie's time... if a friend posts photos of something, I will look at them.

But Facebook can also be really useful, and it's my only social tie to a quite a number of people. I recently deleted a number of "friends" (I have 200 or so Facebook "friends") who I decided I wouldn't recognise if I saw them on the street, but the majority of my friends are people that I care about and Facebook is a great way of staying in contact with them.

Wikipedia Love

This week's assignment is all about Wikipedia! http://www.wikipedia.org/

I decided to create an account and write an article on something that hadn't been covered already... my friend Paul!

I met Paul when I was finishing up my BFA at the University of Lethbridge. If anyone I know deserves a Wikipedia entry, it's Paul. After all, he is an international recording artist. I could have written a lot more, but it took me quite a while to do what I did.

This is the page that I made: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_K_Lawton
I also added him to a List of people from Lethbridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Lethbridge
(Dar Heatherington is also on that list, FYI.)

I would say that in general, it's difficult to find an entry that needs grammar or spelling help, and easy to find an entry that needs more content. I didn't come across anything that is factually wrong, but I wasn't really browsing to fact check.

So I did create the Paul K Lawton Wikipedia page, and I am awfully proud of myself. I edited the "List of people from Lethbridge" page, by adding him and by sorting the other entries a wee bit (some of the ones at the bottom, that I assume were the newest, weren't alphabetical by last name like the rest of the list.) Creating the PKL page took quite a while, and I really only mastered the easy things. Referencing took a few minutes to understand, because I don't speak Html... and I attempted to put a photo of Paul on the page but decided against it because it was just a bit too hard. I also added in a section of "External Links" twice, but they seem to disappear (?), so I guess it wasn't as successful as it should be.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun with this project.

Thanks to Paul for letting me do this!

PS - If you're interested in more Paul K, here is an interview with him from 2009: http://newcanadianmodern.org/2009/09/24/garage-rock-explosion-tmrw-night-%E2%99%A5flavour-of-the-week-paul-lawton%E2%99%A5/

PPS - Wikipedia has flagged my PKL article for "speedy deletion," noted by the large red box at the top of the page. I hope it doesn't get deleted! UPDATE: I just checked the PKL article, and it has been deleted, as has my addition to the "List of people from Lethbridge" page. Disappointing! Wikipedia apparently doesn't think that "my friend Paul" is of importance or significant.