Week 6 – Online applications and tools

Week 6 offered a variety of online applications and tools.  From the options presented, I chose:

Personalised Homepages – I chose igoogle.  I added some picture feeds, Google calendar, currency converter, facebook add-on and a whole lot more.  I don’t see myself having much use for this at this moment in time.

Web browsers – I choose to download Firefox.  I then had to download some add ons.  I choose “Clipmarks (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1407).”  This allows you to save part of a webpage for future reference.  I found that the facebook add on for igoogle worked perfectly in Firefox (not all the tabs worked with Internet Explorer).  I think I will be exploring Firefox for some time – there are a lot of add ons around.  I’ve downloaded Firefox at home and once I have got used to it I will swap over to using it at work.

Google documents.  This looks really good.  You upload documents eg word or excel and can collaborate on them.  I can see this being useful for my work, often I share spreadsheets with subs management staff but as we have access to different sections of the shared drive there are sometimes permission issues and they can’t save their work without making it a copy.  With Google docs I can upload the spreadsheet there and everyone can work on the document without hassle.  It also means I don’t have to email myself documents if I have to occasionally work from home as I don’t have VPN access set up.

Week 5 – Social bookmarking and tagging

Week 5 covered social bookmarking and tagging.  I looked at the library’s account on del.icio.us.   I then set up my own account and uploaded the bookmarks from my PC.  My first task is to weed those bookmarks as there were 331 uploaded.  This may take some time.

I will experiment with tagging new websites as I come across them at work.  I’m not sure about using it at home as I use AOL’s browser.  I will see if I can get it to work otherwise I might change the browser at home to either Internet Explorer or Firefox (any recommendations?).  I’ll report on how I get on in one of the reflection weeks.

Week 4 – Reflection week (or catch up for those on holiday)

Well I haven’t been on holiday yet (just really busy) but I will add a few comments about how I am getting on with the web 2.0 technologies.

Instant messaging – I’m using it for quick messages that require an instant answer and the information doesn’t need to be saved.  It is also useful for seeing who is working and who is away – this is handy if I don’t have access to their calendar.  It would work well for me getting a quick answer to a query from those people who work from home.  However, for it to work properly, everyone needs to be using the software. 

Blogs – I will continue to use this blog throughout the web 2.0 course and have already tweaked it to show archives and recent posts as suggested by one of my blog readers.

Week 3 – RSS

Week 3 has covered RSS (Really Simple Syndication).  Topics included RSS aggregators/readers, RSS feeds and how to find RSS feeds.

I currently have a desktop based RSS Reader which was set up so I could check the website updates were working correctly.  However, as it is tied to my desktop, I haven’t really used it.  However, with the flexibility offered by the web-based RSS readers I became more interested in trying it out.

We were offered two readers – Bloglines or Google Reader.  I opted for Google Reader after reading an article which compared the two.  (http://lifehacker.com/software/google-reader/geek-to-live–from-bloglines-to-google-reader-205786.php).

I found Google Reader easy to use and started to set up some feeds suggested in the Web 2.0 course.  I quickly discovered that some of the suggested links were filling up my reader so deleted them (the news feeds).  I think for any content that is as fast changing as that, I will just visit the website.  For those websites that don’t change so frequently, say every two days or longer, it is more efficient for me to find out via the RSS reader when new content has become available.

I will keep on adding more feeds to my reader as I come across suitable websites as I do prefer going to one place for all my information (and have it come to me) and I am going to transfer my table of contents alerts to the RSS reader instead of my email.

Week 2 – Wiki’s

Week 2 covered creating a wiki.  I am used to adding info to the IRD wiki which uses Confluence.  Now I am trying out WetPaint.

I created a couple of pages, added a photo, added a youtube clip, added some links and made comments on other people’s pages.

I find Confluence easier to use – probably because I am used to it!  I like using wiki’s.  It’s much easier to find information/related information (you can add links between documents etc) and keep it up-do-date.  Also you can set up alerts for pages that have been updated by others.  The information is also easily accessable rather than being buried in email folders which helps when new people need access to the information.  I am quite happy to reduce the amount of emails in my overfilled mailbox so the less information I have to store by email, the better.  It works well for collaborative working too - for example in IRD we may have 2 or 3 people working on the same set of procedures.