Flickr

Had great difficulty signing on to Flickr. Trouble began when it wanted to know my date of birth and my postcode. With these two pieces of information I would be easy to identify. I do not trust organisations such as Yahoo and Google will be able to protect my personal information indefinitely. I object strongly to being forced to give this information. I gave my date of birth as 2009 but this sadly backfired as I then had difficulty getting any further as Yahoo wanted my mom or dad to sign up for me! Then to prove I was over 18 they wanted my to give my credit card details! They said they would take 50 cents from it, giving some to charity. I gave up at that point.

After a rant to a colleague I went back to it and mysteriously Flickr had relented or Yahoo or something but anyway I now have a Flickr account - not sure how its happened. But I did fill out the forms about 6 times so perhaps it got the message eventually! I have asked to join the Oxford 23 Things group.

I do not have any photos today and I do not have a camera. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.

RSS feeds

I needed a bit of help linking to the 23 Things Oxford blog.

After that the main problem was finding interesting blogs. In the end I realised you don't actually have to read them - just practice linking to them. So I did that.

Looking at blogs

Have looked at a number of other's blogs and made a comment. It feels rather voyeuristic.

There is a wide variety of different library blogs each with some useful information but it seems the only way to find the useful stuff is to scroll down it and trust to serendipity.

Starting point

By co-incidence I had set up a Google ID the week before the Oxford 23 Things programme started - so that was lucky! Thing 1 taken care of.

Thing 2 didn't take too long either - and I quite like some of the gadgets and have found the To Do list useful already. I like the time and the weather too. Not sure what the point of the Turtles is but I can see it might be fun to keep different gadgets rotating as I feel like it.

I am now editing this blog to include a screen shot of my iGoogle home page. I had failed to find Paint on my computer earlier but it has magically appeared now!

Why am I doing this?

I have a lot to learn about Web 2.0. I do not use Facebook or Twitter and I struggle a little with the concept of being constantly present on-line and with the interactive side of things. But I would like to learn more about Web 2.o stuff and I realise it may be helpful both professionally and personally. I'm hoping that this programme will help me see what Web 2.0 applications may be useful in my library and at the least that my confidence with Web 2.0 stuff will have improved by the end.