pafa.net

Joyce Valenza has posted about iGoogle’s new personalized home page themes. Tons and tons o’ themes! And each of your pages/tabs can have a different theme. If you’re using iGoogle as a research tool for your students or as a current awareness service for your library patrons, this would be a fun way to make the pages more appealing and distinguish one page from another. I often forget which subject page I’m looking at in my iGoogle account, different header images would clue me in more quickly.

And for those of you who want to get all geeky, you can design your own google theme - this might be a fun project for a group of students. I know I’ll be playing with that later. How can I resist!

p.s. Pageflakes lets you customize the theme for each tab as well. And it’s really easy to make your own theme. Over at Netvibes, I can’t find an option to customize individual tabs, though it might be hiding there somewhere.

Just ran across Buzzword, a fairly new web-based word processor from Adobe. It has a very slick interface and lots of features. You can share your documents with others, designating them as “co-authors” with editing privileges, “reviewers” who can leave comments but not edit and “readers” who have read-only access. Multiple versions of a document are kept. The sample documents attest to some nice features and it certainly was easy to get started editing. Haven’t done a serious comparison to other online office apps like Google Docs or Zoho. Any have preferences for one over another? And why?

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I’ve been looking at lots of video tools this weekend. I’m sure I haven’t made much of a dent in looking at everything out there, but here are some notes on a couple. I’ll try to add more notes as I look at more tools.

Dabble.com
I really like the idea of Dabble.com. (thanks to the Library Instruction WIki for suggesting it) According to the Dabble site, Dabble “tracks more than 600 video hosting companies, and thousands of independent video websites and video bloggers”. Sites like YouTube, blip.tv and LiveVideo. It lets you create playlists of videos and even gives you an RSS feed for each playlist. This could be a nice collection tool to add content to library web pages and feed readers. (I’ve added a test of the playlist feed on the Testing RSS tab at the top of this blog.)

Problem is, Dabble doesn’t seem to actually search those 600 sources. (more…)

Embedding YouTube videos on your web site? The embedded player that YouTube provides includes links to videos related to your video based on the words you used to describe your video. Problem is, these ‘related videos’ might not be what you want on your library web site. Take a look at the related videos showing up on your video pages on YouTube to get an idea of what might be showing up on your embedded video player. Fortunately YouTube provides an easy way to turn off the ‘related video’ feature if you choose to do so. Thanks YouTube!

To turn off the ‘related videos’ feature, edit the embedding code that YouTube gives you and change the two instances of: $rel=1 to $rel=0

Explanation at: http://tinyurl.com/2xbrob

UPDATE: even easier way to do this - just click on the customize link above the embed code to get the option for excluding video. Thanks to Curtis Rogers for posting this tip to flickr.

Granted I’m a proud aunt, but I think my nephew is a terrific writer and reviewer! And I’m so pleased to this review in this Sunday’s NYT Book Review section. Way to go Tim!

Amo, Amas, Amuse a review of “CARPE DIEM: Put a Little Latin in Your Life” by Harry Mount.

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I’m working on screencasting class for later this month. We’ll be using Wink for the hands on portion. Free was a good incentive! Just curious what other people are using these days? Which package do you prefer? Why?

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