iGoogle rethink

Having decided to revisit this blog it’s prompted me to also revisit my iGoogle Tabs. So now i’m doing a long overdue re-evaluation of the Tabs I created in iGoogle, moving and loosing some RSS feeds and gadgets with the view to again making this my browsers homepage, I’ve had the BBC’s weather page as my ‘homepage’ for ages now but I don’t like the rather aggressive redesigned BBC pages so iGoogle here I come again.

Brain Pickings best-of reading lists of 2011

Brain Pickings- one of my favourite places and now
All the Brain Pickings best-of reading lists of 2011 – psychology, design, science, history, photography, food & more – together at last, in one place
https://bitly.com/bundles/brainpicker/9
“Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.”
Thank you  Maria Popova a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of talented contributors.

This has inspired me to make an effort to revisit this blog this year, it’s been neglected somewhat as I’ve spent time on the Trendhub blog, FB page, Twitter feed etc. Time to get back to some things just for me … actually all those other things are me as well … not easy to define where the working me and the not working me start, end and overlap… so I won’t be stopping them
“Because creativity, after all, i. It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.”  Maria Popova

inspired by the SDC

Tuesday 21st September an inspiring day at the SDC, colour, textile, archives discussions, lectures, photo presentations and more … reminded me why I became so besotted with colour and the textile industry all those years ago and reminded me The British Textile industry is NOT dead, it just needs to …

moleskine: MSK templates

made me smile again this  morning again moleskine: MSK templates

“moleskine has released a series of unique MSK templates for all moleskine users to download and insert into their notebooks. through MSK, users can also transfer digital content such as contacts, events or original associations of images and text for further personalization of their sketchbooks. the MSK wizard can help create a personalized template for any area of interest including local art exhibits, social events, or theater productions. meanwhile the events page allows you to upload the events you will be attending and the contacts page lets you upload your contacts from outlook, plaxo or a mobile phone. in doing this, moleskine hopes to make their sketchbooks even more personalized and functional for individual needs.”

and for all book lovers

Trend Hub blog is now visible to everyone

as an experiment, as of today the Trendhub blog is now visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers. It will be interesting to see if this makes a significant different to the numbers of visitors and the number of spam comments received.

25Things 2010

Hello, as 25Things @ Huddersfield is starting a new round for 2010 with a new crop of participants (with 3 of us from last year doing the hand holding for this years newbies), I thought it was about time I got back to my own blog…so here I am

Since taking part in last years 25Things I’ve become even more addicted to the web and now have a blog for the resource area for Art, Design and Architecture that I manage here at the University  http://trendhub.wordpress.com/

Facebook pages and groups for

the Trend Hub resource area facebook/TRENDHUB

SAMPLE (the brand and publication for the BA. Hons Crafts course ) facebook/SAMPLE (I also have a private closed facebook account just for staff and student participants and contributors to Sample)

BaccaPipes Folk Club facebook/BACCApipes-Folk-Club

and now 2 Twitter accounts which I monitor and use mainly via Tweetdeck which makes managing 2 very different account …manageable.

http://twitter.com/desimeleon (the people I follow here now tends to be mainly posting about eLearning and technology )

http://twitter.com/adatrendhub (Art, Design and Architecture Creative stuff )

There are a number of other ways that fuel my web addiction thanks to 25Things but more about those another time.

Mashing libraries: work in progress « Information & Libraries Scotland

as a reminder

the Mashing  Libraries session were brill, i need to revisit my notes and follow stuff up soooon – after my hols

Hello and About

Hello 25 thingers… Hello everyone – So that this post stays on top of the list, it is my Sticky Post. To bring some sort of order, I’ve categorised most of my entries. Look…see…. just on the Right, down there… Posts by Categories! Oh and I’ve tagged most posts so you could choose to view using a tag (kind of mini and multi categories, as many posts have more than 1 tag) – click one to pick one …. or …. just read on in the usual date order sort of way, latest first. There is also more than 1 page – look along the top, this gave me the chance to expand a bit and keep some categories/topics/things separate. That was/is the Hello, now the About, the Why.. The short explination is to do25 things @ Huddersfield(click the link to the left to find out more) and NOW……. 25Things 2010 has started.

Facebook’s New Terms Of Service:

“We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”

ummm interesting… see this post  – http://tinyurl.com/ca4r2l - on consumerist.com

“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

find the above in the Licenses section of TOS

This throws up some interesting IP/copyright issues, what should you/shouldn’t you post,

…it’s difficult to get young people/students (and sometimes the not so young) to think carefully about what they post on social networking sites, to think about the image of themselves they are portraying and what might seem a harmless bit of fun now might come back to haunt them in a few months/years time, are the language/images used going to be appropriate or detrimental in a few months time and how many of us really look carefully at the privacy settings – will this change things, I personally doubt it. I think if you presume that anything you put on the internet is out there forever regardless if you want it there or not.

there is the “subject only to your privacy settings” sentence, so if we all keep these up-to date … is that ok then…restricted to my Friends, since that’s what my privacy settings are set for.!?!  The next question then is  -Who are my/your friends-

A place for Twitter

I’ve found that I use facebook updates for friends (the confessional not professional) and Twitter has become a place for work connections, though I am following my son on Twitter also… yes he does know.. I’ve found lots of interesting e-learning links and discussions I wouldn’t have known about if it wasn’t for some of my twitter connections, so it now has a firm place in my work related resources thanks to 25 Things for the nudge.

#uksnow on Flickr

Following on from my Twitter link  Uk snow on Twitter/Google Earth

Uk snow on Twitter/Google Earth

I found this on YouTube after following a Twitter Feed to first of all this blog post 

http://www.barnabu.co.uk/uksnow-twitter-animation-google-earth-5/

quote from above…. “As a knock-on of this there’s been a large amount of media buzz about the use of Twitter as a mob-sourced geo-mashup generator to show snowfall.  Twitter users have been posting the first half of their postcode, plus the amount of snow in their location. 0 = no snow, 10 = bucket loads. ie: “#uksnow W12 9/10″  Developers have been mashing-up that data. Check out Ben Marsh’s neat, live Google Map mashup of this: #uksnow Tweets“

23rd Thing – Podcasts

I know I’ve downloaded,subscribed to and listened to Podcasts in the past but not for sometime, in fact looking at my iTunes it seems the last time I downloaded one was January last year and I haven’t listened to that. It’s not because I don’t like the idea, it’s more about the way I listen to things.

I’ve always liked audio books, especially while traveling and whilst working in industry I usually had Radio 4 on in the background when working on the computer, now a days I suppose all these hours at home on the computer could be time listening to Podcasts but instead I tend to either tune into live radio,listen to music via iTunes or, use the wonderful listen again features via the internet (and at work my birdsong tracks).  

Today that might change. I think today might just be the time to rediscover the huge variety of subjects that podcasts have to offer. I’m going to start by relooking at what I already have. In my itunes I find I have 44 Podcasts –

27 espisodes of Books on Gardian Unlimited, 11 episodes of Great Moments in History, 2 episodes of Old Time Radio Comedy, 1 Front Row Interview, 1 episode of Radio 4′s Material World, and, 1 episode of Secrets of the Pirates of the Caribbean. a quick discussion with my son and a look at his shared iTunes library show that he currently has 350 Podcasts in his collection, he subscribes to 28 and this 350 include just the last 5 of any that he subscribes to, any older than this and they drop off the list. It seems these are what he listens to most when on his computer. doing homework and well just being. Now I’m going to go away and look closer at my podcasts and come back to this later

bit more Library Thing

This is a comment on one of the other 25Thingers blog - jubaru -

“Have you tried bookcrossing.com? It’s an interesting way of passing books on… “

So I hope jubaru and Bryony don’t mind me pinching this comment…. but with around 2500 books in the house (a very rough count up when I first logged into Library Thing earlier today) this could be useful. Cheers

22/25 YouTube

Thing 22 of 25Things@Huddersfield – YouTube – Thank you

Another chance to upload one of my current obsessions VinniPooh, I just adore these Russian animations and thanks to my sons (Russian) chemistry teacher I now have some of them on video along with some other less endearing, and not so well crafted, Russian animations for children.

This time with translation, even though I think I prefer them without – as I don’t speak Russian the narration is just like music to me. 

Thanks to Youtube user 0xDD who is based in Ukraine, for this

“There is a button with white triangle in the lower right corner of the viewer. It allows you to turn off annotations. You can use it any time you want “