Techno Librarian

More a personal, fun thing here.  Although, this could be a cool idea to do with books(?)

I’ve discovered two different Internet radio websites, Pandora and Last.fm. What makes these different, and what I really like, is that you subit a favorite artist or song, and the ‘radio’ plays similar artists along with your favorite.  As it plays, you can let it know whether you like it’s choice, or not, in which case it skips that song.  Last.fm takes that concept and adds a layer of social networking to it.  With a free account, you choices are tracked, you can add tags to songs, comment on artists and their music, and intereact with other listeners.  Last.fm has pages for the various artists where you can listen to samples, and charts.

technorati tags:pandora, last.fm, internet radio

Just discovered, by way of Lifehacker, that Wikipedia has a page of resources for public domain images.  Good to have these resources for student projects, as they sometimes tend to pull images from whatever website they find.  As part of our duty to instruct students in evaluating and utilizing appropriate resources, here’s a good example we can use to instruct students in understanding copyright.  Even within the websites provided on the page, copyrighted images may stil be contained.

Find some images for the research students are doing, both public domain and copyrighted, and use it to instruct students on how to see the difference, where to look to find out, etc.

Wikipedia:Public domain image resources – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

technorati tags:wikipedia, public domain, images, lifehacker

Not “Can I?”, but “I Can!”

Google Maps Mania: 50 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups

If you like to play with Google Maps, here’s 50 things you can do!

Here’s an idea:

For social studies research, have students do a mashup of event or people locations.  For example, if they’re researching biographies for Black History month, create a mashup to show locations of: where inventions were created, famous African-Americans were born, events in Black history took place, etc..

Use the maps to find distance between events in history.

If you’ve seen somethign like this already done, please let me know.  If I find an easy explanation of creating a mashup, I’l let you know.

technorati tags:google_maps

Here’s another way to search.  Sugarcodes is a website where you can search using command lines created by sugarcodes and users.  For example, typing “g keyword” searches google for your keyword.  Sugarcodes has quite a few command words already, and users (you included) can create more.  I created a sugarcodes, lzn, for LISZEN, the Library & Information Science blog (Google co-op) search engine.

yubnub does the same (looks like it was first), and has a browser plugin.

Thanks to this TechCrunch post!

technorati tags:command_line, sugarcodes, yubnub, search_engine

Here’s a new search engine for kids. Quite different than usual, it includes a tag cloud where you can click and existing searches for that word appear. In addition, as you click on a word, related terms appear, perhaps giving students guidance toward refining their search(?)

Thanks to: Hey a Search Engine for Kids that I Like?!? Library Tourguide to Technology

technorati tags:quintura, yahoo, search_engine