Atherton

More driving today, checking out the Atherton tablelands, a visit to an old work friend, and more photos!

Daintree rainforest

Had a great day yesterday walking around the Daintree rainforest. Wonderful natural forest, full of huge trees, vines, flowers, birds - beautiful.

Green Island

Andrew & Sam's Excellent Tropical Adventure

Google Docs

Google Docs is an interesting application for sharing document editing over the web. It seems to have most things you would want - only it appears to be dreadfully slow to do anything. Takes a long time to open & close documents, and I can't find a "save" button anywhere - I guess it just saves automatically. Great idea, just not sure if the technology is up to it yet. Strange, because it is just word processing, you wouldn't think it would take much grunt for this to work?
I enjoyed saving a fairly short diary of my holiday adventures on Google Docs. It was easy & simple to use in the end. So I guess now I have yet another handy option for word processing on the road!

Mashups!

Well, this topic looks really great. I really like what I see in mashups, they seem to "leverage" the technologies by being combined. I like the "London: A life in Google Maps" mashup, which allows you to graphically search (by clicking on a map of London) for interesting tourist attractions in London, which would be really great if you just wanted to explore the city thoroughly, chunk-by-chunk; I think it would help you plan your days travelling better, by giving you a really good visual idea of where everything is in the city, as well as little pictures of each attraction, linked back to it's specific website. And of course, the benefit of that is that you can then access everything about that place, like opening times, addresses, etc. The concept would lend itself to just about any topic, especially broad topics with lots of categories. I can almost imagine the library web catalogue being "mashed up" with a "virtual bookshelf" graphic that helps people "discover" books on related topics, authors, etc (just using the ordinary authority tags in the MARC record would allow this), and I guess that is what is already happening with some library catalogue software - searching by picture in a "kids opac", for example.
I wonder if we could "mash up" our pictures in the historic local photo database. Mash them up with a Google map, and maybe some relevant scanned documents/newspaper articles, etc? Perhaps create a virtual historic walking trail around Campbelltown, with links back to the old photos from each site?

Update:
I've happily been "mashing" pictures from our Local Studies database into a Google Map - creating a virtual historic walking trail! What fun! The boss says put it onto our website, so I am very pleased. We just need to add a few more points of interest first, and then will add it to the site.

Here is the Campbelltown map in progress:

http://bit.ly/b22nuc

And here is the London map mentioned above:

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/londoninmaps/exhibition.html

Podcasts

So far, in my web experience, I've only found podcasts to be useful when I have a specific interest in seeing a video or hearing a spoken audio file when other static web material (text/photos/diagrams etc) have not been so useful. this has not happened much for me.
However, I can see that a lot of people would often prefer a sound or video file. For example, library customers who have poor eyesight like listening to books on CD or tape. For them, the audio podcast would be good. Although - how do they find it & start it running if they have bad eyesight? The internet is largely searched via our eyes on a web-browser - which would make this difficult for partially-sighted people, I would have thought?
For video files and audio files, obviously, this is the best way to access them on the web. I can see that all my favourite sound & video tracks & snippets are so conveniently accessible, all through this little PC. Which is amazing.
Our library is planning a digital audio book service, in partnership with a commercial vendor, who will provide digital content for a very large number of audiobooks, plus the website interface to blend with ours, providing the necessary links to digital audio players, and the books themselves.
This is a wonderful service for all library customers, especially those that are tech-savvy enough to be able to download an item to their home PC & save it onto either a CD or MP3 player for use in their car, etc, which is already a very popular use serviced by our existing physical talkingbook collections.