Project Play

There is an old English Proverb that states, “All good things must come to an end.” And so it is with Project Play.

The Project Play team met yesterday to discuss the project, where we are, where we’re going, and how we can maintain what we’ve been running since the Fall of 2007. I am sorry to report that we have decided to end the project as of today. It actually wasn’t too difficult of a decision to make, surprisingly enough. It just seems like the momentum has been slowing for some time, and our efforts are being duplicated through other means. We simply can’t justify the time spent on keeping up the blog and doing the monthly Play Dates for the amount of activity those things are generating.

The good news is that the Project Play team will still be blogging in other places, and we’ll focus our energy on providing cool programming at the annual WLA and WAPL conferences. So keep your eye out for us in the future!

The other good news is that we know you’re out there playing more, learning more, and fearing less. Our main goal was accomplished and that was to make technology and cool web tools less threatening and learning about them more fun. We know you’ll continue to explore tools on your own and share what you have learned with others.

Here are some of the places we’ll be blogging, along with other blogs we recommend that will help you keep up with what’s happening on the web:

• The Ides (from Winnefox)
• TechBits (from South Central)
• Just Beth on Libraries (from me)
• Sites and Soundbytes (Tasha Saecker)
• eHub
• LifeHacker
• David Lee King

The Project Play blog will stay up for a while, but won’t be updated any longer. We’ll keep the comments open until Thursday, August 20th, so leave us a farewell message before then. Thanks for playing along! We’ll miss Project Play, but who knows what we’ll come up with in the future?!

(image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dyanna/3230306444/)

I attended Wilsworld last week here in Madison.  One of the highlights of the conference, for me, was hearing Tasha Saecker present Two-Point-O-Pia.  If you haven’t heard Tasha speak yet – I highly recommend her!  You’ll come away with lots of cool sites to check out as well as good ideas for managing your online persona.  Because of attending some of Tasha’s other presentations, I have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and have added many Firefox extensions.

Two-Point-O-Pia was no exception - I took almost five pages of notes during her presentation!  I was going to focus on just one of the many sites that Tasha covered, but decided that I wanted to share more of my five pages of notes with you!  So without further ado – here are three sites to checkout.

Grooveshark.com and Pandora.com – these are both music sites but they behave a little differently.  At Grooveshark, you can play what you want when you want, create playlists, have Grooveshark suggest songs that you might like, and follow the playlists of other members and tweet about what you’re listening to.  At Pandora, which is an Internet radio station, you create your own station based on the kind of music you like.  The difference is that you can’t select the song(s) you want to listen to right now – it’s more of a music exploration site.

Joongel is a metasearch engine that’s really cool! Joongel has several search categories and lists the top 10 sites in each category.  When you conduct a search, you choose a category and get results from all 10 sites.  I’m definitely adding this one to my search bar in Firefox!  Even if I don’t use it very often, I’ve discovered even more new sites to checkout just by looking at their front page!

Okay – four, but the last one really isn’t a separate site.  Feedly is a Firefox add-on that takes your Google Reader and makes it better.  I’ve just installed this add-on so I don’t have a lot of information yet, but so far I like it.  I’ll report more in my next post…

Thanks Tasha!

If you use Gmail (the free email service provided by Google) you can enhance and improve it by using features offered by Gmail Labs.

In 2002 Google Labs was created as a place where users could try out new enhancements to Google projects.  Then in 2008 Google introduced Gmail Labs as a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for prime-time.  It’s a way to let every Gmail user try out new stuff that’s in development, and provide feedback (so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer who wrote it) to decide whether the features are good or not.

Popular Labs features might become parts of Gmail, and they’ll eventually retire the ones that don’t get much use.  (Google Labs says features “may change, break or disappear at any time,” so add and enjoy them with that caveat in mind.)

To turn on Gmail Labs…

1. Log into your Gmail account
2. Click the link for “Settings”
3. Click the “Labs” tab
4. From the list of experimental stuff, click to enable each one you want to try
5. Click the “Save Changes” button
6. Enjoy!

Here are some Gmail Labs productivity features to try:

• Google Docs Gadget: adds a box in the left column to display your Google Docs; shows recent docs, starred docs, and has fast search.
• Create a Document: quickly create a Google Document from an email conversation or a new blank document.
• Title Tweaks: changes the order of elements in the browser title bar to make it easier to see if a new message has arrived, even if the tab or window for Gmail is minimized.
• Forgotten Attachment Detector: prompts you if you mention attaching a file, but forgot to do so.
• Mark as Read Button: speeds up going through listserv postings.
  
• Custom Keyboard Shortcuts: customize standard keyboard shortcuts to save time by not taking your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse.
• Send & Archive: adds a button to the compose form to send a reply and archive the email conversation in a single action.
• Superstars: lets you mark messages with additional star, checkmark, and exclamation mark icons.
  
• Custom Label Colors: create your own combination of colors for labels.
• Undo Send: stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.
  
• even more

When you’ve added a Labs project to your Gmail account, you’ll see a small green flask icon near the settings link.  Any time you want to enable more Labs features or disable ones you’re using, just click the green flask to make your edits.

You might also like to try the Google Labs apps for Google Maps and Search.

On Wednesday, July 22nd, Stef Morrill presented “How to Avoid Cracking Walnuts with Jackhammers: Choosing the Right Web 2.0 Tools for the Job.” Take a look at the recording below or visit it on the SCLS blip channel. Good job, Stef!

I’d started hearing a little buzz about Google Wave, which will be released later this year.  I did a little investigation, and am so excited about it, I just had to share!

Right now, I have minimally 11 different places where I share information (email, IM, google docs, google calendar, 2 different shared file areas, my own hard drive, Basecamp, the Project Play Blog (which uses Wordpress), the SCLS blogs (which use Typepad), external wikis (using PBWiki), internal wikis (using MoinMoin), and probably more I’m not thinking of right now). I spend a lot of time thinking about which tool I should be using when.

After seeing Google Wave, I believe that there may be light at the end of this tunnel of tools.

Here’s a few things you can do with it:

• You can start a “wave” like an email if the person you want to collaborate with isn’t currently in Wave.  If they then appear on Wave and open your wave at the same time you are in Wave, you can begin discussing the information dynamically, like IM. It transmits live while you’re typing (if you want it to) so you aren’t waiting for the other person to finish typing.
• You can easily add other people to your conversation.  They’ll see the whole conversation and can also “playback” the conversation to know who said what when.
• You can drag things like pictures directly from your desktop into a wave.
• You can embed waves in webpages, and content will be dynamically changed.
• You can take a wave and instantly publish it to a blog (and hopefully other things like wikis).  Not only will it publish to the blog, but you’ll be able to review comments in the original wave and respond to comments from there.
• You can collaboratively edit waves with multiple people, all at the same time if you want.  You can collaboratively create documents this way, with discussions interspersed with the document.
• You can organize with shared tags, among other things, so if one person on the team doesn’t use tags, they will still get the benefit of other people’s tagging.

It’s really hard to explain, ’cause I’ve never seen anything quite like it.  But I think this may have HUGE potential to make our use of Web 2.0 tools easier and more efficient.  Keep your ears open to learn more about it as the launch date gets closer!

Wacky Website:  It’s been a while since I’ve included a wacky website in a post, but this one is just especially a-”pee”-aling.  RunPee has one purpose:  to tell you when to make a bathroom run (or popcorn run) during a movie.  It tells you the time, what will happen right before you make your break, how long you’ll have to get back, and what will happen while you’re gone (scrambled, so you don’t get any accidental spoilers).  It doesn’t cover every movie in theaters, but seems to have suggestions for the most popular ones.  My bladder is smiling.