"Thing #7" - I Explore Wikipedia!

Well I was very impressed with the Wikipedia article on Figure Skating! The article had a clear index and each section had many links that led to much more detailed information. All of the basic components of skating were covered, such as all of the different jumps, turns and spins, with visuals, information on the different variations and as noted, many links to details such as the history of the element etc.

The site was very up-to-date, with coverage of the 2007 season and relevant info on the upcoming year. The new judging system was also explained in detail.

What really blew me away was the information provided on individual skaters. All of the Canadian, US, European, World and Olympic champions for many years back ( and up to 2007) were listed with links to detailed biographical information, competition history, specific programs and music used and much more. There was even a link to the skater's official ISU bio page which is the "bible" for personal info. I was very impressed, and would certainly recommend this article to a customer looking for information on a particular skater, especially the current ones. Our books are never that up to date and it would be very hard to get all this info in one place.

Good job Wikipedia! This skating fan will be back to "bone up" on

A just for fun post!

Ok, I'm gettin' the hang of this now!

Omigod, Omigod - if Celine is coming to the Commons, could Barry Manilow be far behind? ( Well a girl can dream....) :)

Notes on Article "Web 2.0 - the power behind the hype"

As part of my tasks for the "things", I read the article "Web 2.0 - The Power Behind the Hype", by Jared M. Spool.
For someone who is a relative novice with all of this, it was a useful article, since it described some of the new applications such as APIs, RSS, Folksonomies and Social Networking, talked about the tech. developments that made these things possible and what the benefits are. I had not heard at all about APIs, where users can overlay their own information on sites such as Google Maps, so found this very interesting.
Of course the author noted that all of this personalization of the Web could lead to chaos since there is no standardization, but that if this is worked through, the benefits over time could be even greater than we think.

This article was one of the ones listed on the Learning 2.0 blog, so I recommend it!

My First Blog Post!

This is my second attempt to set up a blog- I had already done it, but then could not find it again and had trouble posting to it anyway, so hopefully it will work better this time!