#rugame2010 - NSW State Library Online seminar in World of Warcraft

It has been a packed 2 day "feast of information and fun" at the NSW State Library. On Wed 23rd June 2010 the first part of the seminar was held at the Metcalfe, hearing wonderful diverse speakers on the topic of gaming and games in public libraries.

The second part of the conference on Thursday 24th June was held in the largest MMOG ( massively multiplayer online game ) in the world which is "World of Warcraft". Over 68 million players estimated to play this game which is a conservative figure given by one of the speakers on the Wednesday seminar which was Huon Longman, a PhD student from Queensland University of Technology who spoke of the value of online relationships in World of Warcraft (WoW).

Here is my WoW toon

and my character's name

is

Wanglibris

Here is a screenshot

of participants at the online seminar

 

The above screenshot was taken by Liz Danforth

Occupation: Professional eclectic -- freelance writer, illustrator, librarian, and gaming advocate.

           Location: Tucson Arizona USA

Revisting Mashups

The above screenshot is of a mashup which won an award for excellence in mashing. This was a competition held by the Australian government last year.

It was created by Eric Auld, David Lewis, Simon Wright.

"Know Where You Live data.australia.gov.au used datasets from
Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006 Census NSW Crime Data Powerhouse Museum Collection (flickr) State Records Office NSW (flickr) State Library of New South Wales Collection (flickr)/

Know Where You Live is the prototype of a data mashup that displays a range of Australian Government data based on your geographic location along with a Google satellite map and relevant photo from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, the State Records NSW or the State Library of New South Wales collection. The initial prototype was created in under 24 hours as part of the inaugural Govhack event in Canberra in October, 2009."

Visit the competition site and see the winners and explore their mashups! Mashup Australia Winners

On an older post blogging about the International Day of People With Disability, I produced a simple mashup using zeemaps which showed a map and events which were held in our area, Lithgow NSW. In the post about the Rydal Daffodil Show, I used my daughter's mashup of her picture of daffodils using Big Huge Labs pop art app. These mashups are simple and are already set up to use compared to actually using APIs (Application Programming Interface) or Web Development Tools. Google, Twitter, Flickr, etc offer these APIs so that people can develop their own mashups.

Reading from Keen View's blog, mashups are a broad term. This blog breaks it down into these 3 areas in describing them!

" Front end mashup tools: these tools help build web front ends like dashboards using widgets/gadgets and little to no programming (iGoogle, PageFlakes)


Back end mashup tools: these tools combine web-accessible data and services into more useful web services that can be called easily using a REST-ful interface (Kapow, Yahoo pipes)

Integrated mashup tools: these tools make it easy to build end-to-end web applications that link web widgets to data and services."
 
 
I have had a go and used a back end mashup tool called Yahoo pipes.
 
My pipe is a clone taken from Brooklyn Public Library's pipes and I have substituted their search term with my own which is Wanglibrary's Twitter. The pipe ran successfully but now I have a encountered a problem, when you you click on the above link.

warning error fetching http://summize.com/search.atom?q=wanglibrary (420 Unknown)

Help!!!!!!!!!

So, take a look at Public libraries and new technologies blog from NSW State Library and learn more about mashups.

iGoogle Homepages

Great Googling

Type:Course
Date:Wednesday 3 February 2010
Time:10.00 AM to 12.00 PM
Venue:Meet in the Macquarie Street foyer
Cost:$15, bookings essential


Learn to set up your own igoogle page with newsfeeds, calendars and gadgets. Create your own gmail account and learn to use the advanced search features of google search. This course is for more advanced users.

This past week, NSW State Library Learning 2.1 course for public library staff covered Getting organised: customised homepages and Google tools .

Below, I have taken a screenshot of my iGoogle homepage. I have had lots of fun, customising my homepage. I also learnt for the first time how to take a screenshot of a web page (Homer Simpson would have said "DOH!" - My youngest 15yr old daughter Sinead commented - "Didnt you know that the PRTSC key was used for that purpose!""Silly Mum!!!!

But if you want the experts to teach you... pop into the NSW State Library for the course mentioned above this blog post.