You Tube

I've been watching a lot of You Tube lately and realizing that this media is an excellent resource for many topics. This particular video is entitled "Restoring Employee Engagement".  Until recently, I never would have thought to look on You Tube for information about employee engagement, because my un-informed  impression of You Tube was that it was purely for entertainment, containing virtually nothing of  true educational value.

Many of my blog posts have this similar theme - amazement at the  amount of information that is available through social media. If I was really ambitious, I would do a bit of research on this topic and post some insightful and useful information for anyone who happens to read this, but it is going on 10pm and it has been a very long day....

My Blog

Wendy's Venture into Social Media

Tagxedo

I did not have much success with "word clouds" during the semester, but recently came across the Tagxedo site. Either Tagxedo is much easier to use than the other sites I've tried, or I am getting a little more intuitive :).  The Tagxedo site has a gallery of word cloud examples. They are primarily the work of the site's creator, Hardy Leung, very creative and inspiring.

I created my first successful word cloud about a week ago on Tagxedo. It was a heart shape, using the content of this website (my blog). It took me a while to muddle through the process as I don't see any step-by-step instructions on the Tagxedo site and I am not all that intuitive!. I was so excited that I ordered a mouse pad with my design on it! I was able to upload my Tagxedo word cloud to Facebook to show it off.

Today, I revisted the Tagxedo site, hoping that I could successfully create another word cloud and learn a bit more about the functionality of this site. There are a variety of word cloud shapes already built into the site from which the user can select, but it seems you can also download your own shapes to create word clouds. I have not gotten that proficient yet! However, by using one of the shapes from the site, copying the Gettysburg Address from Wikipedia and pasting this into the creation page on Tagxedo, I was able to produce a word cloud that I am hoping to share here ... one way or another!

http://www.tagxedo.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address

Protopage

 

Several months ago, I set up a Protopage and have revisited it several times since, updating it a bit each time. Initially I liked the fact that I could customize the colors and found it very easy to organize the page by simply clicking and dragging the various windows.

As I got a little more familiar with the site, I was able to add my Twitter feed onto the site, as well as another feed for "employee engagement" postings. Today I was able to add in some other useful tools, a clock and a calendar onto which personal notes can be entered. I am having some difficulty adding in my Facebook feed, but will revisit that at some point.

I found an online post about enhancing a Protopage site and plan to dig a little deeper into this article to further enhance my Protopage site.

http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2012/create-your-own-library-social-media-monitoring-dashboard/

Flickr Tag Browser

Came across this Flickr tool while I was on StumbleUpon. I haven't really investigted Flickr much, but this is definitely awesome.

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/

Authenticity

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2uyBcj/:1f5U37WqF:U!4_n7u6/www.fromupnorth.com/2012/02/inspirational-quotes-433/

StumbleUpon

Last night I was finally able to log into StumbleUpon! Turned out it was the security settings on my laptop preventing access to the website. I'm definitely happy now that I was not able to get into this website while working on my class work - it is as addictive as Pinterest. I really like how you can select from pre-specified topics, but also incorporate your own personal topics of interest. Although my relationship with StumbleUpon is only 24 hours old, it appears that the sites you "stumble" into are a lot more expansive than the sites you "pin" on Pinterest.

StumbleUpon brings you to some very unique places. I'm not that familiar with this site yet, so my impressions may be incorrect, but it seems that although you select your own topics of interest and "surf through" various sites by selecting the "stumble" button, you do not save your favorites on your own personal boards. I have pinned some favorites to Pinterest and scooped others onto Scoop-it in order to save them.

That's it for now - I'm off to investigate StumbleUpon a little more...will probably still be sitting here at midnight again telling myself this is the last one...