Embedding Delicious widget

Last night I was testing myself to embed my Delicious bookmarks into here. I was so happy when I finally managed to embed it, YAY!! I couldn't write a post about how to do it because it was really late in the night, 1am. So, here is the post.

I searched the google for 'delicious widget for blogspot', and it introduced me this site, "25 great blogger widgets" by Mashable (oo.. just realised that I have followed Mashable on twitter for quite sometime). In that post, it recommends the "Delicious Linkrolls". Linkrolls allow Delicous users to have their latest Delicious bookmarks displayed as part of their website. What I did is, I signed into my Delicious account, then adjust some settings in this Linkrolls, then insert the HTML code into the hypertext of my blogspot page.

Here comes the problem. I don't know where to find a section to put this HTML code in my blogspot. So, I read "Google Blogger for Dummies" (hehe!!) on "How to use HTML/JavaScrip gadget window in blogger". BINGO!!!

1. Go to customise page
2. Click on "add a gadget"
3. Find the gadget "HTML/JavaScript", click the + sign
4. Set my Title
5. Copy and paste the HTML code provided by Delicious Linkrolls to the content box of that gadget.
6. Click save button
7. Woohoo!! My delicious bookmarks was successfully embedded into my blog.

I love this adventure of trying, seeking, testing and the joy of found it and use it....

Proudly present to you, my twitter!!

Twitter!! The 21st century hottest microblogging tool so far..

I heard of it. I signed up for it when US president Obama said he was on twitter last year, but, I didn't tweet or use it until December 2009. This is due to I have a negative impression of it at the start. I thought, why should I let other people know what I am doing all day long? And I am not interested to know what other people did to their life, living, work, study or whatever.

And, here comes the change. During my long four months summer holiday break, I have time to visit many librarian blogs. I bookmarked them (most of them, especially those who are active in blogging). I found that, nearly half of them have twitter account. Because I was so attracted to these librarians' blog posts, I started to think, may be I can use my twitter to follow them. Since then, twitter has become another information gathering channel for me. I log onto it several times a day using my mobile twitter platform, and I have many recent and newest issues and topics about librarianship; issues related to information institutes, university and high school libraries; social media new tools, application and trends; the latest web related technology development news and etc.

Here is my twitter and you are welcome to have a peek on my most recent updates to the left of this blog.


I have only 25 followers. I filtered most of the advertising and "spam" followers. I don't follow many people too (only 69 for the moment), because I am very selective in whom I follow. Think of this, when I follow someone, I will get their tweets showing on my twitter. If they are not tweeting quality information, I will have wasted my time reading over those unnecessary rubbish. This is the issue of how to manage my twitter to best suit my need.

Oh yes! Thanks to John (our lecturer of Doc Man) who linked the bit.ly that can shorten the URL I want to include in my tweet. Bit.ly is very useful.

I will show you my lists of whom I have followed next post.

NLA newspaper digitisation program

Our proud national collaboration project in digitising historic (out of copyright) newspapers (1803-1954) owned by each states. The greatest thing about this project is, it invites public to join the project in correcting errors on digitised newspaper articles. It was initiated by The National Library of Australia in 2007. I have browse and read through its program overview. I was amazed by its Project Details page which has included: project details and progress reports, the processing and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of newspapers, metadata, system architecture, content management system, search and delivery system, statistics of service usage, public collaborative text correction and tagging of newspaper articles. It also listed which newspapers are available and how we as public can involve in this project.

The public contribution in text correction opened my view towards newspaper digitisation, and how a national digitisation program can benefit the entire country through the collaboration of each states and community libraries. This program not only provides searching capability for historic newspaper articles, it also serves as a teaching tool for primary, secondary and ESL students in learning Australian History, English and etc. It also benefits for researchers especially who are specialised in Australian History and Genealogy.

Here comes the actual site, and its wonderful quick and easy online tutorial on how to search and correct the text. The article that I have chosen was about the launching of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) in 1906. I guess the original article must be really old, and the digitised image through OCR is really poor on this particular article. Please refer to the first 13 lines of the article on left. I barely can see the correct spelling, neither can the OCR. The accuracy of OCR technique used in this project averages from 71% to 98.02%. But I still can read over it with zoom function. And I have made some corrections to the first 6 lines of the text. That's why public is encouraged to participate and contribute to the correction of the digitised text.

I love to contribute in this project. It is simple to use and no strict rules as the wikipedia and other scholarly collaboration sites. This is good and suit my current level of collaboration work to public project.

THE PROJECT IS REALLY COOL!!!