What I found amazing while thinking about this last Project Play assignment on mashups is how easy applications on the web is making it for us to do things without having to learn much about how they actually function. We can combine different functions, with someone else doing all the coding for us, getting a very sophisticated look with little effort.
To try out Map Builder, I thought I'd have to map a nearby library or another place in our town, because my department head, who's also doing Project Play, mapped ours yesterday. But someone had apparently overwritten part of his work and while the balloon was in the correct place, another library's name and address came up upon clicking on it. I corrected that so that it's back to Fond du Lac Public Library.
I've tried to think of other applications for our library, but can only think of better mapping options than we've used so far, but since mashups are such a rapidly growing field, I hope before too long we can make some creative use of them. It would be one way to make our website more vibrant and appealing.

YouTube

For libraries who have put videos on YouTube, I especially like the ones done with a bit of a sense of humor. Some of them I looked at this week were very creative; I was especially amused by Library Girl and the Betty Glover Library Workout Tape. When I started to hunt around looking for a video to imbed, I found a great variance in technical quality. This one on Library Cats, for example, interested me for its topic, but there's a frame-speed issue that's very distracting when you watch it.

To choose one for this post, I started searching "library cats", but ended up picking this one where a cat is clearly trying to pick out a book, but is too overwhelmed by the variety of choices to settle on one.

Screencasting opens up all sorts of exciting possibilities for our website. I could see creating short screencasts as other libraries have done, showing patrons how to use some of the features of our site and library. For this week's lesson, I created just a short screencast at Screencast-O-Matic, without narration, showing how we map the most common two network drives at our library: the common drive and a personal drive, but we could do some that would be a little more extensive with sound. The limitations would be that the patrons might not have the right plug-ins or versions of them to view the screencast, so we would need to have a transcript available as well.