New technologies

Tried SitePal. The character doesn't look professional at all. Probably will not be accepted in our library. Though it may be fun to receive some animated greeting emails from friends and coworkers occasionally.

Noticed the "text to sound" product, since it can speak 52 languages, I thought it will be cool to include translation component into the product. Imaging this, when I type in English word or sentences, the sitepal say it out aloud in Chinese. That will be way cool.

Another video program I tried in the last couple days is the camstudio, a free screen capture software. The program records screen activities and audio into standard .avi file. It can also convert the .avi file to streaming flash file. With little video editing skill, I created a software installation tutorial movie for our staff, it works out pretty neat.

Another two programs worth mentioning are google spreadsheet and Writely. Pretty cool applications. comparable to Office software, but free and stored on the server. Other feathers include multiple output formats (including PDF files) and online collaboration. I will definitely recommend to our library users since most of the public workstations in the library don't have Microsoft Office installed. Thanks to Taneya bringing this to my attention.