Reflections on the 23 things

Even though I cannot imagine that I will ever manage to make use of all the options that I learned about, I found this program extremely illuminating and am grateful that I am now better informed about these possibilities than my teen-age sons or my techie husband - first time ever!
Here are some personal highlights:

Second Life - Was truly a new concept, even though I cannot imagine to join myself
Bloglines subscriptions - Very convenient
Yahoo-Online docs (forget the proper name) - Finally a place for several people to edit the same file
Audio-Ebooks, Podcasts - Perfect entertainment when on the road!

I was no too fond of the myriad of personal blogs, because their quality is rather 'uneven' and while personal experiences are interesting as literature - maybe - I really don't need to know all of them.
The tag system was not convincing because one still got too many entries for general ones and almost nothing when looking for something rather specific. I think libraries could provide some help here.

Many thanks to Ginny for making this available to the Library Staff and to the Library 2.0 team for the time, effort and encouragement.

Web 2.0 Award Winners

I checked out a travel site where they give prediction as to when one gets the best prices on tickets. Sounds like a good service, though I did not have the time to pursue this to the end. If I got it right one subscribe to this and get alerts as to when best to book a flight to a certain destination. Quite some service, considering it is totally computer generated.

Audio E-Books

Project Gutenberg was an interesting source, though I found it annoying to have to try out which format would work on my computer. Apple I-tunes came up us gobbledigook even though this is a Macintosh and I-tunes is installed. I also do not care to read a book on screen, but I like the fact that one can read many books in the original or better even listen to them in the original without needing to go anywhere and without the possibility that the title I am looking for is checked out.
I listened to Buechner's Leonce and Lena in German and would probably have had a very hard time to lay my hands on this here in Santa Cruz.

Podcasts

I very much appreciate this option because it has no visual elements. I look forward to loading lectures and other interesting content onto my Ipod and listen to them while in the car. It is very great that one can subscribe to them as well and will never miss anything of interest.

Google Video, Metacafe, photobucket

It seems that each site is targeting a specific kind of audience with YouTube having the widest appeal.
Metacafe was interesting because of its sponsored videos which encouraged users to post their own videos and making some money on it based on how many people view it.
Google Video needs to rethink whether or not they want to post the top ten since all of them had a sex related topic. This must be a statement about who their users are.
Photobucket seemed to offer the least in search options. Daily Motion offered a tag cloud which I thought was interesting.

Firefox Extensions and Add-ons

My 15 year old son knew all about this, so I have used these before. It is practical to have these search engines in the search bar.

Google docs and spreadsheets

This is great. I have been wondering how to do this for a while. I think this is a great tool and I am sure I will use it a lot for the Library Newsletter.

Library 2.0

I really enjoyed reading The New World of Librarianship and not being a librarian I was just baffled at how the profession has changed and will change in years ahead. While I feel some resistance towards the fact that any kind of information should be made available, that it can be modified by anyone and anywhere, I also see quite clearly that this is about making it accessible to users not preserving it in an ivory tower.

Rollyo

Being true to myself I prefer less information over too much. So, Rollyo seemed more appealing than Google's CSE. I liked the ability to customize the search and found the sites offered relevant. It seems a CSE is THE approach for a library, since you can control the quality of the information by a selective process before you even search.

Yackpack Meebo

A phone is a phone is a phone....The advantage I see is that several people can talk at the same time, which is possible but a little more challenging over the phone. One could also automatically dial into different groups.

I am wondering whether the whole conversation is being recorded, so that when you are not at home, you can at least hear what the others talked about.

Leaving an offline message seems to be very much like an email...

Wikis II

I think it is a good idea to have the people who are in charge of departments determine how they want to present themselves to the public. In the case of a public institution it still seems important that certain standards are required.

It was easy to update the page. I would suggest that the instructions use the same terminology that is found on the website. So, 'edit' as opposed to 'update' just facilitates and speeds up the process.

Wikis I

Reading the various articles about wikis was interesting and finally shed some light for me on the phenomenon of Wikipedia which I view with slightly more trust and confidence.
It seems a wiki is essentially like an on-line chat on a certain topic with the rest of the world participating and cutting out unnecessary information.
I can see this as a great tool for research and a way for the research community to exchange discoveries or knowledge at unprecedented speed. It also challenges the territoriality and claim of ownership mentality, because one would suddenly be sharing one's insights without control over what happens afterwards.

Librarything

I still cannot quite see the merit of individualized tags, unless people are very conscious about how they use them and then it seems we are back to the organized way librarians handle keywords etc., except that everybody uses their own organization.

I looked up the Freakonomics entry in the library catalog and the tag cloud for this book. One of the tags was business. When I clicked it I got what I expected a list of 600 books tagged 'business'.

That was somehow self-defeating, so in order to get something that is more focused you still have to go back to the library way of cataloging books.

Someone explain to me why this is useful....

Del.ici.ous or so

It was interesting to get to places that I never even knew existed and to be led there through MIT. I was surprised that people take the time to figure out how many brands are represented the Bourne Ultimatum - do I need to know this though? - and that you can look up seating options of the entire fleet of any airline. This seems to be a great service to people who travel frequently. I wonder who compiles such sites and what they get out of it.

My Space, Second Life

Setting up a My Space account was easy and I had most fun inventing a new name for myself. To my surprise quite a few names that I had derived from German fairy tales were already taken. Finally, I found myself the name Camilla Eulenspiegel, after a medieval figure who used to play pranks on the citizens of a small town by the Saale river in what is nowadays Germany - Till Eulenspiegel and Camilla: an amazon in the Iliad. The combination of these two names was finally odd enough so nobody else could come up with it.

I recently attended a workshop about SL in libraries, and so my initial questions about why people might be interested to use such a site etc. had already subsided. This enabled me to see the SJSU SLIS video without constantly wondering about this aspect, so, I could begin to see that there is merit in SL academic instruction for remote learning programs. SL could support the learning experience by letting it come 'alive' through visual materials, and even personality, which could not be transmitted in remote learning environments thus far.

In the article I read the author mentioned that people do not understand the connection between literacy and internet gaming. Unfortunately he/she also did not offer any answer to this question which I would find rather interesting to explore. Now what is the connection. Are internet gamers more or less literate than the previous generation. I would tend to think they are less literate. On the other hand considering the vast numbers of people that are playing computer games one can probably state safely that the majority of them would never have sat down with a book and read it front to back. So, this goes back to how we define literacy. If it is about numbers of people who read a computer screen and use a keyboard, the internet and the computer games have certainly had a 'positive' effect in that people who would otherwise not have learned to read and write now had an incentive to do so.

RSS Feeds, 2nd

I am subscribing to a couple of magazine feeds which I found by googling, I searched a couple of associations and to my disappointment, they did not have feeds. I think the library should have a library feed that people can subscribe to. It would raise the library's profile and would keep people engaged.

Feeds etc.

I struggled through this exercise not quite knowing what I am doing but considering this I am even more impressed by the outcome. I am subscribing to 17 or so feeds, now that I figured it out, and I like the short synopses that some offer, so I can choose whether or not I want to know more.
What I prefer in comparison to a newspaper, is that one can stay up to date on a given topic, without having to read through a wholes newspaper in order to find the one item one is interested in.

Flickr

Trying to catch up....
Flickr was rather interesting. Creating the account and posting the image was very easy. But I have to admit that I have not yet once mastered a 'thing' in 15 minutes. This must be the time for someone who uses these tools day in day out.

I have not managed to create the link from Flickr to this blog because I cannot determine what kind of blogger I am using: Atomblog, bloggerblog? I cannot tell to which category blogspot belongs.

After 1.5 hours I am giving up on this one.

Blogscope, Sphere, Blog.Ask.com

Information overload! Whenever I think about the vast amounts of information that are now available on blogs, my immediate reaction is: Do I really want to know all this, or even just know that all of this is out there.

I also wonder what prompts people to invest so much time in writing up their blogs, but it seems to be a modern version of the serial letters that I write to my friends every year during the holidays.

Of the search engines we looked at in Thing#3 I liked Sphere the best. It is nice to be able to get the latest news on a given topic. Sphere offered a Widget that would connect one to the latest news in a chosen field of interest which I found very interesting. Except the link did not work. I will try again...

Blogsscope was not very interesting to me, because it is unimportant for my limited purposes to know which keywords get the most interest. For any kind of marketing research this would probably be very interesting.

Blog.Ask.com was more interesting because it organized the information.

Technorati fell into the category of information overload - similar to a Google search.

Blogscope, Sphere, Blog.Ask.com

Information overload! Whenever I think about the vast amounts of information that are now available on blogs, my immediate reaction is: Do I really want to know all this, or even just know that all of this is out there.

I also wonder what prompts people to invest so much time in writing up their blogs, but it seems to be a modern version of the serial letters that I write to my friends every year during the holidays.

Of the search engines we looked at in Thing#3 I liked Sphere the best. It is nice to be able to get the latest news on a given topic. Sphere offered a Widget that would connect one to the latest news in a chosen field of interest which I found very interesting. Except the link did not work. I will try again...

Blogsscope was not very interesting to me, because it is unimportant for my limited purposes to know which keywords get the most interest. For any kind of marketing research this would probably be very interesting.

Blog.Ask.com was more interesting because it organized the information.

Technorati fell into the category of information overload - similar to a Google search.

Got Started

I have created my 'blog' today, so I can share information with others. Is this its only purpose?