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.