Tweeting and Facebook

I can see the appeal of Facebook- it's a quick and easy way of keeping with what people you don't necessarily see all the time are doing, keeping track of old friends from school or uni or distant relatives or whoever. It obviously doesn't take the place of good old fashioned human interaction but it can help at least keep you in the loop about when you mightn't otherwise have the time to talk to. Okay, I hardly ever update myself and have a tendency to skim through most of the stuff people post but on the whole I'm okay with Facebook. Twitter I'm less keen on. The idea that we actually need to keep everyone up to date on the insignificant minutiae of what we are doing every second of the day as presented in some the explanatory material is a bizarre one to me. I found particularly amusing the Twitter in Plain English video which presented Twitter as finally solving the problem of not being able to let everyone you know when you're mowing the lawn or having a cup of coffee. Yay. Maybe I'm a cold asocial individual but I don't feel the need to be that in touch with everyone I know. The occasional Facebook update on whatever random thing has happened in your life I can see the appeal of, the boring day to day stuff less so.

As tools for the library I can see they have their uses. Not a huge amount for a public library but they are just a couple more means of disseminating information and given how popular they both are probably pretty good ones. To extent they are tools which help you preach to the choir as if anyone is going to friend your library on Facebook or follow its twitter feed is probably already going to be a fairly keen user, which is great, but I don't know if I can see it as being that much of a tool for reaching new people for somewhere like a public library.

The LibraryThing from the blog

LibraryThing is kind of fun but I'll be damned if I can be bothered adding more than a handful of the books I've read over the years or sitting on my shelves to it. I do kind of like the idea of linking it to the library catalogue even though I doubt a huge amount of library patrons would use it. It is still a nice feature to have for those who would use it especially if your catalogue is of the more bare bones variety.

I must admit it did take me an embarrassingly long time to work out how put the LibraryThing widget into my blog and I guess using an out of date Google 'how to' help page didn't actually help either.

The mild taste of Delicious and the bad taste of Yahoo

I kind of feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over for a lot of the tools I've looked at for the Web 2.0 course but Delicious is another tool I can see the use of but I currently don't see much use for professionally or at home. At home I only have so many bookmarks and I don't need to tag them and if I need to access a certain site from another computer at any given time it ain't that hard to find it. At work I probably have even less bookmarks and I'm always on the same computer so again not really much use. I can see some potential use for it though. I imagine if you were researching something that required a lot of different websites or if you actually did use a lot different websites regularly for work it would be a pretty nifty way of organising it all, thanks to the tagging function. Also, if you were using a lot of different computers for whatever reason, because you travel around or might use different workstations at work or whatever, I can see the advantages.

It was fairly well laid and easy to use also. Nothing at all to do with Delicious The only problem I had was signing up with yahoo mail to get onto it at the start. For some reason every single user name/address I put in yahoo wouldn't let me use before I had to settle for a variation of my name with 6 random digits after it. I don't know if this because so many names are taken on yahoo (I find that hard to believe) or if it is because they have some weird and unclear parameters about what address you can use but it took way longer than it should to create a simple email address.

Something Wiki this way comes

I've not much to say on Wikis as the strengths and uses of them are fairly evident and well explained in some of the links from the Web 2.0 page. I just wish I was aware them when I was still doing stuff like group assignments back at uni- I'm sure they would have been around then but I guess few of us would have been aware of them at all. As for libraries using them I can see a fair amount of potential. A lot of the examples given seemingly weren't that different from a regular more static webpage but I guess without studying the changes and evolution of any of them it is hard to really see all that is happening with them and if it is a group creating the page i.e. the collected staff or a particular library or organisation I imagine behind the scenes the use of a Wiki site as opposed to a standard website means an unfortunate individual doesn't have to do it all (Hopefully). Within a workplace, any workplace, I could certainly see the use of a Wiki as a superior way of maintaining things like procedures and guidelines- as long as it properly moderated it would be a superior option in many ways to having umpteen different drafts of a certain procedure scattered across the local drives.

I suspect like many people the only wiki I use on a regular basis is the big one- Wikipedia which for all its faults I really love. It's a great quick answer tool, not recommended for in depth study by any means but excellent for the quick fix when required. I've spent many hours Wiki-surfing random topics when I just meant to look up one little thing and kept clicking on links.

RSS musings

RSS is one of those things I have been aware of and tinkered with but have not really used a great deal. For personal rather than professional use I can't really see myself using it at all. I guess I can kind of see the appeal of going to one location to see if your regular online haunts have been updated rather than having to visit them individually but don’t really care about that. I can see it as saving a little time but not all that much time unless you really do have a lot of websites you feel the need to visit regularly and feel the need to be up to speed. Personally I'm probably going to be content to visit what sites I visit on an irregular basis and come across the new stuff when I do and I don't really feel like I'm wasting a great deal of time when I spend a few seconds to go to one of my book marked sites and see that no there isn't any new content. If it's a site I frequent with any degree of regularity I have a pretty good idea on how often it is likely to be updated in general and go there accordingly depending on my level of interest. I'll check on a website when I'm interested in checking on it and if there is new content that's good and if there isn't so be it. Ultimately I'm probably a fairly lackadaisical internet user and the main advantages of RSS it seems to me are keeping up to date and (To a limited extent) saving time.

As a work tool I can see RSS feeds having far greater value. In the workplace saving that extra little bit of time might be worthwhile and being as up to date as possible on whatever information source you need to know about could clearly be useful especially if one of your tasks is to provide said information to your clients. Probably something that would be of more use in a special or possibly an academic library rather than a public library where I now work. In fact the only time I had ever used RSS before this course was when I was briefly working at The State Library and needed to keep up to date on the release of a number of electronic publications. In a situation like that having one stop where you can quickly see what has been updated and go straight to it is a more efficient way of working.

Musing 2: Electric Boogaloo aka. The Flickring

Better late than never I have taken a look Flickr and in lieu of anything imaginative to do I did the thing that everyone does sooner or later on the internet be it just on google or wherever and did a search for my own name to see what would come up. I found a whole of photos of people sharing my name or one of my names, photos of places taken by people with my name or one of my names, quite a lot of inside shots of hospitals, some paintings by a 19th century artist with my name and even some photos of school named after someone sharing my name, along with truly random pictures of things such as typewriters and mallards.

If I were to paint a horse it wouldn't be quite as good as the one my 19th century namesake did...

Musing 1

Welcome to my first blog posting. It's not exactly rocket surgery but it is still good to learn these things and the odds are that I would never have bothered to learn with signing up for the Web 2.0 course. I'll probably get around to posting something more substantial when I can think of something to say.

Actually I'm a impressed at the way blogger keeps saving my draft every thirty seconds or so even if I do find the movement at the bottom of the screen a little disconcerting.