Digg

I found Digg to be quite an eccletic mix of news articles, images and videos. I thought that it would be more serious and intellectual than it was. Still, I found an article about the world's largest cave interesting, and I was totally sidetracked by the article "Ukeleles Have Gone Viral" when I clicked on the YouTube video of Jake Shimabukuro playing George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". Who knew that a ukulele could be that awesome?! After checking out a couple more videos ("Crazy G" and "Thriller" yes, on the uke) I returned to the homepage and was saddened that "Ukeleles Have Gone Viral" dropped down the page because it had fewer "diggs" than a video of a turtle having an orgasm or John Madden's 2009 football predictions. That the site continues to evolve that quickly (this had all happened in the course of about 40 minutes) made me wonder at the legitimacy of the information. Overall, as a library tool, I would probably stick to safer bets.

Delicious

Tagging makes a lot more sense, now that I've set up my Delicious account. I really like this application and can hardly wait to try it at work. After importing and sorting the bookmarks I already have on my home computer, I added "LibrarianInBlack" , "The Shifted Librarian" and Teri Lesesne's webpage for her fabulous reading lists.


What I learned about tagging is that a tag has to be all one word "NorthTexas23" or you end up with a bunch of useless tags like "North" and "Texas" and "23". This took some getting used to, since I am not a digital native!

I like having the Delicious toolbar across the top. It makes accessing my bookmarks easier, and being sorted by tags, much easier to find what I want.

Tagging

It makes sense in Web 2.0 applications to have some sort of organizing tool, especially if one has 100's or 1000's of photos, bookmarks, etc. I am not sure how tagging would work in a library setting, but it could be helpful to add access points to records via tagging. After all, controlled vocabulary only works if the catalog user happens to know the correct term. I see this often as a school librarian. Kids will type in "scary stories" rather than "horror" and wonder why the only thing that comes up is "Scary Stories to Read in the Dark".

Twitter

I created an account, poked around some on the ALA and #ALA2009 posts, but felt like I was intruding on someone else's party. So I deleted the account.

The most recent news item I heard about Twitter was from my son's college, UT Dallas. One of the profs there used Twitter in her lecture class. She had her Twitter page projected up on the screen behind her, and students could ask questions during her lectures. A grad student videotaped a couple of sessions and reported the project on YouTube, which caught the interest of U.S. News & World Reports, and was then mentioned in an article on technology.

Here is the link: http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2009/06/11-001.php

Instant Messaging

I created both a Meebo account and a Yahoo account, but never did get the hang of creating a buddy list. My experience with Instant Messaging is at my work, being the librarian at a K-8 school. We have instant messaging just among staff (no students) preloaded for us. I use it a lot for managing Accelerated Reader. Teachers will IM me to unlock a student, I can IM the office for information on new students when setting up AR accounts. Teachers also IM me if they want to make an unscheduled library visit, or check on students they have sent individually if they are taking too long. Sometimes teachers will ask if we have a certain book or books by a certain author rather than looking stuff up for themselves on our online catalog. In short, (no pun intended) there are many uses for IM for any quick, immediate communication between staff members.

Ning

Quite frankly, I just don't get this thing. Why do you need to create your own social network when you are basically doing the same thing on Facebook? I can see perhaps the value of setting up an invitation only ning account for a school or business group, but again, why use ning and not some other tool?

My interests are pretty mundane, and the sites I visited reflected that. The titles for the groups were sometimes the most interesting part of the webpages, as I found page after page of forums unattended, blogs posted with no replies, and groups yet to be formed. One library page had scores of tulip photos. They were lovely, to be sure, but what did they have to do with "reader's advisory"??

Time to move on to the next Thing!

More Facebook

There is more to Facebook than I realized!! It was frustrating to find groups to join, because there are so many groups but so few filters. Now that I've found 2 (thanks again, Jeff and speedylibrarian!) I am actually excited to see if anything develops....The 2 I chose are the UNT SLIS Unite! and Texas Library Association.

Facebook

Ha! For once, I am not a complete newbie to one of the "23 Things". I joined Facebook a year or two ago in order to view a video a friend of mine made of his mission trip to Kenya. Since then, I've collected 24 friends, mostly people from church. Oddly, about half are teens from my church that I don't know really well. Why they want me to know their musings, I don't know. Perhaps they want to collect lots of friends and I am a safe one, or the youth minister suggested trusted adults as a way of having a conscience about posts, or maybe, perhaps maybe I made some sort of impression on them when I was their school librarian way back in 8th grade????

I found the link to the articles on privacy helpful, especially grouping friends.

RSS Feeds

Okay, I was aware of RSS feeds for some time now, but didn't know that "RSS" stands for Real Simple Syndication. I also found the videos helpful. I went to Helen Blower's Library Bytes feed and signed up after watching a video about how news is being reported as it happens now via the Internet. Compare that to the Battle of New Orleans being fought after the War of 1812 was already over, or Juneteeth recently being celebrated because the slaves in Texas didn't know until June that the Civil War was over. And now we don't even have to wait for a newspaper to publish or a TV newscast to tell us what is going on in the world. Amazing, truly amazing.

Blog Reader

Interesting concept for those who spend more time on the Web than I do! Someone commented that Foxfire had a drop down menu to check on feeds. Perhaps this is what Explorer is doing with its new "slices" tab?

Image Generators

Of all the options for this post, I found imagechef.com the most fun and intriguing. I might even use some of the apps on my Facebook page! I also found the link to the various social networking sites (including Blogger) to be very helpful and useful.

By the way, the "fortune" I chose is meant to tie in with today's date (Happy July 4th!) but like most fortunes, is general enough to apply to just about any day during the summer!

Flickr Mashup

Thank goodness for instructions! Otherwise, I would be saving and adding each picture one at a time, like this:

I am not sure why the "L" doesn't want to line up, but I guess it adds to the whimsical look. Spelling with Flickr is fun! Even when there are small glitches...as with all technology, one just has to keep at it, learn from it, and be patient with oneself!