library 2.0

Yeah, I have talked a lot about library 2.0 in my classes at school. I completely agree that libraries all over the country need to take advantage of the tools that web 2.0 has to offer. These tools help us to connect with the younger generations who spend most of their internet time at social networking sites, and by fostering and encouraging their use of libraries we create a customer for many years to come. But it should also be noted that people of all ages use all of these social networking sites, so really we have an opportunity to meet all sorts of users. I really like the ideas about making a library website kind of amazon-like. When a user sign-in recommendations pop-up based on his or her general interests. Tagging and customer commentary also seems that it would help users in selecting materials. I constantly cite the reviews on amazon and other online book sellers to get an idea of the book. Without having the book in hand, I strongly rely on commentary because the content description never really satisfies me. I think customer commentary would be really nice with the audio book catalog.

One thing that libraries need to remember is the digital divide runs deep in this country. People who do not own computers or do not have access to the internet are still a large part of the clientele. Librarians cannot allow their drive to keep up with all the technological advancements consume them to the point that they forget about the other populations they serve.

Technorati

Well, I guess the site is okay. I did see some interesting things... I guess some people maintain a blog about raising Free Range Kids, where you actually let them out of your sight to discover things on their own. I am a big fan of the idea, although I have no kids, and don't really ever plan to have any, but that's how I grew up and I turned out okay. I still don't know if I like reading blogs. I guess I can't really care about anonymous people's lives, never got into the reality tv either. And for the blogs concerning interesting news, they are useful in as much as they inform me about something, and I then go to credible resources to figure out the real story.

#13

I think that this exercise was kind of useful. So I created an account, and renamed all of my bookmarks with new tags, so now they all fit into pretty little categories. And then I went up to favorites and select blogger.com to get here. Yup, kind of absurd, no? I guess my point is that it will take quite a while before I get out of the habit of using favorites, and while it is nice to have all my bookmarks on the web so that I can access them from any computer, I do not think that I will find myself signing onto Delicious.com in order to go to my Favorites. So I will probably never get out of the habit of using Favorites, but I now know that when my computer dies I will still have my Favorites.

Rollyo

This exercise was okay. Perhaps I am not being creative enough today because I really could not think of a theme that would make this exercise fun. I chose local news, pretty boring. I guess I can see the usefulness of this for a job if a lot of the information you need is stored on the web. I thought it might be useful to me with school work, but I am not sure. All the sites that I need to look through for school require a log-in so I doubt I can add them to a Rollyo.

Wow! The whole getting the Library Thing on to the blog was an adventure. Thanks to the people in the staff forum for helping me figure out the whole thing with having to add a gadget.

Image Generator

This is the image that I made. I love cheesy horror movies; they are hilarious. I played around with a lot of different image generators, some were cool, a lot of them were not. But I like this one okay so I am sticking with it.

More RSS Feeds

Well I did not like this exercise as much as the previous one. I am not a fan of the three websites that were suggested. They look cluttered, and I could find many feeds that worked with Bloglines. I ended up searching Google for BBC news, and found a feed for Bloglines on that website. I have a lot of feeds on Bloglines already, and I completely understand the process of how to obtain new feeds, so I only chose to pick up two more feeds, NPR and BBC Americas. One problem I am having with all of this news is that I am not able to get through it all. Oh well, it is still fun.