I did it! Hurrah!!

Is there a special reward for doing this in record time (8 1/2 hours for all 23 things)?

I actually wish I had been able to spend more time on each "thing" - and will certainly revisit my favorites again soon. It has been very enlightening and an excellent exercise to do as a library-wide project. I do think this needs to be on-going, albeit in smaller bites and with the main focus on things we can apply directly to our library service.

My favorites were the "fun" sites, such as YouTube, Flickr, image generators, and LibraryThing.

Thank you, Kathleen, for your unflappability and patience with all our little "problems" throughout this exercise!

Web 2.0 Fun Sites

The first site I explored was:

http://www.onesentence.org/

The whole premise of the site is to write a story in one sentence - the entries were for the most part surprisingly literate, thought-provoking, and even touching. A neat idea.

Another site I explored was:

http://www.lulu.com/

This is a site for self-publishing and marketing of writing, art, photos, etc. Perhaps we could get all our award-winning chili recipes together and publish a fabulous cookbook? Looks very professional and easy to do.

Zoho - Yippee!

This looks like a very user-friendly word processor (take note, Vista Word!). Everything you want clearly and attractively presented - my kind of tool! (Unfortunately, the smily face I put at the end of this did not transfer over to this blog).

I also like the idea of having access to your documents from anywhere you may need them and the option of sharing them.

Library 2.0

New World of Librarianship article:

I just added an interesting list of new words to my vocabulary:
techno-lust, techno-worship, digital natives, technohustle, knowledge spa ... - it's a brave new world, all right! Two things are essential in wading through this overwhelming avalanche of technological advances: 1) a focus on our own customers and what they want and need, and 2) continuous designated staff time to develop local experts that other staff can turn to.

Better Bibliographic Services article:

Single metadata creation is definitely the way to go for sharing records among publishers, vendors, and libraries - there is way to much duplication of effort going on right now. WorldCat is a great start for sharing bibliographic records among libraries; it needs to be developed further to make downloading each other's records easier and more efficient.

Technocrati

When I tried the 3 ways to search the keywords "library 2.0", the winner was definitely the Blog Directory search. It presented an overview of all blogs related to the topic, all right on target. The next most useful search was the tag search, however, it takes you straight to individual blog posts, so a bit random. Least useful was the blog posts search - a lot of unrelated hits came up.

Del.icio.us

I didn't find this one all that "tasty". Perhaps my searches were too general (German news, knitting) to find anything more useful than an ordinary Google search could have found. The comments by other people were not exactly enlightening. Probably more useful for more specific searches on professional topics, though.

Rollyo

I created a file for "Author Interviews" with tags "authors" and "interviews" (very imaginative, I know). This would be one useful tool for me when I look for interviews for book club presentations. I could search my 3-4 favorite sites all at once and eliminate extraneous sources.

LibraryThing

One of my favourites so far. Very easy to use. Good brief introduction. Fun to see what else other people with the same book choices as you own are reading!

Will return to this one!

Luise

Image Generators

Here's my creation from "Lunapic" (found via the Generator blog). Looks like a fun site , will definitely return to this one when I have more time.



Here's the link to the site:

http://www79.lunapic.com

RSS Feeds

These provide a neat short-cut to all kinds of areas of interest you may want to stay current on. Of course there's always the danger of ending up with too much of a good thing!

I didn't find the search tools all that useful - they looked too cluttered with ads and seemed very random in their organization (I also came across a long-abandoned blog). I find it much easier to go to sites I already know I'm interested in and establish an RSS feed from there. I'm not that interested in letting more and more blogs eat up my limited time (I don't care to know everybody's opinion on everything under the sun, especially if their writing skills aren't that inspiring -there are too many well-written books out there waiting to be discovered!)

Thoughts about Technology

After 3 solid hours of catching up with 23 things my brain hurts. However, I concede that technology is the gateway to an amazing world of fun and useful possibilities!

Luise

Flickr

A fun site I'll spend more time in with my own growing digital photo collection at home that needs organizing badly!

Here's my brief experiment with trading cards (not too original, but I get the gist of it):



Luise

NetLibrary

I recently spent a freezing hour and a half in Peter's office learning all about eaudiobooks and how to get at them via an online training session. Will do the real thing once I have an MP3 player.

Luise

Podcasts

I found that for the main purpose I would use these for (getting audio/videoclips of interviews with authors to show at our book clubs), I'm still better off going directly to the publishers' websites and getting their audio-interviews.

Podcast sites ok for browsing - if you have surplus time (which I don't at the moment)

Luise

YouTube

My son is hooked on this site, where he can watch episodes of his beloved Japanese anime series "Naruto" in Japanese long before they appear on TV in English. He also introduced me to the "Household hacker"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfPJeDssBOM
- very useful information, if you're ever inclined to charge your ipod using electrolytes and an onion...?!?

Luise

Wikis

I can see wikis as a very useful tool for reference staff. We could finally "store" all the information we need in one place where it can't be lost, get outdated, or only some of the staff know where some of the information is kept. All our policies, passwords, local reference information that is hard to find on the spot, odd questions (for our enlightenment and amusement), the possibilities are endless...

Luise