Thing 13: Library Thing

I added a few books to my new account at LibraryThing. And no I don’t really intend to prepare any of the recipes in the Martin Howard book. This was very easy to use and I love that it is so easy to search international Amazon sites because sometimes books aren’t available in the US. Most of my books are fairly obscure editions so they weren’t very popular. Will Ferguson’s book Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw did have a discussion from March 2008 about travel narratives by the GenX in PDX: A Librarians Book Group. I checked the LibraryThing Local for Ocala and didn’t find any events listed. I checked a few other Florida cities (Gainesville and Orlando) and didn’t see any events.

I think LibraryThing would be very useful for book promotion and event promotion in the new Local section. I could definitely use this to keep track of my books at home.

I checked out GoodReads and was amused to see Twilight in the Best Books Ever list and the Worst Books of All Time list.

Thing 11: Social Media resurrected

Here is an article from the NY Times book section on horror versions of Jane Austen stories.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
publishing date May 13, 2009

and

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford
publishing date unknown

Thing 12: Wikis

SJCPL Subject Guides- This is a great way to promote book browsing for home users. It is a little weird that when I click on the image of the titles in the biography section, I go to a page about the image. When I clicked on the linked title in the list, I go to the catalog record for the book.
Book Lovers Wiki- The pages in this Wiki were very slow to load. It didn’t seem to have as much information as the SJCPL Wiki.
Library Success- This has a lot of great information. It is very easy to navigate and the information is well presented.
Library Staff wiki- This idea could be a very useful place to gather information and make the information available to staff at different locations. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on the site but it takes time to transfer paper manuals to the computer.

I hope to be able to edit the neflin wiki. I am having trouble getting the page to load. Maybe there are too many of us doing Hopefully, it will open soon and babelfish didn't mess up the French too much. I was trying to say "twelve things finished, eleven things remain." Here is my edit in the page history.

I think Wikipedia is a good resource to get an idea about a topic and to find other information sources in the bibliographies. Because anyone can add information to Wikipedia, sometimes the information could be incorrect. Wikipedia does have editors and administrators with special powers to monitor information for facts and bias but they can’t check everything all the time so users may not always get correct information.

Personally, I find that Wikipedia pages tend to be very slow to load so I usually look other places for information while I wait and wait and wait for the page to open. This is kind of ironic since the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia says the wiki part of the name is from the Hawaiian word for fast. So far, that is the only part of the page to open (I have been waiting about 5 minutes).

Thing 11: Social Media

UniqueO Mania♥

http://www.flickr.com/photos/uniqueo/2591953363/

I did the tour for Mixx and did not learn much about it so I decided to just see what I could find there. The categories used to find seemed obvious and this wasn’t a difficult site to navigate. I am a little disturbed by the twit (is that what people who twitter are called) surgeon from a cnn story found in the news category. I think that I would prefer for my surgeon to be thinking about my operation and not about how to tell the world all about my operation.

The tour for Digg was much more informative about how it works. I have seen the Digg link in many articles I have read online so I think this may be one of the more popular social media sites. I found the Wake Up Your Cat photo album after following a few of the linked articles. I have seen the annoyed, barely opened eyes of my cat shooting me dirty looks when I disturb his rest.

Newsvine gave a lot of information about how things work within the site. I found the information about writing your own column and being able to get a portion of the ad revenue to be different than the other sites. Newsvine seems much more news oriented with information from the Associated Press as soon as it is sent out. Both Digg and Mixx seemed to have a lot of random web silliness that someone looking for news might not want to sort through. I clicked on the local news link and it figured out my general area (within 40 miles anyway) using the IP address so I didn’t have to enter any information. Newsvine looks more like some of the newspaper websites than Digg or Mixx. Under the weird news, I found a story about a man who shot his TV because his cable was shut off and surrender to the police after a two hour standoff.

At first, the navigation links in Reddit blended in with my toolbars and other screen information so it took me a minute to find the links to categories. Compared to the other sites, Reddit is not very impressive in terms of appearance or ease of use. The categories seem very random. Of the four sites I explored, Reddit seems like the least usable for me personally and in a library setting.

I think the social media sites can help productivity and also hurt productivity. It helps by putting a lot of sources together and making it easy to find popular stories. Unfortunately with the internet, it is very easy to get lost in following links and realize you have been sitting at the computer reading stories for hours.

In keeping with the food theme of my last few posts, I am sharing an article from the New York Times food section on restaurants serving breakfast items as dessert (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/dining/18dess.html).

Here is an article about a thing yet to be (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/technology/internet/19facebook.html).

Thing 10: Tagging and Delicious

In case anyone is wondering how I know about things before they are posted. No, I am not psychic.

For some reason things appear in my google reader (like thing 10 on 2/9) before actually being posted in the blog. Why won’t the google reader give me the next winning lotto numbers.

I added a few tags/labels to some of my earlier blog posts. The hardest part was thinking of a label.

I have been using Delicious for a while since we move from computer to computer here and my favorites don’t follow me. But since I have issues with sharing (I must have failed that part of kindergarten), I don’t share any of my bookmarks.

It would be nice if tags could be more than one word, like for web 2.0. It just seems wrong to me to type web2.0 like this.

I followed the linked search for popular sweets bookmarks. It took me a while to figure out I could see the comments by clicking on the number of people who have bookmarked the site. Not all of the people put in a comment for Cookie Recipes smitten kitchen but a few did. I have to agree with roadtonowhere about the gorgeous cookie photos.

The network badge could be useful to give a link to URLs in a blog or other webpage but it might be just as easy to put the URLs in the blog itself.

Social bookmarks and tags would be helpful for creating a virtual handout of websites for programs and presentations. Delicious would also be a good way to share helpful websites with coworkers. Libraries could also use social bookmarks as a way to help patrons find information that is difficult to find online, like previous years tax forms, etc…

Thing 9: Sharing - slides, photos, databases

Zoho vs. Slide share: I had a lot of trouble getting Zoho Show to work on the computers I tried to use. I ended up with two presentations with one slide each but I couldn’t open them to add additional slides. I also found it more difficult to browse other slide shows in Zoho. With SlideShare, the browse feature is very easy to find and use.

I finally managed to make this silly slide show about my cat using Zoho Show, which worked much better on my newer computer at home. This would be a good way to share presentation slides rather than make a handout. It was easy to make the presentation once I was on my home computer but it would be very difficult to create a presentation with this with an older computer.

Picture Trail seems to think I am a working mother wanting to go back to school and searching for an astrologer. They couldn’t be more wrong. I think I may be a little older than the typical user because I would not want all the dancing baloney all over my pictures. Here is my simple flick of pictures of my family (not my cat for a change). This would be a great way to make eye-catching slide shows of photos from programs and events. This was very easy to use and the built in preview was a great help in making choices about what the show should look like. I would recommend this to others but I think I would advise against using most of the flashy animations because they were a little tacky.

The lazybase server was having trouble when I tried to create a database. So, I looked at the samples instead. I had a lot of trouble getting things to open in the lazybase tool so I can't really say how useful this would be. If the loading problems are something they can fix, it would be useful to track book club readings and other information about programs. I can't really say much about this since it didn't really work when I was trying it.

I am not really much of a sharer of stuff online. It all goes back to my need for privacy. I can see the useful aspects of some of these tools but users need to really think about what they are showing the world about themselves.

Thing 8: Communication - Web 2.0 Style

Some of the information in the e-mail productivity could be useful depending on what type of e-mail program is used. We use Microsoft Outlook for our e-mail and the notifier has information about the sender and subject in the pop up. If it looks important and urgent, like log out of our online catalog or the server is going to be taken offline, I will open the notifier and read the message. If it doesn’t look urgent, I close the notifier and check when I have time. Because of this, I don’t think changing the notifier would be very useful because I would miss the urgent messages.

I have used the Ask A Librarian service before the recent software change but I am not that familiar with either texting or chatting. I think that with the new Ask A Librarian software that seems to work better during the training, there is not a huge need to set up a separate instant messaging service. The Ask A Librarian service allows a lot more coverage for less staff investment, including coverage when the library is closed. I think it would be very difficult for someone who doesn’t do much text messaging to acclimate themselves to the 160 character restrictions.

I tried to listened to A Conversation with Tim Spalding from LibraryThing.com, from
September 22, 2006. It was difficult to listen to the interview because it was played through a speaker phone and sounded very tinny so I couldn’t listen to it for very long. Recently, I did a Solinet webinar on Using Worldcat on the Web. It was very easy to get used to the software. It was easy to ask a question and to respond to yes or no questions from the presenter. I think webinars are a great way to offer conferences to people who might not be able to attend an in-person conference due to financial constraints.