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).
No comments:
Post a Comment