Wednesday, June 18, 2008

the sandbox

I have to say playing in the sandbox has been the most fun for me. I enjoyed reading others "favorites" and it was fun adding my own. This may also turn out to be a good resource for library employees and patrons...kind of along the same lines of "What Do I Read Next?"

Wikis

Wiki's to me are kind of scary. ANYONE can edit, change, add information that is incorrect. The Library Success wiki now has an email confirmation needed to edit the wiki. This just illustrates my point. They are experiencing a vandalism problem so they had to take certain measures in order to deal with it.

Web 2.0

The ability to easily update information and keep up with the constantly changing technology is, to me, one of the most important aspects of web 2.0. This also leads to feedback from patrons and users and helps libraries see where their needs are. In "To better bibliographic services", John J. Reimer mentions the Open WorldCat project as does Chip Nilges in "To more powerful ways to cooperate". This seems to be a good project in which to experiment with the different aspects of web 2.0 and whether it will be beneficial to libraries. Nilges says, "Our next major effort in this area will be the release, this spring, of a search box that will allow anyone with a Web browser to search all of WorldCat, no authentication required." I just wonder if no authentication is required, will this lead to the eradication of the library?

Technorati

I don't like this site very much. It seems really busy and not very user-friendly. I searched for web 2.0 and thought I had found a link with interesting info but it was just a post consisting of a few sentences. I realize you can search different types of networking but when I went to the blogs tab I couldn't find the one I was looking for.

del.icio.us

Again, I like the idea of del.icio.us. The collection of all the websites you like in one spot. And, that you can access it from any computer and you're not limited like using bookmarks where those websites are saved only on one computer. I also like the fact that you can make your del.icio.us page public so that others that may have the same interests as you are able to see your list. And, if they have sites that you might be interested in, you have access to those as well.

Generators etc...

I checked out some of the generators. The image generator I played with was the warholizer. That was fun but someone pointed out to me that printing out the image was a waste of toner.
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/warholizer.php

The other generator that I wanted to note was the Alanis Morrisette Random Lyric generator. It's like mad libs.
http://www.brunching.com/alanislyrics.html

I already had a LibraryThing account that I have let fall by the wayside.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=Mandi025&shelf=list

I like the idea of WebFeet. It encompasses so much and it's easy to use. However, putting my town of Lantana in didn't yield too many results. "The untold story : my 20 years running the National Enquirer."

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

RSS Feeds

I definitely like the concept of RSS feeds, however, I'm not dedicated enough to remember to log into this website and check my info. (I have a facebook account and NEVER check it...it's just not my thing.) But if we had RSS feeds on our website that offered book reviews, news websites etc that might encourage people to check our website more often.