The end?

Reflecting on the 23 things, I can see a lot of uses for many of the neat tools we've been playing with. I do struggle with the balance of adding some communication tools, providing one more thing for staff to need to check...and am proceding with caution in light of our workforce planning taskforce's discovery of just how much time we spend each day in electronic communication.

That said, there are tools that do build efficiencies in here...and particularly for work groups who aren't working close together on a daily basis (particularly homework help center coordinators).

I do think that the 23 things has helped all of us learn better how to share the uses of Web 2.0 tools with our customers, who very much want to learn how to use them. In this respect, this has been an invaluable experience for all of us...and it certainly was fun!

I know I will keep up with twitter and facebook on my own...and librarything has been a very useful professional tool. I have appreciated the opportunity to learn & play!

MOLDI by any other name...

I admit I've not been using MOLDI in spite of my addiction to audio books. This is largely because I'm an IPOD user...I am very happy that this is no longer going to be an impediment soon!

While I am excited for the opportunity to become a MOLDI user, I have to say...while I can find what I want on MOLDI, I typically know what I'm looking for. MOLDI is not a very browsable site. In particular, whoever is deciding what is "children's" and what is "teen" may be throwing darts at a wall. Teen is a useless section to browse, with only 22 titles...and with Breaking Dawn in children's. Either put them together or separate them properly, I say!

Could the good folks at aqua browser do something with the MOLDI interface, I wonder?

podcasts...meh

I get it...I just lack patience for looking for the right ones and I lack the time to keep up with them once I find them.

One key takeaway from searching podcast directories is this: DO NOT start one if you don't want to keep doing it. It looks really bad to have a "weekly" podcast that hasn't had a new episode since July. It's a commitment to set up...but I saw a library that had adult/youth/teen podcasts...they just didn't look current. It'd be a cool thing to do if they could be kept up to date!

YouTube and guilty pleasures

I haven't spent much time with youtube...and had some difficulty figuring out how to search effectively for the good stuff. My sad, secret (now not-so) shame is that I enjoyANTM...and since we've lost the CW network on Time Warner I have been unable to get my fix. On Sunday I spent a couple of hours getting caught up. Hey every once in a while I need a break from being all intellectual and stuff!

Here's what I watched, so that I can test posting the embed code into my blog.



I think the really nice piece for libraries is that it makes it easy to share videos on more easily navigable websites (hopefully, any library webpage will fall into this category). As ever one of the things libraries are good at is getting people to the best information for them in this overwhelming morass of inormation that is out there. Same goes for youtube...we librarians need to play to our strengths!

Power Tools Page & Stumbleupon

Well, looking at the Power Tools Page from the CML website, it seems to me that there should be more stuff there and/or we should just send folks to The Web 2.0 Award site. It's a lot to keep current on...and maybe the awards site will be more current and more complete. Our power tools page reads more like a list of random things that our librarians have stumbled upon. That said, the stumbleupon concept is quite nice...and I did take the opportunity to look around a bit using it. A good place to go if one actually NEEDS more web sites to visit regularly!!!

face book: almost more addictive than twitter!

Perhaps the reason I've gotten so, erm, behind on L&P things is thing 18! I've found Facebook...and it's something I've spent minimal time on at work, and exorbitant amounts of time on at home! In a fit of utter madness, I created a facebook profile for my dog. If you don't believe me, click here! I've added a widget to my blog that links to my facebook profile or click here, friend me if you want. I've even set it up so that my tweets go straight to my facebook status. That said, there are people on facebook, my husband amongst them, who think my status updates come to frequently when doing it that way. Tough, I say, because otherwise my facebook status wouldn't get updated 'cause I USE TWITTER! So there.

google docs

My previous post was posted directly to the blog from google docs. A small group of 4 co-wrote the document using google docs back in August. Thought I'd see what posting it to my blog would look like. Please not that the text of this post is identical to that of my very first blog post...which shows how much I've learned about using Web 2.0 tools to make things easier for myself! While I'm not uber impressed with how the formatting came through, it's fairly handy to be able to post straight to a blog. More importantly, though, is how fabulous an experience it was co-authoring a document using google docs. While there were times when several people were logged in and editing at once that were frustrating...generally speaking, it is a very slick thing made even better by the fact that it is free!