#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...

I like Michael Stephens’ “Into a new world of librarianship” (although there’s some reading homework there for me). I think his point about the library is human is so valid. That’s a great drawcard in a world that is increasingly automated, and no, not all users want interaction at a face-to-face level but the 2.0 technologies allow us to meet users where they are, but still maintain that social interaction. Chip Nilges talks about collecting user intelligence, which has been done to great effect by some libraries, especially in regards to reader development, reader’s exchanging reviews, online book clubs/blogs etc.
Library 2.0 to me is about using the technologies to enhance library services and to draw users in to an active library community where the boundaries between "expert/user" are made irrelevant. It gets back to information/knowledge sharing.

#14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

This was totally overwhelming, again I’m going to have to go back and revisit this, can you tell I am frantically cramming to get through these activities! I did a directory search and got 759 blogs about Learning 2.0 and 510 results for "Learning 2.0 " exact match. I’m not sure why but the exact match search retrieved more library posts by relevance than the directory search. As I said I’m going to have to play around more to get a good sense of what is going on here, or maybe that’s way too ambitious for me!I’m looking at the Top 100 Blogs to get some inspiration for my own to see if I can jazz it up a bit.

13. Del.icio.us

I can see how this would be useful for bookmarking pages when browsing for a reason on a particular topic. My bookmarks get so excessive they become hard to find, whereas if they were tagged with subject headings, well, it would be a beautiful thing. I'm going to attempt to create one of my own.

12. Rollyo

I created a rollyo search of book sites (called Books about...), I think I need to have a better play around with it, what I really want is for it to run a search for books about books to help add to my collection and discover ones I haven’t read yet.

11. Library Thing

This is fun, I decided to choose books about books or bookshops or libraries for my collection. This looks like a fun site to explore at greater length.

#16 and 17 Wikis

Yay! Finally something I know about. I did a research paper on Wikipedia as part of my Masters and I was really impressed by the level of accuracy and more importantly currency of the pages. Of course there's always problems with the more controversial pages getting locked out because people cannot agree, and more obscure areas may escape the mass editing that the more popular pages enjoy. However I was really impressed with how quickly spam and obscenities got removed, which meant the system of mass editing was working. Its not britannica, but its much more fun!

#10 Image generators

I used Flickr FD Toys http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ and chose the Motivator link which makes posters http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/motivator.php
This is great. I have wanted to create a thank you card for our wedding attendees, so I apologise but I am mixing work with pleasure and here it is. It was so easy to use, I had the photo on my hard drive, I just uploaded it, added the text and chose the font and border. Too easy!
Here’s the finished result:
http://flickr.com/photos/14692561@N02/1583554150/