Web 2.0 awards

Maybe I made poor choices, but after looking at several I wouldn't put my faith in them. Under Travel I couldn't find anything special about the Farecast site. I had previously used Kayak and maybe it was just timing but found better fares just going to a few web sites of airlines. Under Guides and Reviews Yelp's listing of restaurants in West Palm Beach was very spotty. Other categories offered more mainstream sites like Flickr or Craigslist. I suspect the sample of selectors was too small and biased to make the awards meaningful.

Zoho writer document

New Zoho document.  This is wonderful - won't clutter up my computer and if the site stays alive accessible from anywhere .  Looks like all the formatting tools are there and more readily available than in Word.  Why are we putting Word on all the public PCs?

Editing a wiki

Editing the wiki was easy, though the results are not pretty.

Wikis in the library and elsewhere

Wikis were less foreign to me than some of the other technologies. The Sirsi Users' Group has a successful wiki on the pages available to clients. It's still fairly new, but contains instructions for doing things that somehow the documentation doesn't cover, at least in plain English. The Listservs are useful for getting answers to questions, but the wiki gathers the solutions all in one place and makes them more accessible. Sirsi customers are friendly and helpful and some very smart people take the time to contribute to this valuable resource.





A good wiki project for IT might be solutions to common problems. Reference staff might be interested in Frequently Asked Reference Questions.



At a recent SEFLIN Technology Ad Hoc Committee meeting, I learned that FAU is developing two wikis: a subject guide and a guide to electronic resources using Mediawiki.

Library 2.0 and the future of libraries

Of the perspectives offered, I particularly liked "Into a new world of librarianship" by Michael Stephens. He makes several points describing Librarian 2.0 who is, of course, a facilitator of the best of Library 2.0 for the benefit of his patrons. This paragon is a trend spotter and avoids techno-worship. These people do exist, and I am happy to take what filters down to my technical comfort level in order to improve the experience of our patrons.

The heresy of Rick Anderson in questioning the value of just in case library collections - should libraries have collections at all? - is a little startling and seems to echo the comments that we've heard and discounted for years "Why have libraries at all - everything's on the Internet?" Scary thought when the things we've been exploring in the 23 things exercises seem to demand a tolerance for chaos. It may be o.k. for a generation that grew up multitasking but frightening to older generations that need information presented in a more linear fashion.

Technorati

Searching for Web 2.0 found 49,624 posts, while searching for blogs with Web 2.0 tag found 13,707 blogs -obviously they're counted differently. Related tags include Web -20 and web2.0, which may mean that people are tagging their posts or blogs or whatever with several alternative spellings and punctuations in order to be found easily. A search for http://www.pbclibrary.org/ featured many links to the mousing around tutorial, and several incomprehensible references to Groundhog Day 2008. When searching for the meaning of the "Authority" numbers, I got to the FAQ and loved the FAQ Tag cloud feature - now that is a really useful way to index help topics.

del.icio.us or just fattening?

The YouTube and us.ef.ul tutorials seemed to make it clear what to expect. Maybe because it's near the end of the day, but the site wasn't quite as user friendly as advertised. In fact, it was pretty aggravating. First I checked out the limited offerings by logging in with the account provided but found them repetitious (is that the point?) and a whole bunch of tags all referring to the same"useful web links" on the library's web site. Then I branched out to "all" and "popular". It would take a while to reach any sort of comfort level with this spaghetti. It also looks as though people can pump up hits on their web sites (a la Google advertisers) by adding every tag imaginable to the site. A few sites came up with suspicious frequency. The Tag Cloud was interesting and if used correctly should lead to some self-policing in adding tags.



One good thing - the mango chicken recipe led me to an RSS feed for recipes. All is not lost.

RSS Feeds

The RSS accumulator is a good way to gather in one spot new stories that you might not otherwise be able to keep up with. It would be even better if it arrived on my desktop instead of having to take the initiative to go to the bloglines site. However, going to one site is much better than many sites so it definitely has value. I started out adding a bunch of feeds, but - Holy Cow! - didn't have time to read them all. I've since winnowed them to a few of interest - AL Online, LITA Blog, New Urban Legends (one of my favorites) and the Palm Beach Post for a local flavor. If I let it go too long, I can start with a clean slate by marking all as read.

Libraries are offering RSS feeds as one more tool to reach the public about events, new items, new services. RSS feeds could also be included in something like "useful web links" non-subscription resources that are selected and categorized by librarians.

WebFeat exercise - Where is home?

One part of the Week 5 assignment was to look for something interesting about our hometown using WebFeat. The first problem was defining a hometown. My closest approximation is two towns in the same general part of Massachusetts: Walpole, where I was born, and Plainville, where I spent my teen years. Walpole is probably best known for the notorious Walpole State Prison, and I found references to Willie Horton, whose crimes after escaping from prison provided the campaign fodder for George Bush to defeat Michael Dukakis, as well as Albert DeSalvo, the self-confessed Boston Strangler, who died at the hands of a fellow inmate. Plainville was and is much quieter. It lies between the jewelry manufacturing centered around Attleboro and the high-tech Route 128 corridor near Boston. A current resident was recently granted a patent for a Network Fault Correction Apparatus, while Price-It featured some antique jewelry pieces manufactured by the Plainville Stock Co., in business since 1896 and still a viable company. I used to pass by its two-story brick building on the way home from school. The image is of a victorian gargoyle pin from the Plainville Stock Co. Having been somewhat involved in the implementation of WebFeat, I thought I knew how to use it but ran into several frustrations when Gale kept telling me I had been successfully logged out.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing was interesting, though it seems to be a very time-intensive leisure activity. Maybe when I have lots of time on my hands, it will be fun to scope out new authors and titles. The books I have chosen for my catalog are ones I enjoy for leisure reading. I look for mysteries with complex plots and characters. I especially enjoy the books by Michael Connelly because there are characters that appear prominently in one book but peripherally in another, developing along the way. It was a chore, but I finally managed to add a LibraryThing widget to this post.

Exercise in image generation

Watch me turn into a
Great White at YouWild.org

This link leads to a photo of my fisherman son, JJ, morphing into a great white shark.