Web 2.0 Award nominees

I looked at the winners first. Since I was already familiar with Craig's List, YouTube, Google Maps and Twitter, and have recently played with Flickr, Del.icio.us and Google Docs, I decided to look at Mango Languages because we have it as a database. The introductory lession started with the familiar dialog format but using the enhancement of sound, repetition and grammar in a painless manner, more structured than Rosetta Stone.

I then looked at Farecast, which turned out to be Bing Travel. I didn't find it to be particularly impressive as I have used similar meta-search engines for air travel before--I'm not too impressed with Bing as a search engine anyway.

I decided forego looking at PBWiki since I had already joined them in my attempt to reach the now infamous wiki of marylandlibrariessandbox.pbworks.com, and instead checked out LinkedIn. On closer inspection, I saw they wanted me to use my email address to look for possible professional contacts but felt uncomfortable opening up my email information to the world in order to garner a few possible leads, so decided against pursuing it further. I'm already beginning to feel a little leary having too much information up on Facebook, although I can see that LinkedIn has the potential of being a great networking resource--of course we could do this on the PLA site as well but, as I mentioned before, the site is completely dead.

Online productivity

I've given up on the Sandbox for the time being because I still can't get in and decided to move along. I'll return when I can.

Well I learned something new today. I've heard about this kind of online application and didn't really know where it existed. I tried out Google Docs, tested it out to see how useful it would be. I formated the page using the "fixed width" to see how sophisticated or formal a document I could create with it. I don't think this is going to quite replace MS Office but it would certainly work for more casual correspondence and documents. I added an image and inserted comments, a table and links with great ease. And I loved the online thesaurus and translation tools which are quite handy. This is great if you have a computer that doesn't have MS Office because this is more sophisticated than Wordpad. A negative is that it does require a connection to the Internet. . .

Playing in the Sandbox

This didn't start off too well because the site didn't recognize my email address, so despite the password being given, I couldn't enter the site. I tried signing up directly by creating an account on PBWorks but that didn't work so I then emailed the workspace owner. After emailing a second time with no response, and emailing MCPL's own Kate Tavakolian, I decided to give up and move on.

On Library Wikis

I really loved the Library Success: A best practices wiki which I think works well. I even bookmarked it because I may want to look at it again. I'm a big user of Wikipedia and have even updated a couple of footnotes for entries, and remembered using the ALA Annual Wiki a few years ago, updating it with transportation information. Wikis seem to work really well for information like this if there are enough people to monitor it and keep it up-to-date. Wikipedia, however, is a fine example of how uneven the information can be. A well documented, scholarly article on one subject, and mere "stub" of an article on another. I read something from a teacher that mentioned the collaboration possibilities for students working on a project and its availability 24/7, which would be another good use of wikis.

The Loudoun County Public Library has an attractive wiki (http://www.loudounpedia.org/) that can be added to which seems to work. PLAspace on the other hand, is an example of a library related blog/wiki that is completely moribund. Making people aware of these wikis is one thing (a number of people looked at PLAspace when it first went up), but they need to be easily accessible (possibly from another site frequently visited) and there also needs to be relevant, interesting content so that there will be reason to return to the site.

Library 2.0 and the future of libraries

Quite frankly my eyes glazed over on reading some of these articles and I thought I was reading Marshall McLuhan--fortunately the Wikipedia article brought more of a sense of reality to the subject. Wendy Schultz's To a Temporary Place in Time provided an interesting projection into a possible future, but in public libraries I myself am not quite ready to give up the pleasurable physical experience of the book to live in a totally 3.0 existence. The blurring of fantasy and reality (40 hours a week of SecondLife cannot be healthy) can have a dangerous side for society. The 4.0 experience sounded better but somehow the author's use of language, and mixed metaphors/concepts got in the way, and I was not sure exactly what reality was really being communicated to me...

Technorati

To start with, I couldn't watch the Technorati screencast at work because the software for .mov files wasn't installed on my computer. I did find a funny library video by using the search engine, was able to watch it (as apparently uses something other than .mov files), and managed to have it embedded below:




Searching on this site could be better explained for the novice, however.


View technorati.com

The above ticker widget is supposed to display a real-time feed of what users are searching for on Technorati right now but, for some reason, I couldn't get it to work either. ;-(

Del.icio.us

I created a Del.icio.us account and tagged some bookmarks but I couldn't add them in a cloud to my blogsite like I thought I would be able to do.





Postscript: Well this is most frustrating--I created 10 bookmarks with some 25 tags and now they no longer show on the site. It even says that I have NO bookmarks! They were there for several days and now they have disappeared completely--and I have no idea what happened to them. Not very confidence inspiring I'm afraid...and a whole lot of wasted time on my part ;-(