Wiki II: Enter the Wiki

Well using a Wiki for the first time was an interesting experience. I see why many wikis require the owner to accept a user or have other safeguards for it seems that once one is in the site one has carte blanche to do what they will to the wiki. I'll check back at the PBWiki Learn n' Play site next week; I am interested to see what others have posted.

Wocka Wocka Wocka? Wiki Wiki Wiki!

Watching the Common Craft video on wikis made me want to go camping instead of blogging...but here I am.

It seemed to me from the video that wikis could act like a digital community bulletin board. I have used Wikipedia many times in the past and and know that there can be a downside of the community having the ability to edit and save info; the downside being accuracy. I suppose that is related to why Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki requires e-mail confirmation to edit because they have had vandalism problems?!? That makes me think of electronic tagging in a whole new way.

Library 2.0

Well I read Rick Anderson, Michael Stephens, and Dr. Wendy Schultz's ideas about Library 2.0. All made good points.

I agree with all of Rick Anderson's ideas. This especially struck me: "But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." I feel it will be a real balancing act adopting technological trends yet incorporating easy to use technology and/or easily implemented customer education. The aforementioned quote also reminded me of what Michael Stephens said in his address to CML about 2.0., to paraphrase, he said "if staff doesn't get behind a technology it won't work no matter what it is." I feel this ties in with Stephens' idea of controlling technolust. Technophiles don't necessarily set the trends we should incorporate wholeheartedly; if the average library user cannot use it with little difficulty, the technology should not be central to the library experience.

The most attractive portrait of libraries of the future was painted by Dr. Wendy Schultz. Aside from the Second Life bit (which I think is a wrong direction to go and so do many corporations who are pulling out of it in hindsight) the library she describes sounds divine. Library 4.0 with its mind gym sounds a bit idealistic, but hey I'm an Aquarius. I find it very forward thinking that she describes a part of the library as being a "sanctuary" and a place to "retreat from technohustle."

Samoas are good but Tagablogs are delicious

I had seen the strange spelling of "del.icio.us" before on the web and wondered "what is up with that?" Thanks to Web 2.0 my ignorance has been squelched and my curiosity satiated. del.icio.us is pretty cool. I played around with it and made my own account. I will probably use this in my personal life as my bookmarks on my PC are currently a bit unwieldy. I like how one can access their favorite sites from other PCs as well as the social networking feature which allows one to find that hidden gem of a site that someone else has discovered.

Sylvester and Tweety

Hearing about Twitter and tweets made me think of those Looney Tune characters Sylvester and Tweety Bird. I can just envision a tweet (stuck in cat's mouth...halitosis engulfing me 10 seconds ago from bluetooth) coming out of Sylvester's feline maw before Tweety makes an aerodynamic escape, flyng (back into) the coop.

I wasn't too excited about Twitter. I read a few blogs regularly and have known about blogging for a while but this is my first blog. So why would I want to micro-blog? But I gave it a shot. I found and followed some co-workers, the learnandplay account, and searched for some things I am interested in like urban homesteading. I just don't think I'll use it much personally. I could see how it would be more effective than texting with a phone if someone was in front of a PC most of the day, which applies to some library workers or other professions.

Oh yeah, my Twitter alias is: librarymanimal

Thingy

LibraryThing, you temptress. My curiosity has been aroused by your modus operandi in the past but I had not succumbed to your wiles...until Web 2.0. For you know, as I know, that one can tell a lot about a person by what they read. Even the psychologists agree. A friend even threw you a party, LibraryThing, and had people over to help catalog her thousands of tomes. Today I have only given you five books I love; however, your siren song of ones and zeroes tells me you will not be satisfied until I give you all of my cherished ISBNs.

CML Factory

I had fun playing around with Generator Blog and Letter James. However, I couldn't quite figure out how to use the Letter James. I used a lot of the links on Generator Blog. Some of them were quite amusing, some not so much. I decided since the Warhol exhibit is coming to the Wexner center to go with http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/warholizer.php ,which was one of two Warhol links-the other gave me an image that looked like it was created by an Atari 2600. The future is now, start the 15 minute stopwatch.

Feed me more Seymour

Using the different search tools for exercise #9 was a bit unproductive. I guess the blogs in which I am interested I found in connection with a website or another's blog. Or maybe they just fly too far under the radar and/or are too multi topical. The key word searches kinda gave mostly general results. Syndic8.com seemed the best at finding some feeds related to the topic on which I was searching. I liked Technorati the best though because of its layout and the searches came up with youtube videos.

Feed me Seymour

Well RSS is new to me. I recall seeing the little icon in the corners of some blogs I read, but never gave it much thought. This exercise expanded my understanding of how the modern blogosphere and Internet work.

Using this in my personal life may save a small amount of time; however, I could see how it could be very useful if I was researching a certain topic and could get many daily feeds of said topic and thus many different viewpoints. In relation to topic searches, RSS seems it would be a great tool for seeing what the current buzz is about CML on feeder sites.

And here is my blog roll: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/librarymanjared

Techgnosis?

Well I rarely get excited about new technology. I have never been awed by new whiz bang gadgetry (although I must confess that I have ordered SPORE, which is being shipped as I type, because the breakthrough animation corresponding to the game's evolution theme speaks to my biology nerdiness).

However, I picked my brain for some sort of technological advance which had recently piqued my interest. I recalled this article: http://www.realitysandwich.com/collecting_sun

My wife and I have been researching adding solar panels to our home but are waiting for Ohio solar incentives to increase, because right now the cost of a homeowner adding enough panels to their home to make a significant difference is still quite expensive. Hopefully this solar energy storage breakthrough will help Ohio, and other states, encourage solar energy even more.

1 cheer for brevity

I played around with some Flickr mashups and tools. I can see how the Flickr color Pickr would be good for designing a website. The retrievr was my favorite, but it never produced the owl picture I had "drawn." However, the results were thought provoking.