The 23rd Thing!

Wow!

1. My favorite thing was when I surprised myself by learning something that I will continue to use. I continue to use and love Zoho, it really is convenient. My favorite thing, not for myself as much as for others, is the way it allowed you to play as a way of learning. When learning is fun, it tends to stick.

2. I like to learn by playing, I encourage others to do so, and having it encouraged by the entire state of Maryland really institutionalized this as a real way to learn.

3. Well, not really. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and I worked hard to learn something even in sites I was already familiar with, like YouTube (where I learned how to imbed the video link using tools in WordPress.)

4. Not sure if anything – it seems to have been wildly successful! Perhaps more sharing in ways other than your blog so that we can view and build on others successes.

5. Yes!

6. Learning + Fun = Library 2.0!

Thing 22: Downloadable Audiobooks

I’ve worked with both Overdrive and NetLibrary here at work in getting the subscription started and getting things set up. However, I can’t use them at home because they don’t like Macs! I don’t want to get into all the wheres and whyfores, and I understand it is as much the fault of Apple as it is with the downloadable companies, but it is the way it is, I can’t use it and there you are! I have downloaded audiobooks from iTunes and it’s a pretty easy process.

Thing 21: Podcasting

I must admit to not being that big of a fan of podcasting, and exploring some more didn’t change my mind. I’ve already expressed how I feel about subscribing to things, but there seems to be something amiss here – many podcasts that I found while searching just don’t get updated that often. It seems almost like it’s something that causes people to dig in and burnout fast. I found soccer podcasts that hadn’t been updated in 3 weeks, a dj poscast I subscribed to earlier in the summer and thought it wasn’t working, but he hasn’t done one since June. It seemed as if all of Podcast.net hasn’t been updated in nearly a year. I did find one cool video podcast, Jetset that had a lot of good information – but it is professionally produced and it shows! This is another one that we can use to keep up with Pop Culture – and it uses real teens as correspondents.

I *Heart* YouTube

Oh, YouTube! As I mentioned in my last post I am sure I use it every day. From sports highlights to music videos to internet sensations like Kige Ramsey and Miss Teen South Carolina (even though I am officially over her now!).

 Here’s a great music video, Justice’s D.A.N.C.E. It was nominated for best music video last night at the MTV Awards, and Justice is the band that along with Simian Mobile Disco beat Kanye at the MTV Europe Awards.

YouTube can be used to answer reference questions even! To stay on top of Pop culture, an ever-important role of a public librarian. For example, to publicize new cds, link to music videos on your new releases page. YouTube is really playing the role that MTV used to play as far as music videos go.

Web 2.0 Award winners

Many of these I am intimately familiar with already, so despite the temptation to take the easy way out (hee!) I decided to list them, then explore something new.

Craigslist- I’ve used this to sell extra concert tickets, and to buy tickets to a Chelsea match while in London. Craigslist is great if you don’t have the patience for eBay.
Going - This isn’t one of the “Events” winners, but its one I use occasionally - similar kind of thing for New York. Great to find off-the-beaten-path kind of stuff.

Frappr – I stumbled across this one day, can’t remember how, and found a map of people who lived in my college dorm, which was in the Ohio State Stadium and no longer exists. I reunited with a good college friend!

Yahoo Answers - I usually use this when trying to find out the answer to something and googling it. Recently I learned how to dial 911 in another city (ex. you’re in Baltimore and someone you know needs help in Naples what do you do? Answer: You’re probably screwed. But Yahoo Answers explained it better.

Zillow - A great tool to figure out your house worth.

Threadless - Great t-shirt site, I also like onehorseshy.com and of course cafepress.com

Facebook – Just discovering MySpace? Better catch up, Facebook is way hotter.

You Tube – I’m not sure a day goes by that I DON’T use YouTube for something.

 So for today, I decided to look at the Travel Winner, Farecast.

At first, I wasn’t super impressed, but after spending some time there, I will try to remember to use it again. I often search Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia to see who has the best fare options – in my experience, Orbitz usually comes out on top, and Farecast proves this. But having them all in one place makes it easy. I can see how this, and all travel sites are useful in the library, as many folks might be planning a trip still vaguely unaware of them. Travel websites are great! I can’t imagine how we did it before!

Zoho Writer

So Zoho Writer just became my favorite thing I’ve learned about in Library 2.0!

I had used Google Docs before and didn’t find it to have the same strong compatibility with familiar Microsoft Office Docs, or if it was there, I didn’t find it as user friendly. (Never thought I’d say that about a Google entity.)

Seconds after creating a ZohoWriter account, I had imported a booklist I created earlier today, edited it and saved it. The way you can export in many different formats and publish right to your blog is very helpful too. The automatic reation of the footer information helps, since I am loath to remember to update this kind of stuff.

I am currently working on a freelance project that I do 90% of my work at home, but then if I get questions on it during the workday, I often can’t answer because the documents are on my laptop. If I save them to Zohowriter, I’ll be able to access them anytime and make changes. Which, I think I may start doing.

Publishing to your blog using Zoho writer is easier than publishing to your blog using the actual blog! Wow! I am officially impressed!

Thanks, Library 2.0!

Thing #17, Maryland Library Sandbox

I like the sandbox, it allows people to see how easy wikis are to use.

I edited the “Best Breakfast in NYC” page (and wish I’d seen that before going to NYC this weekend! And I created by own Fancy Footballers  page. Since we were having fun and all!

What is fun about this exercise is it does something I’ve often done when working with teenagers – it allows you to pursue your own interests while learning. Now that I’ve made a “Fancy Footballers” page, I’ll have an easier time making a page for something less exciting!

Thing #16 – Wikis

OK, I love Wikipedia. I love love love love it. There is no amount of Wikipedia detracting that can make me not love it.

I love that no matter the topic, the format is the same. So if I want to know Clive Owen’s birthday, or how tall is Michael Owen, or where is Owings Mills, I just type that in and the format is the same. HERE IS SOMETHING THAT WORKS BETTER THAN GOOGLE! Because much of my leisure time is spent finding out more about sports stars and the like, if I want to know where Terrell Owens went to college, I could google it, or I could go to the Dallas Cowboys page and try and figure out where on that page layout the information is. But in Wikipedia, it is always the same, no matter the team, the topic, whatever.

Yes there is the argument that its not always accurate, but our your reference books always accurate? Always? Why don’t you go to the World Book and see if Merv Griffin is dead. Or Lady Bird Johnson. Or I bet they’re not. But to a user who didn’t know this, they are still alive. All formats have pros and cons, and imho, the pros greatly outweigh the cons of Wikipedia.

 Yes, it can be hacked and defaced. Earlier this year the Liverpool Football Club website only said “Steven Gerrard is a diving ****” instead of the thing of beauty that it is today. But, has anyone ever ripped a page out of a book? And what do you do? You order a new one and fix it. Same with wikipedia – at the end of the day, the LFC page was back.

Libraries are using wikis in some interesting ways, but again, I challenge us to think of the BEST way to use the tool. I don’t find the ALA wikis anymore helpful than their website. The New Orleans ALA wiki example had no different or better info than the ALA website. NOW, if a community had posted additional information it had potential. A wiki is no better than a website if only one person is using it, it needs to be communal to matter.

I look forward to seeing  what kinds of things libraries, and our library in particular, can do with wikis.

Library 2.0

Because I’m an early adopter, I’d have to say I’ve been into “Web 2.0″ technologies from the get-go.

In the early days of Internet access, and the dawn of the web, I subscribed to Compuserve for my email. Most of the other stuff on Compuserve was bulletin board postings. I quickly realized the lowest common denominator of these-especially because then as now I was looking for information about sports and music.  Things quickly dissolved into namecalling, largely I think due to the anonymity of the web.

The next 2.0 type thing I got involved in was <a href=”http://www.inquisitor.com/”>Inquisitor</a>,  home of the Beverly Hills, 90210 weekly wrapups. I got into these before I moved to Baltimore, and when I moved, and didn’t have the physical social net that I had in Ohio, I found myself more and more drawn to the message boards, which talked not only about 90210, but also about basically everything in our lives. When Danny decided to jettison the boards around the turn of the century, we’d formed such a tight community that not having the boards caused us to panic, and we set up “Displaced Mediarama” on ezboard. Even though they still go on as a shadow of themselves, I haven’t been there in ages. However, I am still very good friends with one of the posters from there, who lives in New Jersey, mainly because we also ran into each other doing things with <a href=”http://www.wfmu.org”>WFMU</a>.  , a radio station that I was able to get more involved with only because I can listen online.

So I have always seen the social side of the web, really.

 What can libraries do? I think there is a lesson in my involvement in the 90210 boards. When I didn’t have friends nearby, I was able to find friends online. In the library world, if you can’t get to the library, you can generally find a good substitute online. Now, when I made my “online friends” I didn’t exactly give up “real” friends. But I can also tell you that the more “online” friends I made, the more likely I was to make more, and to often turn to them when they were more likely to be able to answer a question than my “real” ones.

In the library world, people will find that there are places online that do what they do better than the “real world.” And then what is their incentive to go back to the “real world?” There really is none! So as Rick Anderson said in his brilliant essay, we need to jettison the things we don’t do as good as online resources (reference books!) and stop building just-in-case collections. There are many things that we continue to do better (storytimes, bestsellers, for the time being media) and we also allow those without good computers to access all these other things their own way.

We need to harness this – when I saw the youtube videos at the last presidential debate, I thought (too late) what a great program it would have been to have those who wanted to do this come to the library and upload videos there. We need to be more nimble – not trapped into false deadlines like when it needs to be in H& H to get to the publisher, or how soon the flyer needs to be ready. Let’s really think about how libraries can make themselves useful and indespensible in 2007 and beyond.

Technorati

I’d spent a lot of time on Technorati since I was the blog trainer at the HCPL tech fair. Still, there’s lots more there than I had found previously or that we had shared at the tech fair.

I LOVE searching for the most popular searches and always have, since the days of Google Zeitgeist (now called Hot trends) and the Yahoo Buzz Log.  (Though there’s something morbid about Skip Prosser being #1, followed by a tag that says “Breakout!” since the only reason he’s being searched is because he’s DEAD!) Anyway, it’s a great way to know where the buzz is these days, and this is something it’s important for us to know in collections.

 Things that I didn’t know on the “Top Searches” were all either sex scandal/porn from other countries or blogs about blog conventions.