Thing 11: Social Media

Oooooooo….so that’s what all those pretty little buttons are at the bottom of the news story! Yay! I CAN learn something new here.

I played around with these sites and had some fun – on first glance I was drawn to Digg the most. Reddit’s site seemed circa 1998 to me…very text heavy and very little white space. It reminded me of the old Yahoo homepage (and I say that nostalgically and affectionately). I could figure out Digg right away. I logged into BBC news, found a cool photo montage of interesting pictures and “digged” it. Or “dug” it. Whatever.

I had to create a Digg account, but that was easy. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this, but it is need to have the power to recommend things for others to see. It gives me authority! It gives me power! It makes me look smart and well-read!

My friends use the recommendation feature on Facebook all the time; that’s how I get clued into the really interesting stuff out there. It always says something about the sender, too. I find myself trying to connect the content to the sender….hmmmm…why would she send THAT?

Figure this one out. Ha!

Thing 10: Tagging and Delicious

I think tagging and delicious are neat. It brings out my hidden inner cataloger to assign tags to my blog posts…I was tempted to call them all sorts of strange things, but I suppose that defeats the purpose of tagging effectively. I remember discussions a while ago (we’re talking a couple of years ago) with our technical services director about adding tagging functionality to our library catalog. It was interesting to debate the pros and cons of allowing our patrons to tag library holdings with their own created tags.

While I was intrigued with the positive potential (creating new ways for patrons to find our stuff; easily) I was a bit dismayed with the ability to “renegade tag.” What if our patrons assigned malicious or purposely misleading tags to items? Who would clean up the catalog with misplaced tags…what do we do with tags that are just plain wrong? Ick.

I guess I’m a purist at heart and I’m not ready to hand over our catalog to the tagging public. (we never did, by the way)

I nosed around in delicious, tagged my blog posts and had fun with this one…

Thing 9: Sharing - slides, photos, databases

Isn’t he just the picture of newborn squishy cuteness? That’s an old photo of my son, Max. I’ll tell you why he's here on Thing 9...

I had grand designs of using Picturetrail to make a cool valentines-themed spinning cube thingy to highlight the pictures from my recent Clifford birthday party program. Alas, it was not to be…the firewalls on our work computers made uploading the pictures to the Picturetrail website very challenging.

I would think that I was all…most…there…and then, BOOM, error message. Drat. Tried and tried again for about half an hour and then hung my head down in defeat.

This is a prime example of how WE, the technologically willing may be ready to zoom off into new frontiers while our current resources may send us crashing back down to earth. I persevered, though, and went about it in a round about way; I used my old Photobucket account to upload a picture (hence the really old photo of Max.) See? I told you I was getting to him sometime.

I do think these “Flicks” are neat – I could see myself spending a whole bunch of time making them to promote or celebrate programs. I’ll just be sure to upload my photos to Photobucket first next time!

Thing 8: Communication - Web 2.0 Style

I remember the day, not too long ago, when my good friend Lori showed me how to text message on my phone. I used to do it the old fashioned “scroll through the three letter choices gosh this is painfully slow” way and rarely sent messages. All of my buddies were writing me gobs and gobs of messages and I would respond with “yes, call you later” because that’s all the patience I had.

Once I learned the beauty of T9 Letter Prediction software on my phone I was in text messaging nirvana. (you have it on your phone, by the way, and probably don’t even know it.)

Anyhoo, I love the instant quick answer you can get through text messaging and I think it would be awesome if we began some sort of text SMS reference service. I found it funny that the article we were to read on texting was from 2005 and it already seemed a bit behind the times!

I think text messaging (or chatting, or even emailing) from a smartphone is the way everyone will be communicating in a few years. The Iphone has proven that people love to stay connected, informed, and organized with a small portable device. I was laughing at an article I read yesterday online...Dan Moren from Macworld.com wrote:

"Ask your average iPhone user if they spend more time on the phone or on the Net, and I guarantee that the majority of them will say something to the effect of “Holy crap, it makes phone calls too?”

Once you have a phone that does so much, you just don't want to take the time to call when a message or email will get the job done. If we, as librarians are to stay relevant we need to get on the messaging bandwagon. I'll be the first to jump on.

I've done my fair share of Ask A Librarian chat duty and I loved it…I’m a fast typist and I found it easy to interact with patrons through this service. I remember the urgent “I want it NOW!” feeling from patrons mentioned in the article. I never had a problem reminding patrons that I would take me a minute or so to look up their information. After all, through these services patrons should remember that although our method of communication is high tech it is old fashioned personal service they are after.

Thing 7: Online Image Generators

Oh, I wish I was working on my 23 Things Blog at the beach. And it was warm. And it was summer.

These image generators are very cool - now I know where all the cool kids make glitter words for MySpace. Yay, I'm cool now!

I think it would be neat for a Library to use these to promote programs or jazz up an online calendar. I'm not too fond of the "ImageChef.com" logo, but several of these aren't so obnoxious with the advertising. I thought LetterJames was very hip and European. I especially liked the Paris Metro train sign generator. I used ImageChef for my beachy logo.

Thanks for teaching me something new Neflin!

Thing 6: Flickr Mashups

'Nuff said.