#13 Technorati and popularity

I'm late posting this, but the week that we did Technorati, both Learning 2.0 and kcls27things were on the Technorati's list of most popular searches. There was even a guy in Maryland who blogged about us, saying that there was this thing that was creating quite a bit of buzz that was apparently a staff learning experience for a library. I don't think he realized that all the buzz was created by 400 KCLS staff members all searching for the same things on Technorati that week.

I've just gone back there and, alas, we are no longer in the list of most popular searches...

#12 Tagging and Social bookmarking

I thought this might be an easier way for people to access Answer Line's favorites, so I uploaded them to Del.icio.us and started adding the toolbar icons to our computers. But, I need to tag all of the bookmarks in order to make any sense of them on Del.icio.us... at the moment they are all just listed out in alphabetical order. I was thinking that people could add their own tags so that they can easily find the bookmarked sites. This will have to be an ongoing project, but I'll see if I can make it work for us.

#10 & #11 My Space and friends

I admit that I set up a My Space account a couple of weeks ago so that Barack Obama would be my friend! I know he has over 77,000 other friends, but I'm sure I'm special!

Now we don't "befriend" people, we just "friend" them. And these "friends" could be people we've never met before. Will it become similar to mail, where now, if we are referring to letters that are actually written on paper and mailed to us, we call it "snail mail"? In the future, if we're actually getting together in person with friends, will we have to refer to them as "flesh friends" so that people know we are talking about an actual face-to-face meeting?

I'm not sure about how this will all work out for libraries. I think it is cool that authors have "friended" the KCLS page, and kids who are into reading might find that useful (on the other hand, if the author already has a presence on My Space, the kids have probably already found it). It also seems that kids are going to leave My Space (as I understand they are now doing) because it is becoming too popular with people of all ages, and that ruins the fun. For now, though, having KCLS on My Space so that kids and teens can easily find out about library programs that they might be interested in seems like a good thing.

#9 Social networking

After seeing Stephen Abram's talk, I was curious about some of these social networking environments, especially Second Life, so for the past few weeks I've been spending a little time there. I'm not a gamer, so the learning curve is pretty steep for me in this type of environment, but I think it has a lot of potential. However, after reading the article about the librarian in SL, I wonder how much use it could really be for libraries. The librarian mentioned that most of her questions related to the SL environment itself ("how do I get my avatar to stop dancing?")

I saw a report on CBS Sunday Morning a couple of weeks ago about Second Life, and they mentioned that some people have made a lot of money (up to $200,000 a year) by setting up virtual shops and selling things there. Just another space on the web, but a different one than I'm used to, so I'm finding it interesting right now.

The Joy of RSS

RSS is a useful time-saver! I have seen many references to RSS but haven't bothered before now to learn about it (thanks, Learning 2.0!). It is very handy to have the newest information from my favorite sites in one place (well, not all of my favorites... see below).

At first, I tried to go to several of my favorite sites to add them, but alas, none of them had RSS feeds available. I ended up choosing a few of blogline's suggested sites, and also searching with their search tool to find some other sites that looked interesting. I also tried some of the other search tools but didn't find them as useful as blogline's.

I've added several book review and library sites and blogs, and also some fun sites like the Daily Show Videos (which I found by looking at blogline's recommendations). Now I'm a bit confused... I was doing this while answering phone calls, but I'm sure that when I first set up my bloglines account, there was a place where I clicked and got recomendations broken down into categories; also there was a list of the most popular feeds on bloglines. Now that I've subscribed to some feeds, I don't see these things any more... was I hallucinating? Or maybe those categories only show up for new subscribers. That's what I get for doing two things at once... confusion!

Anyway, I'm sure that's how I found the Daily Show Videos, as well as Scientific American and the Librarians' Internet Index. It was easy. Now if only more of my favorite sites would add RSS feeds...

Flickr mashups

I've been exploring the mashups on Flickr, and I have to say that my favorite one right now is the Montagr. I could waste a lot of time playing with that one!

Actually, they're all fun diversions. The trading cards could be useful. It would be fun to have librarian trading cards -- avidly collected and traded, of course.

Flickr and blogging

I am already behind in my 27 things! I have found it difficult to fit it in at work and haven't had much time at home this week to really work with Flickr. If you have never used Flickr before, it is fairly time-consuming to do all of the things we are asked to do. I have managed to upload a few photos to my Flickr account (awaiting approval, I assume), and I have also explored some of the public photos. Here is a link to a recent photo montage that I particularly liked:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloudnumber9/415708017/

Too bad we couldn't see the lunar eclipse from here!

I think Flickr is a fun site and I might use it in the future to post photos for friends and family members to view.

The most difficult part of Learning 2.0 for me so far is blogging. I have never had a burning desire to blog, and most of the personal blogs I've seen are, well... boring. "Today I took the bus to Fremont and got my hair cut", for example. I actually read that on someone's blog once! Now, I can see posting about getting your hair cut if you went in just to get a trim and came out with an orange mohawk, or if the hairstylist slipped and lopped off your ear (in which case, it would be a public service to name the salon so I would know to avoid it!), but nothing unusual seems to have happened in this case, so is just getting a haircut blogworthy?

But maybe I'll learn to like blogging by doing this exercise and I, too, can join the ranks of bloggers who write about what they ate for breakfast!

My first post

OK, I'm posting (hi, Matt!). Setting up a blog was easy, but thinking of something interesting to blog about, not so easy.