Wild Library Thing

I don't know what it is, but when I see or think about Library Thing I start singing "Wild Thing, you make my heart sing." I guess it's my age! Anyway, WOW I love Library Thing! So many possibilities for my home collection! It was fascinating to see how many people had the same books I did. There are even 2 people who also have Weeds of the West in their collection. Who knew! I have already told several non library people about it and they are as excited as I am. I can hardly wait to start organizing my home collection.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=cecilia.mcgowan

Technorati A Go Go

It was hard to believe how different the results were when I searched blog posts, in tags and the blog directory. I found in the blog directory that San Jose Public Library is also doing Learning 2.0 but they only have to do 23 things! What's up with that David?! But...they only get a flashdrive when they complete the program which definitely isn't as good as our prize.

I first searched Technorati with the terms KCLS 27 things and got completely different results from when I searched KCLS27things and kcls27things. I'm glad I searched the three ways; I found some great blogs! I then looked for my blog and was humbled to discover this phrase: "There is nothing in the known universe tagged storygarden." Okay, well what about the unknown universe?

Delicious in So Many Ways

What a labrinyth del.icio.us is! I could spend quite a bit of time digging deeper and deeper into subjects I am interested in. I played around with the item The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users. It was interesting to see all the tags people had made for this article as well as what they had to say about the good and not-so-good features. I liked how I could click on the common tags and be taken to other sites that have been tagged with the same word. I liked that when I was taken to the page where the sites for the tagged word are listed the word is in a box at the top. I could definitely see how we can use this in the library setting by having in one place sites or articles that are of interest to us. I can also see how this would be of great use to some of our patrons. Now I just have to find the time to show them how to do this!

My Space - Not Your Space

I can see how people could really get into My Space. It makes sense when kids are so connected that they would want to be involved in an online place like this. I can see how it would work well if you had a book club and had the kids on your list of friends and sent them updates about books they might want to read. I wonder how parents would feel about that? And I wonder how kids would feel about their Space being "invaded" by adults. Even if the invasion was from an adult they knew and liked.

I imagine I will leave my page pretty plain as it takes so much time to change - but I may find a few minutes to do some customizing.

My Space and Social Networking

I enjoyed reading all the articles (I read them all since I know so little about the subject I thought it would be a good idea to learn as much as possible!) I guess one of the reasons I have stayed away from My Space is that I think my daughter, who has a My Space account, would be mortified if I went in and asked to be a "friend". I guess I'll have to sneak on and keep a low profile - just what parents are supposed to do.

I think Facebook sounds more like the social network for me since My Space has gotten so big but I'll participate in My Space as part of our learning experience.

I'm really intrigued by Second Life and love the idea of avatars. Infoblog's article was a great introduction and invitation to participate in the Second Life Library and Info Island. I can see KCLS being involved in social networks in able to reach patrons we wouldn't otherwise interact with. My biggest concern personally about all of this is that people are meeting and communicating online in record numbers but have cut down on face-to-face interactions with others. Balance is everything and I think many have a hard time with it in their personal lives. And all of this takes SO MUCH TIME! Time I'm spending on blogging and posting and online networking is time that has to be taken from somewhere else: reading books, gardening, cooking and meeting people in person. Thankfully I have a dial-up connection at home so I'm not even tempted to get my soul sucked out by spending too much time online.

Finding the Feeds

Of the RSS search tools I found Syndic8.com to be the best of the lot. Blogline's search tool was also good but Feedster and Topix were just pain confusing. I didn't go to sites that I already knew about; I searched for something new. I really liked some of the blogs I found that were done by library employees around the country. On one of the search tools searching under children's literature gave me some surprising and unpalatable results.

RSS Heaven!

What a great way to keep track of blogs and news! I loved how I can organize the feeds into different folders - children's literature and library sites for work and gardening and cooking for my personal use. And Unshelved for a kick of humor each day. I think teaching a class to patrons about RSS would really help some of them look for and organize information.

Fun With Mashups

What fun the suggested mashups are! I think my favorites are Montagr where I made a montage of shiba inus like my dog and Flickr Color Pickr where I could go wild with finding images of flowers from the color wheel. Of the two I think that Flickr Color Pickr will provide the impetus for using color in my blog. We don't own the book Flickr Hacks by the author of the blog Flickr Color Pickr, but I'm going to ILL it.

Fun With Flickr

Me and Vigo
Originally uploaded by cecilia.mcgowan.

Okay, this wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be! Thankfully Erin was able to help step me through where to go to grant access to Flickr for my blog. That was the most difficult part of the process. Setting up the account and moving the photos over was fun and easy. Now I want to move a bunch of photos on to Flickr!