Wiki Sandbox

The wiki sandbox was fun to play around with. I had a little trouble creating a link, but figured it out.

Wikis in libraries

I looked at the wickis for Bull Run and Grand Rapids public libraries. The Bull Run wiki was confusing. It looked like a library webpage with a bunch of wiki related links at the bottom including a "view page source" link. Judging from the content, it appeared to be for library users (but why would the public want to view the page source???), but not user-friendly. The Grand Rapids page was less confusing, but didn't exactly impress me either.

I think I've got a decent understanding of wikis as a tool for collaboration, but how do you apply that to a library's website in a way that makes sense???

Web 2.0, Libray 2.0

I read all five articles. The first and last articles were the most interesting. I especially enjoyed Wendy Schultz's prediction of the future for libraries. Who really knows what library 3.0 or 4.0 will look like, but it was interesting to read her ideas. The first article hinted at the idea of a giant digital collection with everything in it--books, journals, blogs, podcasts. My guess is that one day we will have a national library like this. If so, then what will local libraries look like??? Will they only be used by folks who don't know how to use or don't like technology? Or will web 2.0/library 2.0 and even bigger technological innovations lead to libraries evolving into something that we can't even come close to imagining?

Technorati

I found 73 blogs that linked to our library's website including ones that referenced our mousing tutorial.

Some of the related tags that I encountered while doing a tag search for web 2.0 were Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTickr and NetVibes. These all sound like more web 2.0 applications, websites, etc. Where does it all end??? I also came across a new term,"social fatigue," which was defined as something like having problems remembering all your usernames and passwords for all your social sites on the web. Apparently, the person who coined the term wasn't fatigued from participating in all these social sites.

Del.icio.us

I had fun with this one. I've gotten out of the habit of using bookmarks, but this could get me back in the habit. I started using Yahoo bookmarks a while ago for the ease of access anywhere, but I don't think it had the networking aspect. It's interesting to see what has been bookmarked by other people with the same interests as me.

Webfeat

Webfeat turned out to be a little clunky. If I searched on my hometown (a small town) over all the databases, Webfeat did a lot of hiccuping and then would get stuck. Choosing just a few databases to search brought up a list of hits, but I encountered problems getting to a good number of the actual articles. Webfeat sounds interesting, but it needs to work out the kinks.

Library Thing

Library Thing was easy to set up and fun to play around with. Seems like a fun way to find books by looking at the libraries of people with similar interests. I found several books of interest this way.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/hauserj23things