Digg

I really am not a fan of Digg. I hate to say that, especially in this sort of a forum. I guess it is a cool snapshot of what people like on the net today. Sometimes I think the stories are a little frivolous. And lots of times when i click on a story it does not connect to the website with the original story. I am not sure if that is our lovely library firewall at work, but I have just not gotten addicted to digg. I do think it is a good place for my hu\bby to put his political rant blog. Perhaps when he figures out not too many people read it, he will spend less time on it.

14 Delicious

As a librarian who works at several different public service desks on any given day, delicious is a wonderful thing! I follow several different storytime blogs and early literacy sites and having them "saved" to one location. I have not gotten into the network feature too often, but sometimes if you save a site that only has a few members then I will look and see what other things those people has saved to their account.

here is my list:
http://delicious.com/lisake

Thing 13 Tagging

I really like the idea of tagging. I think people are used to bookstores and grocery stores that are nicely labeled. I think that subject headings get a little overwhelming for patrons in the library and that makes it difficult to look things up. As for putting this in practice, i do not know how it could be put into practice. I heard someone say once that theoretically it would be cool to get rid of Dewey since that seems to be confusing to patrons, but realistically how would books get reshelved with out a call number? Is there a way to integrate both? I am not a cataloger so that makes my head spin, but I do think eventually something will have to give.

12 - twitter

I do not do a lot on twitter but I love hearing about all the celebs who twitter all the time. Today I heard that Jessica Simpson announced her breakup via twitter. Plus I think it is interesting how it has become almost a way for regular citizens to report news, like when the flight went down in January on the Hudson river - someone just sent a picture of the plane over twitter. Twitter also makes me want to get a better phone plan were I can get online and take advantage of all this fun stuff. I am yrlib by the way. I have not tweeted anything yet but I am following interesting people like conan o brien and joe machale.

Thing 11

IMing. I used to do IM on yahoo ALL the time when it first came out. However I have not IMed in awhile, except for the chat that you can do on facebook. I found IM to be annoying in a social setting, but I think it would work great in a library system setting. I think this is a great way for staff to communicate with each other - especially when they are all housed in a big building or have different branch locations. It is so much less time consuming than sending an email. I also would love to have an online reference using instant message. I think people are much more likely to do an IM than send a generic email to the web manager. Reference librarians on IM have the opportunity to give somewhat instant responses which compared to an email can take at least 24 hours for a response. To me, this seems a lot more welcoming to patrons also.

Thing 10

I have not been really impressed with Ning. I have joined two library related groups in the past. Neither was too active, which could be why I did not have a lot of fun. I do think the controversy about the data Ning is retaining is interesting though.