Wikis

I am not completely new to wikis. I have used wikipedia a bit in the past. Also, for the Maverick committee, I've had to use our wiki for discussion purposes. For some of us librarians in Irving, we made a wiki and used it a bit. My analysis thus far is this: Wetpaint is a terrible tool! #1 I got a virus while I was using it! #2 the annoying moving ads. #3 Difficult navigation #4 can't create pages with the same name, even as subpages? I dont' know the tool we used in my other wikis, but they work much better. Maybe that has to do with the whole account making aspect of it. I like the idea of it, but not completely sold on the ability of others to edit something you put up. For that, I like Google Docs better cause it's more collaborative in nature. In looking at wikipedia (origami article) I can definitely see how toes get stepped on in this process.

Thing 17, pt 1

Not working for me either. on two computers. After reading the blog posts, sounds like I'm not the only one. I'll try back I guess... It's a shame- I was planning to look up "graphic novels" to see what buzz is out there to help me with my Maverick reading. And banned/challenged books cause that's always interesting to me. Seems like a great tool to use when you are looking for info on a current topic or maybe doing research? If I can get it to come up, I'll bookmark it.

As of 8/15/09, I STILL can't get into this.

Library Thing

I just don't see the point. I added 15 books. Now what? Am I supposed to rearrange them? No, I have them by size and I quite like that. Search them? I really don't forget what I have. Catalog them? No thank you. I'll leave work at school. Hmmm...I read the articles. ISBN check? seriously? Is it that hard to look up or remove dashes? Am I supposed to share my library with other people? Not gonna happen. A lot of these are autographed copies! What am I missing here? Maybe I'm just a really bad librarian. Oh well. After 15 things, surely I can dismiss this one as completely irrelevant to my life. I never will get that hour and half of my life back though...

Not DIGGing it

Well, I'm just not a fan of the news. If you know me, you know I get all my news from either magazine headlines or my husband. So I don't really intend to use it. However, if I was going to try and find out about something, that might a place to go look. The idea of the people deciding what's important instead of the media is good. I like the change of format. The comments are a lot to slog through to find anything useful. Not a big fan of that component. Oh, yeah, since I was at school, then a lot of stuff was blocked. hah! fun!

deli.ci.ous

Bookmarks. I love bookmarks. I am a bookmark queen. I think it's part of me being a librarian. I need that kind of organization in my life. I wish everything could be this easily organized and stored. Now, I will elaborate somewhat. This is a bit of a repeat of a prior blog. My preferred format is to keep my bookmarks organized in folders on my laptop. But of course, the idea of portable bookmarks has its appeal. So I worked on my tagging to help me organize the bookmarks I already have. I added more as well. Didn't do anything beyond adding a couple of tags. Anyway, I think delicious is great. All about keeping it up to date periodically as a bookmark backup.

Tagging

To me, tagging has use, but not to the extent that it's currently touted as having. Or maybe I should qualify that I mean that for my life personally. Let's start with delicious, which is where I did first see tagging as an option. Back then, the main idea behind the site was just having an online place for your bookmarked websites so that you could access them from any computer. Still useful, although in no way replaces bookmarks the normal way. And since I'm such a big user of those, then the tagging is irrelevant to me. I use folders instead. The organization behind the tagging is there. what I don't really subscribe to is the sharing of tags. Apparently a big part of delicious now that I'm missing out on. Oh well.
For me, tagging became useful with Shelfari. Once you get a whole bunch of books, it's helpful to be able to organize them. The way that you can do this in Shelfari is only with tagging, as far as I know. So I tag my books when it's convenient for me. I don't do it for anyone else to use.
The other site I use tags with is blogging. This blog will be tagged for any reader to have access to my plethora of knowledge- or opinions. I know this can be useful because I know of blogs that I need to be able to search. OK, I haven't done this yet. Not sure if it'll work. I need to look for trailers on Naomi Bates' blog, and if I can search and go right to a blog entry for that book, it'll save time. NOw if the tags don't allow that to happen, then I'll be frustrated and know that we have a long way to go.
I see the use of tagging photos- especially in a site like Flickr so you can find pics that fit your need quickly. The real reason it works here is cause you can't just search the "whole text". Without text assigned to it, how can you make a match with a search? That must be why Google Images is so darn popular. Too bad the kids don't realize the copyright issues at stake there.
So that leads me into my philosopy on the whole thing. It's like keyword searching in the library. Extremely useful cause it saves time and allows those less educated to be more successful. Why not? Yeah, semantics need to get worked out. Us experts don't need to be the ones doing it. Power to the people! An analogy to consider: is a site or object without tags like a book without an index?

I've joined Twitworld- I mean Twitter

HALFWAY DONE!!!! OMG! Gosh, I'm so much more comfortable blogging than tweeting. I'd really prefer to call it twitting cause it just sounds so darn funny. If you want to check me out, follow me, whatever, then I'm @lionslib or something like that. I spent the majority of my time tonight on Twitter finding people to follow. The sky's the limit seems like. Not sure the last time I heard about Twitter- maybe when I saw my kids' school district marquee advertising that we could follow them on Twitter. So I am following them. And of course, the school district I work for. That only seems fair, right. I do like the idea of keeping up with someone or getting news in small snippets- it fits my theory of there is just too much information out there and I must seriously limit what i allow into my overpacked brain. But what was more fun was looking for authors online. Don't know why but I knew Scott Westerfeld would be there and I was not disappointed. A-mus-ing. Stephenie Meyer- if you can figure out which is the real one, will you let me know? Hmmm my judgement of Twitter's place in my life is postponed until further exploration can be done.....