Social butterfly - beautiful learning...

For years I have been bebo-ing and more recently facebook-ing. I wouldn't call myself a social person, but these networks certainly bring you and keep you in touch with a range of people throughout your life.

By looking at the other libraries that have pages on facebook, bebo or myspace, you can see there is a variety of methods in utilising these. I particularly like the Rotorua one. We have been trying to get a myspace page for youth for a number of years, however the ugly IT restrictions rear their head again.

As for second life, I have also been aware of libraries in here for some time, but forget it, I hardly have time for a first life....

Brilliant learning program, thank you PLS-SLNSW

Online everything!

I was really impressed by all those applications being available to use online and for FREE! I knew about getting Freeware applications, but not applications online through the web browser like that. Immediately I have setup a zoho project for a large technology implementation at my library. In the past I have tried using organisers, spreadsheets and word, but they are never as good as specific project software which we were unable to afford.
The online conversion tools at Zamzar were very impressive as well, if I had known about this in the past, the money I could have saved!!!

Mashups - New York Public Library

Mashups New York Public Library
Originally uploaded by cuppa.thé

After fiddling with big huge labs and making numerous mashups, I decided to save this one. Using the flickr tags of New York Public library, I love how the centre image is of leftover food and wine glasses. This is similar to the completion of our events although it is usually orange juice and spring rolls. A great combination of people, books, building and the culture of libraries just from a random selection using tags.

Pod is the word

Podcasts consume the rest of my time between TV, youtube, RSS feeds, work, sleep and eating. I have been subscribing to numerous podcasts, both audio and video for some time now and catch up on them periodically.
Of course podcasting doesn't work at work, so I had to remember to subscribe to more at home to complete the activities for this week. The British library being one, and more ABC podcasts. I had since subscribed to a Stephen Fry podcast after Week 1, just from seeing his great video on Web2.0.
I can see great opportunities for libraries and podcasts, book group discussions, author talks, speeches at events and even weekly news or upcoming events in an audio podcast.

Answer boards and social searching - Librarian's have all the answers!

Well the bonus from this week is that I have discovered taste.com.au from the referral in the social searching section. What a brilliant recipe site that I will return to. Love the social searching rating aspect.
I have often used answer boards for IT related issues, but more recently have come across them for more general information. The authority of the answer is hard to judge, but having librarians slam the boards is a great way to increase the reliability of them. I love that the public recognise the quality of answers from Librarians as shown in the wiki.

Tagging & Folksonomy

Del.icio.us
I like the way both Sutherland and Cleveland have used Del.icio.us for their tags. We sustain links pages for HSC, local and other general reference websites on our site. I think using Del.icio.us would appeal to those who already social bookmark and would also make it easier to update and reduce the need to train staff in editing webpages.
A tag cloud is a much preferable style of view to see the tags to me. You can easily see the most popular/used and is a positive move away from old school lists.

Technorati
It is great to see that you can broaden or narrow your search by using a keyword or tag search. The principles of library information retrieval remain! The results were more precise when using "bookmobiles" as a tag search, and conversely nswpln as a keyword search provided more posts. It's great to see all the images of libraries that have been added to flickr as part of learning 2.0

Librarything

What a wonderful thing librarything is. I have added a couple of books and put the widget on the right hand panel as you should see. In terms of the quality or cohesiveness of the tagging, perhaps this works for the most part, but I still see the need for some kind of uniformity. Forgive me I am a Librarian. I do like the social aspect though as it is interesting to see what other read and tag who have the same titles as you in their library.
I already use a similar tool on my social networking page, so probably wont be able to sustain 2, so will leave librarything for this exercise.

The tube or youtube...

When at home my choice is usually do I watch TV or do I watch something on youtube. Inevitably it is usually a TV show that I catch up with on youtube.. (as suggested by the Stephen Fry clip in week 1) My first choice is usually youtube, although I like that Google is not restricted to 10 mins.

I noticed that google video listed both youtube and their own videos when doing the example searches for lego etc. I think this is a recent development when Google bought Youtube, as a year or so ago I remember google videos being only google videos. I particularly like that author talks at libraries are available, and would like to post many of our events on there, if we had the resources that is... I often would like to go to the author talks at Mosman and other libraries, but because I am usually at work here, don't get the chance. Online videos give me the opportunity as though I was actually there.

All the DIY and information videos is something I have recently discovered on youtube. I think libraries can take advantage of this and instead of giving someone a 2 dimensional book on creating something, they could have a real-time instructional video, or at least supplement this with the book.

Instead of embedding a library related video, I have decided to continue my Peruvian theme and show this short clip of exactly what I will be doing, seeing and feeling in 6 months time....