Week 6 Assignment del.icio.us & technorati

I LOVE love love LOVE del.icio.us.
It has kept me sane -- what with using different computers at work, at home, and at Western when I was teaching.

• I use it to keep track of articles when I'm making up a reading list for my course.
• I use it to keep track of my user names and passwords for various accounts -- I keep those bookmarks private and encode my password, to boot.
• I LOVE IT!

My only complaint is that ITS yells at me if I install the delicious toolbar at work. I've been trying for six months to live without the toolbar, and just tag by copying the URL, the way Lisa showed us earlier this year. It works. But it's such a drag. Three steps instead of one.

Definitely one of the first 2.0 things I would bug ITS about. But it depends who else at RWL cares. Does anyone else like del.icio.us?

Thanks for getting me to check out a popular tag -- I had forgotten how to see other people's comments.
Ironically the one I picked was the New York Times new API service. Ironically because what they are sharing is their set of tags -- a consistent well thought out set of subject headings.
Doesn't this remind me of something???
Yikes, it's like letting people use the Library of Congress Subject headings -- at their desktops.

Technorati
I can't see the video -- it may be my husband's computer.

As I am currently tutoring an electronic information course for SOLS, I was fascinated to see the different search results, depending on whether it was a search of indexer-applied subjects/tags -- or a keyword search. Boy, keyword searches are certainly screwing up some of my students!

Would it be useful? Hmm.
I wonder if that's how Oakville Public Library and Bibliocommons found out I had mentioned them in my blog. I got emails from both of them the day after I made my post.
However, don't you have to register for Technorati to add you to it?

Week 5 Assignment: CD 2.0

Library Thing:
Well I finally used this! after hearing about it for years.

Things I liked about Library Thing:

• fun to find other people who've also read the book
• quick way to catalogue a home library: I liked how you could quickly re-use someone else's record

Things I didn't like

• once I found people who'd read my book, I wanted to see what they thought about it, but I found it very clunky to do this. Maybe I didn't do it right? It took me about six clicks to go see how they had catalogued the book. (Here is what I did: find members -- search member library (but some had 1500 books!!!), and I kept ending up on my own page.:-(
• For the initial book record, I kept having to change my search where? criteria. I wish LT could have searched multiple sources at once.

I like the list-making possibilities more in Bibliocommons, I think. However, I haven't been "inside" Bibliocommons yet, so maybe it's only lookin' good from the outside???

Facebook: The GREEN page was downright scary.

• Someone hacked their website http://www.greenbecauseyoucan.com/
• This happened three weeks ago
• But no one from the page/group did anything about it.
• Good thing: lots of discussion going on. If people were this passionate about our library I'd be happy.
• Bad thing: overwhelming to try to figure out what's going on. Seems to be a long conversation between a couple of virulent greens and anti-greens.
• I can't figure out how to interact with this page.
• Oh, I guess you have to be logged in to do that. But it didn't tell me.

Week 4 Assignment - Community Development 2.0

I have tried many times to get in the flow of using RSS feeds, and find it hard.

One thing that makes it VERY DIFFICULT, at work, is the way the Region discourages, and even prevents us from installing toolbar gadgets. So I can't easily install the cute little orange RSS feed button on my PC.
Which means I have to think about going somewhere else to click on the feeder link. GRRRRR

But even at home, I haven't found it an easy habit to get into. I've tried 3 approaches

• I put the RSS button in my IE & Firefox toolbars
• I signed up with GoogleReader and subscribed to some very cool library blogs that I knew I wanted to keep up with, for my teaching last summer.
• And now I've signed up for Bloglines.

But in each case, I have to do something outside my normal routine -- which is check email, open DOCs, open Workflows.

And worse, if I do break my routine, and find something cool in my news feeds, cripes, I hate to think how distracted I would get.

Who has a good solution out there?

I want to figure this out, because a lot of people LOVE newsfeeds, and I want our library to keep in touch with them.

For me, I really really prefer getting things emailed to me. I started getting email alerts from PC World Canada magazine of their latest news stories, and I find it easy to skim these, save the few articles of interest (by bookmarking to my del.icio.us account) and delete the rest.

But that's so old school. How can I get into using RSS and newsfeeds more regularly? What's the habit I need to form?