Mashups

I visited Mashupawards.com and browsed through numerous sites. Most of them were really pretty useless unless you were interested in their specific focus, like 24 hour restaurants or other esoteric information. The one I found most useful was Quick.as. It's a mashup that can be used as a really useful home or start page with links to various types of search options, news sources, mail and social networking sites and services like YouTube and Babblefish. The only thing that I didn't like was the inclusion of links to specific banks like CitiBank and Chase. It made me a little nervous. The developer of this site, Beep, is an Aussie firm claiming to be noninvasive and focusing on developing, marketing and commercializing web and mobile apps. I guess you need bank backing for that.

Similarly, there is marketing galore on Rollyo.com with every few hits of my privacy search interspersed with ads for, you guessed it, products related to privacy! Unlike with Quick.as where the links were set, the level of complexity and specificity of this marketing is extraordinary. It changes in relation to search topic! I got the impression my privacy was being violated but I think I'm a marketing person at heart because I found it very impressive! My privacy search of the multiple library blogs listed returned over 9500 hits. They extended years back and most were really unimpressive. There seems to be an obvious (and I guess expected) perception that the privacy expectations and desires of older people are much different than those of younger people. I would suggest this is from discomfort with online use and having grown up in a different political culture but on the other hand does this difference exist solely along age lines or is it more related to experience with technology or educational level? This site would be an incredible tool to use for crossing databases and especially social research.

Intrigued by the opportunity to create my own search list I created a Rollyo search list for sites with information on learning Spanish, most having come from a recent online course on Spanish for English-speaking Librarians. The link is http://www.rollyo.com/profile.html. I didn't initially realize I was linking to the site, not the page and when I wanted to use the links as such they didn't cooperate. I guess that's what del.icio.us is for!

YouTube and Me

I was already familiar with YouTube as they often have funny entries with cats or silly children or even comics that my kids and coworkers share with me. They get the links from their friends or by simply glancing through the offerings available, especially the ones that pop up on the main page. I enjoyed looking at YouTube but I had to apologize to a patron who walked in and explain that I really was working! My problem with YouTube is distraction. I have trouble with dictionaries too so it really doesn't count for much but there's always something interesting that catches my eye and I have a difficult time getting what I need for being tempted to look at other things. I think the social networking power and ease of use make YouTube a great method of sharing information, even for libraries, and I don't see the format as a problem just the quality of work being posted. I ran through multiple library related items before I found one I thought 1) looked interesting enough to even open and 2) was actually worth watching. Not a YouTube problem, a production problem. I think if we as librarians want to use this as a method of communication we need to focus on both content and delivery equally. This is a very visually based medium and if it doesn't quickly catch viewers' attention the efforts put into a production will go to waste. The titles and initial screenshots are the advertising that draws viewers and must be valued as such. I think we can use this as a tool as long as we're willing to put in the effort.
I found a pretty good video on Boolean Searching. It caught my eye because it looked human (not simply a screenshot of a database page) and the first few seconds engaged me. It wasn't incredibly funny or entertaining but it kept my interest and offered a platform for reaching countless millions of people. Sounds like a winner to me.
View for yourself and see what you think.

Online photo sharing

This week I created a Flickr account and posted a few photos. I already had a Picasa account, which I find much more intuitive to use than Flickr, but I think I could learn to use this without too much discomfort. I chose to post animal photos until I get more comfortable with the choices of limiting viewers and creating folders, etc. I also placed a few photos on my FaceBook page but couldn't easily figure out how to transfer directly from Flickr to Facebook which would seem like an easier way to do this than the way I ended up using. Anyway, I got it done and I realize I'm beginning to have lots of friends popping up on my FaceBook account. But isn't this friends of friends thing what got Kevin Bacon in trouble?

Web Office Tools

I now have a Google docs account and my writing career may finally materialize. Or perhaps I now have yet another tool I don't have time to utilize to it's full potential. The possibilities with online document creation and sharing are limitless and this technology will be used and shared. I think all the various utilites we've explored so far have great potential but it's really difficult to find the time to keep them straight and use them fully. I am still confused about how they all interact and relate and although I am happy to find that many of them are accessible directly through gmail I am not yet quite clear on how to get back and forth between them all. I have a friend, a retired minister, who is enamored with the abilities of word processing yet still uses pen and paper to correspond with friends and write the occasional sermon. He sees the great potential in the tools yet from so many years of working on paper he says he finds it difficult to process his thoughts without it. I think it will take a bit of time but eventually most everything will go to online sharing and management. I recently developed a list of faculty authors for a presentation. Working on multiple computers at different times and using email to send changes back and forth was extremely confusing. Online document management would definitely be the way to go with such activities. I vote YES! to online document management. It's the wave of today, not just the future.

Social Bookmarking

I think the whole concept of social bookmarking is excellent. It is useful and forgiving and it has made a world of difference for me. Before I established my del.icio.us account I asked one of my coworkers if there wasn't something that I could do to have access to my favorites from other computers. I knew what I wanted but not how to get it. One option he offered was to set up remote access to my main computer so I could access it from anywhere I happened to be but this required that I leave it on at all times. No thanks. Del.icio.us was what I was looking for! It is an awesome tool for accessing and sharing. The access was my original need but the sharing is nice too. I went to the SJLibraryLearning2 site and the first url was for a site where I can look through children's picture books. I may be a health sciences librarian but my heart is in children's lit and I saved this link as soon as I saw it. As had 350 others! I don't know how else I would have stumbled upon this site. I think this sharing could be useful in a general way for social type research but the value to me is in access and popular culture type sharing.

Social Networking Activities, Week 3

Social networking tools are great but there has to be a limit to how many one person can actively participate in. I have often intended to set up a MySpace account but there are only so many hours in the day. These applications offer great opportunities for keeping in touch and interacting with others, especially when there is limited opportunity for traditional interaction.

For MLA members, these tools offer opportunities to interact and create webs of relationships with others sharing similar interests and specialized knowledge, relationships which can provide educational and professional support in addition to social contact. Many medical librarians work in fairly isolated circumstances and participation in an online social network may help them feel less disconnected from the rest of their colleagues while also providing current professional information. These sites can also be created and/or supported by MLA members to address the needs of the user populations they serve and help them provide better service. Online communication is fast and available and may meet the needs of users faster than trying to connect in person.

I think it would be nice if our library developed a MySpace page (more of our users are on MySpace than FaceBook) but I'm not sure that it would be used significantly right now. The key would be linking them into our system. We have a very effective website and very busy students who don't have tons of time to waste on looking at a library social site. If we could develop some useful, innnovative services to provide through one of these accounts then I think it would be a great tool. I also foresee that five or so years from now the site would be quite popular as our student population becomes less local and more online. I think it would be worth a shot at setting one up.

Privacy concerns for individuals are discussed constantly in regard to online social sites. The technology is there for anyone with online access to use but the concepts of safety are not being emphasized except using scare tactics. Kids are being taught to be afraid, that online sites are dangerous, that they're bad. Young people feel invincible and the last thing I want to do is tell mine not to do something without more information. Don't put anything online you wouldn't want their grandma or your kids to read, don't put up really specific information and don't interact really personally with people you don't know. I'm probably the only mom of a teenager encouraging her child to work on their MySpace page but I think it's one more opportunity to use technology. There may be privacy dangers but if part of a generation grows up online and the rest are never even exposed who will end up better off in the end? Knowledge is power.

I enjoyed setting up the FaceBook account, I found it very simple and easy but I found myself questioning what information to put online and what to leave blank. When I worried about what to include I thought of how much is already available on my library's website and really didn't have much problem with it. I liked that I could add links to services such as PubMed in, it would be really convvenient to have that right on the page if I needed a search while working on my site. Kind of makes it a hybrid social/work space. My only complaint was that we weren't offered the option between MySpace and FaceBook because most of the students I work with have MySpace.

Blogs versus Wikis: Who will win?

Today, I work to understand and describe the difference between blogs and wikis. My gut tells me, from past experiences, a blog is like a journal, really useful for marking events in chronological order and keeping up to date with information. A wiki is more a reference source where information is made available but remains fluid and can be changed easily and quickly. I think both are easy to start but hard to maintain and can be quite useful for many purposes. I also think our society is currently overwhelmed with information and these are tools that must be evaluated and used based on their function, not just their currency. If we can maintain our focus on the quality of the information and use these tools appropriately they both add to our ability to communicate with one another online. Used indiscriminately they simpley clog the electronic pathways between us.