Facebook frenzy

The number of times we find our SOLO machines displaying Facebook should be reason enough for our library to create a presence on the ubiquitous social net-working site. We have in fact created a dummy site, but are waiting for the powers that be to give their approval before going live.

When we started thinking about a library Facebook presence we kept stumbling upon questions which were tricky to answer. For example, we didin't know whether we needed to worry about people not related to the college becoming fans of our page for security reasons. When we looked at other college library Facebook pages, there seemed to be large numbers of fans who appeared to have no connection with the college. Does anyone else worry about that?

We decided early on that we wanted to keep our Facebook presence quite focused on library information, not becoming too embroiled in the more social aspects of the site. So, we included our address, a reminder of the opening hours over Easter and when books are due back, some links to other college-related Facebook pages, and a link to SOLO. We'd also like to have links to our own web catalogue, but there are some technical problems with that at the moment.

With more time on our hands, we'd create a number of groups in order to target information to specific subjects about new books and lists of Delicious bookmarks. Does anyone have an idea of how many hours in a week this might take us? Our fellow librarian is wondering if the time needed to keep Facebook up-to-date is going to be equivalent to the increase in student awareness.

Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

Love to hate YouTube

I either love or hate YouTube depending on the day of the week.

The Education pages are useful and there are some really worthy library information videos. But as someone else has noted, it only works if it's done well. We have even been thinking about creating a library information video which could possibly appear on YouTube for prospective students, but finding a moment (or twenty) at this time of year is troublesome.

One thing I don't like about YouTube are the comments. Has anyone ever seen an insighful or instructive comment about one of the videos? I think not. The second thing I don't like about YouTube is all the home videos of people on their soapboxes. Why not blog, so we don't have to look at you too? The third thing...

I won't go on.

Podcasting quietly

 

Podcasting is a fabulous invention. The choice is limited only by your imagination and it's not hard to find high quality material which you can then listen to anywhere. There is the usual amount of dross to wade through, but the BBC, Guardian and other respected news sources are always reliable, in my experience.

I already subscribe to a number of Podcasts, but have added a few more to Google Reader (which I'm taking-to more than iGoogle). I'd prefer to keep all my Podcasts in one spot as I tend to listen to them on my iPod, so would probably prefer to use iTunes than Google.

On a professional level, Podcasting for library information seems a little out of our scope, but I imagine that Podcasts of lectures would be useful and interesting for students. Our Classicists and Modern Linguists might also find Podcasts useful for rote learning - "amo, amas, amat".

As the 23 Things are progressing I find that navigating the different sites is becoming easier and Web 2.0 in general seems to be a little more intuitive and less scary. Progress!

Not so tasty

 

I'm still not convinced by the 'tag cloud' phenomenon, even after having read a number of blog entries about why they're useful (see here for example). Just because I only have one bookmark with the tag 'ephemera' doesn't mean that it's less important to me than a tag that appears larger in the cloud. It may just be that I can only find one site that I want to keep an eye on for that particular tag.

The networking tool also strikes me as odd. I've added a couple of people to my list, and now I get some random bookmarks appearing that are of no interest to me whatsoever. Just because someone shares my interest in letterpress (good) doesn't mean that they're not also interested in Egg Watching (bad).

Whilst I'm struggling to find a personal use for Delicious, I can see their importance for libraries and educational institutions, and I must admit that I'd be quite happy squandering quite a lot of time playing about with the possibilities, and nosing into the bookmarks collected by other people.

It's not you, it's me

It's just me, I suppose, but sites like Delicious seem to be aimed at people who use the web in a more systematic way than I do.

The site was easy to use and fairly intuitive but I can't see how I would use Delicious on a personal level. If I'm at home I have my bookmarks organised in my web browser and I don't really see why I would want to share my bookmarks with other people.

If I'm at work I tend to use different bookmarks but if I did want to look at a site bookmarked on my Mac at home I'd be more likely to Google it than log into another web site. If some of our fellows used Delicious a little like a reading list, then it might be useful for the library to know about it, but I've not heard of anyone considering this.

I'll look at the other 23 Things blogs to see what other people think, but if anyone uses Delicious on a personal or professional level, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Blogging's no Picnik

Using Picnik seemed relatively intuitive, but it took me a while to work out how to save images to a location from which I could use them on my Blog. Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but it worked in the end. I'm not sure what the advantage of Picnik is over my normal image editing software.

I'm starting to see how Blogging works: If you sit in front of your machine for long enough you forget that there are potential readers out there in the Blogosphere and then you can ramble away to your heart's content.

The above image is an attempt at editing the brightness and sharpness of one of my photographs, then cropping it to a Blog-friendly size.

Yet another email address

How does everyone keep track of all the email addresses created when joining sites like Flickr? At latest count, I have 7 email addresses with different providers, and one that has become inactive through lack of use. Maybe there's a way of redirecting all email to one account, but if so, I've not found it yet.

My misgivings about uploading my life have not abated.

On a more positive note, I have learned how to use Flickr, and the Geotag function was fun.

Things 5 and 6

 I'm still not quite sure about the difference between iGoogle and Google Reader, so will go in search of an explanation in words of one syllable...

Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage and Google IG), a service of Google, is a customizable AJAX-based startpage or personal web portal (much like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo!, and Windows Live Personalized Experience). Google originally launched the service in May 2005. Its features include the capability to add web feeds and Google Gadgets (similar to those available on Google Desktop).

Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. It was released by Google on October 7, 2005 through Google Labs. Reader graduated from beta status on September 17, 2007.

 And why might I want to follow a particular blog in iGoogle rather than Google Reader? These Things seem to create more questions than they answer. However, I am becoming more familiar with how to use Blogger and the different Google pages, even if I'm not sure of their specific purposes. Blogger isn't the most intuitive web site, and I don't seem to be going about things in the quickest way.

Thoughts about blogs

The only two blogs I've ever looked at regularly are 'Reasons to be Hopeful' (intended as an antidote to the focus on bad news in the world) and 'Mostly Eating' (a sustainable, local, healthy food blog). Otherwise, my intentions are good, but I lose interest very quickly.

Retospective

In retrospect, Things 1 and 2 were mostly things I had done before, and I, for one, spent most of my time choosing the frivolous parts of the page, notably the themes and templates. Having said that, no-one likes looking at badly designed web pages, or those with offensive colours.

One issue I have with this process is that I wonder about how easy it's going to be to delete my presence from the Bloggosphere once 23 Things is finished. I'm not happy with the idea that my blog will remain on view indefinitely. The trail left by individuals is also slightly worrying. I noticed that the iGoogle screen-shot on one of the blogs reveals that the blogger was playing online poker at the time, and one of them reveals snapshots of personal emails!