23 Distractions

The end of the beginning?

2010-01-02T06:43:00.003-06:00

Good-bye Web 2.0, hello Social Media. This story from Mashable is about how the second term has now become more popular than the first, so Web 2.0 as a term is probably on its way out. Has Web 2.0 itself actually become established now? This blog was about exploring bits and pieces of it, and now I take many of those bits and pieces for granted. Cloud computing still falls apart at inconvenient times, but I'm relying on it to get through grad school. Not only could I find my new address through Google Maps, but it showed me the building itself at street level, where I could turn my focus around and see my neighbors. My heart and my book collection belong to Library Thing. Now that I finally have high-speed Internet, YouTube is no longer terra incognita.

But through all this, social media reigns. Just about everything I read on the Web offers me options for sharing with others, via Facebook, Twitter, or a dillion other sites. I've got an idea of what many of my friends did for the holidays because they posted to Facebook. The sites I shop from want me to be their fan on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. Welcome to the mainstreaming of social media.

$ea Change

2009-06-27T15:01:00.003-05:00

Microsoft is discontinuing its Microsoft Money software. Credit this to Mint.com and its ilk: apparently online banking, both from banks and from free websites, has gotten to the point Microsoft decided to drop out. It's not that I have deep sentimental attachment to Money--please, we're talking financial software here--but I've been using it since 1998 and I'd gotten used to it.

I'm guessing there are ramifications here beyond just the end of one program. Just how well is Microsoft doing lately? It's a shaky economy for everyone of course, but here we are entering the era of cloud computing, and Microsoft is more known for tangible products sold in stores with updates only every few years. I hear they've discontinued Encarta as well, although that will barely affect me.

Off to explore my banking and accounting options...

Thing 47: Evaluation

2009-06-18T21:14:00.002-05:00

Oh wow, I actually made it. I gather that More 23 Things took about a month longer to complete than the original set. In my case, anyway, I see that the original 23 Things took place over the summer, while More 23 Things was running during winter and spring. It was easier for me to work on these sorts of things during the summer; earlier, I was in class and had less time and energy.

Overall, I enjoyed the program. I think each Thing needs to be fairly simple and straightforward though. Twitter felt like it had gotten out of hand. I enjoyed Books 2.0 and Bloggers' Toolkit, but it took way too much of that precious time and energy stuff to look at a good sample of the possibilities for either Thing. By comparison, Screencasting and Online TV & Video felt so much more manageable. It might've worked better if each Thing only mentioned a few activities or sites with the rest in a sort of "appendix" to each Thing.

As with the original 23 Things, I don't see our library getting much use out of most of these Things, although we've started Twittering and I suspect we'll find a use for screencasting. Personally, though, I'll be listening to Internent radio, watching online TV, discussing my travels online, and so on. It was a great introduction to Library 2.0 and Web 2.0; thank you.

Thing 46: WebJunction Minnesota

2009-06-18T08:21:00.006-05:00

Well, here I am at WebJunction Minnesota. I'm not sure what to say about this site. Like LinkedIn, it's something that's purely professional for me . . . and like LinkedIn, I suspect that means I'm going to forget to visit it after a while. Social networking--or in this case, professional networking--is just more attractive when you've met the people you're networking with. With WJMN, I suspect the only people I know are the coworker and former coworker that I've gone through the 23 Things programs with, and by now, we're connected on all sorts of websites.

I like the idea of a site specifically for library networking, but I think WJMN needs some time to mature. I glanced over the classes. This is a good idea for letting people know what's available, and ditto for the calendar. However, the website itself could do with a redesign. Overall, the design seemed scattered and I found it difficult to focus on any one section. The Quick Links are "below the fold" and it took me multiple visits to the page before I saw them, and through them, finally found where the groups were listed. After all that, I did join a group: on Library 2.0, of course. I see that you can read group discussions without necessarily joining the group. I like this, as I have a tendency to lurk on groups, and this way, I won't be building up a long list of groups I joined because I found one discussion months ago to be interesting.

At this point, it's probably the courses that set WJMN apart from all the other networking sites out there. Discussions, contacts--those could be found on other sites, including LinkedIn and Ning. Perhaps as more people join WJMN, they'll expand their features, much as these other social networking sites have done.

Thing 45: Cloud Computing

2009-06-17T08:11:00.005-05:00

Huh. There's not much in this Thing about the downside to cloud computing. Try searching "cloud crash Google" (ironically, you can Google this). You'll get a slew of articles on what happened this spring when Gmail and GoogleDocs went down for a few hours. Apparently there are already a lot of people who can't function without them.

Obligatory cynical reaction now taken care of, let's move on to the benefits of cloud computing. I'm getting more cloudy by the moment, it seems. My most recent switch is to using web-based email for my primary account. I'm making the change for several reasons, but one of them is that I'm tired of not being able to access my email from any computer I'm at. Yes, I could have left my emails on the server, but my ISP's webmail is unpleasant to use. I figured I might as well switch to a service that assumes you'll be keeping your messages online, and doesn't just offer a MB as a backup while you're on vacation.

After peeking at the Web OS articles, I don't think I'm going to need to leap into this right away. Beyond surfing the web and handling email, much of what I do just involves the basic Microsoft Office programs. GoogleDocs can handle most of this--okay, it'd be nice if they'd upgrade to the point they can handle .docx files, but if I have to, I can revert to .doc. And rumor has it that Microsoft is planning to make the next version of Office cloud-compatible ("Office Web"), so maybe a little patience is all that's necessary.

On the other hand, I really do need to pay attention to data backup. Again, with a dial-up connection, online backup was just a fantasy. Now it's a practical option, and yes, sounds much cheaper than the therapy I'll need if I lose both the computers and the external hard drive.

At present, I don't think cloud computing is affecting my productivity one way or another. Basically, I don't take my work home and I don't travel as part of my job, so I almost never have to access work files when I'm not physically in the office. It's pretty obvious, though, how this could benefit all those people who do need to carry their work with them, at least virtually. Likewise, I'm not that worried about security right now, simply because I'm not working with confidential materials. But it's a good question: is your data safer in the cloud or on a laptop or flash drive that could be lost, stolen, or damaged?

Say, if I decide Mint.com is a safe option, that's cloud banking, isn't it?

Thing 44: The Economy

2009-06-17T05:38:00.004-05:00

Ah, this is going to be one of those blog posts where I try to list my reaction to as many things as possible in as short a time as possible. Got it.

The educational tools were, well, educational. That was a pretty good little "how it all fell apart" video. I couldn't think of any pressing financial issue I needed to research on MyMoney.gov, but it looked like it would be solid information about the basics.

My interest level rose when I tackled Banking 2.0. Understand, I just don't find personal finance and economics all that gripping, so one of the ways to pique my interest is to involve software and websites. But the security issues around online banking make this less fun than online music or video. I wonder if sites like Mint.com have been having an influence on software: Microsoft Money has vanished from stores. You can still get it online, but in general, it's gone, and it and Quicken were the big names for personal financial software. How do you judge the safety of these sites? At first, I wondered why anyone would trust their financial data to a free website, but then, Money could be forwarding my account information to Zanzibar every time I go online and I wouldn't know. Plus financial software leaves your data on your hard drive, which is difficult to erase securely when you're done with the computer. Just try thoroughly wiping a hard drive when the computer won't boot. Maybe Mint.com is no worse a risk.

On to the potential savings in my daily life. I don't own a car, so I skipped the entire driving section. My cell phone comes in cheaper than any of the plans at MyRatePlan.com. Self-sustainability, although noble as all get-out, is clearly not targeted to people who live in apartments: a woman who can't keep oregano alive in her windowsill for lack of sunlight is not going to be able to maintain a victory garden. I don't go to garage sales and thrift stores now, so I'm not going to start the habit. The pennypinching websites were an odd lot. I was pleased to see that I'm already doing lots of the tips on FrugalDad, although if you water down juices a là #31, I don't think you can count them as servings of fruit. I clicked on an article on Wisebread and found myself reading a product review of a webcam--what's that doing on a frugal living site? Finally, the coupon sites looked like an awful lot of effort for minimal reward.

I think I'm going to research Mint.com and ClearCheckbook more thoroughly, since they interested me the most. I'm hoping to find some expert opinions on whether or not they're safe enough to use (or at least no more risky than Money or Quicken).

Thing 43: Online TV and Video

2009-06-16T07:32:00.006-05:00

I first heard of Hulu the old-fashioned way: I saw commercials for it on television. Like Internet radio, online TV wasn't much use to me as long as I had a slow connection, but I've been testing it out a bit now that I can actually watch the episodes. Stripped of most commercials, this will be a faster way of watching TV, but I'm still a bit hesitant to really get into this for fear it's going to eat up a fair chunk of my time. I'm not going to underestimate the instant gratification factor. I'd missed a few episodes of Dollhouse, and normally I'd have to wait until they came out on DVD to see them, but hey, now I can just wander over to Fox's website and see them there.

This will also let me see programs I just wouldn't be able to see otherwise. Since I don't watch a lot of TV, I don't spring for anything except the most basic level of cable. Except for the very few programs I'll buy in DVD, cable-only television is a mystery to me. Mystery no longer, it seems. So what is The Colbert Report like, anyway? Well, now I can find out. I suppose I'm going to want to hook my TV up to my computer at some point.

I'm not sure how much of an impact this will have on broadcast TV--will they notice after the long-term impact of cable? Cable is another matter though. Will people be willing to pay exorbitant fees if they can get good stuff for free? And how will advertisers respond? Print media is disintegrating almost daily because people realized they could get the same stuff for free online, and advertisers haven't figured out how to capitalize on that. Television may follow suit in a year or so for the same reasons.

Incidentally, I can't see any applications for personal mashups, Internet radio, or online TV for our library. Alas, we're dull. :)

in-between thing: supporting micronesia

2009-06-15T10:04:00.002-05:00

I hadn't been able to avoid noticing the "new" domain name .fm that had popped up in the last two Things: Lifestream.fm in Thing 41 and Last.fm in Thing 42. Both sites touch on social networking, but lots of sites involve social networking nowadays, and I couldn't figure out what else they might have in common (okay, they both start with L, but I doubted that was significant).

A trip to Wikipedia reveals that .fm is the country code top-level domain name for the Federated States of Micronesia. Micronesia isn't stingy: they're quite willing to let others register .fm domains. The proceeds go back to Micronesia, a source of income in these troubled economic times. In general, it's been FM radio stations that have chosen the .fm domain, so even though Lifestream.fm and Last.fm are the only examples of .fm that I've seen to date, they're apparently atypical.

Oh, the trivia of the Internet. :)

Thing 42: Music 2.0

2009-06-15T08:29:00.004-05:00

I feel like I'm starting out on this Thing a little behind the population in general. I got out of the habit of listening to radio back in college. For me, listening to basic broadcast radio after this many years would practically be a Thing in its own right, much less Internet radio. I suppose this means I don't have many old habits to unlearn.

I looked at both Pandora and Last.fm. I confess I decided to start with Pandora because I liked its name, but on the other hand, Last.fm doesn't make you create an account to just try it out (after this many Things, I'm getting burned out on creating accounts and keeping track of passwords). One advantage of either of these services over broadcast radio? Well, remember the frustration of, "Wow, I really like this song, but I've never caught who sings it or what the title is"? Not a problem with Internet radio, where you can read all about the song, the album, and the artist while the song plays. I was able to bookmark a group I'd never heard of before, who happened to come up because they're similar to a group I'd told Pandora I liked--fun!

While I've had iTunes on my computer for about two years now, I'd never bothered to look at its "Radio" option. There wasn't much point, what with only having a dial-up connection. But having just gotten high-speed Internet (!), it was a good time to be reminded of that option. I looked it over a bit. Admittedly, after all the graphics of Pandora and Last.fm, iTunes looked very barebones in this regard, but they certainly had a lot of stations to choose from. But several of them were dead silent when I clicked on them. I don't know if the station was permanently dead (how often does Apple review these lists?) or just not broadcasting at that time. If the latter, it reminded me of TV stations in my childhood and how they would just go off the air every night.

Here's an album quilt widget from Last.fm. I finally have a name for the genre of music I've been listening to lately: medieval. So that's something else I learned from this Thing.

in-between thing: friendfeed and lifestream.fm

2009-06-14T21:53:00.003-05:00

Two days in, and I can tell you neither of them is perfect. FriendFeed can't see my Facebook status. Apparently this is some sort of glitch that affects people who tried to add Facebook to FriendFeed after the "new" Facebook was released. The app developers said back in May they were aware of this problem and are working on it; obviously they haven't solved it yet.

Less critical, but still annoying: despite my telling Lifestream.fm that I was in Minnesota, my posts are time-stamped for Central European Summer Time (seven hours ahead of Central Daylight Time), which affects what day they're credited to. Sigh. Lifestream.fm is based in Germany, I believe.

Thing 41: Mashup Your Life

2009-06-12T16:18:00.007-05:00

I get why this Thing is called "Mashup Your Life." But for how I will end up using it, "Mashup Your Friends' Lives" would probably be a more accurate description.

I joined FriendFeed this afternoon. I'd chosen it because I knew at least one friend of mine was already there (so I'd have someone to connect to) and because my coworker who's doing the More Things program had joined Lifestream.fm and loathed it. But about an hour later, another 23 Things-er invited me to join Lifestream.fm, so I've ended up comparing the two. Based on a few hours familiarity, I think I like FriendFeed slightly better (I see why the More Things on a Stick program would like people to try these services for a few weeks, but this close to the deadline it ain't happening). It mostly has to do with aesthetics, and that I don't like Lifestream.fm's search engine for trying to find out if your friends are already on the site. But I'll have to play with both sites some more to see if that preference holds. I'm glad that both services let you make your account private. I will probably make my accounts public until the end of More Things on a Stick--that's only a few days, after all--and then go private and personalize my chosen service.

I see the two sites differ in their focus. FriendFeed puts your friends' avatars first, and the source of each post is almost an afterthought, in small gray print at the end. Lifestream.fm leaves your friends' avatars out altogether and leads with the icon of the post source (Twitter's little t, the RSS feed's orange square, etc.).

Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, these social networking site aggregators don't seem to be nearly as popular. I think these kinds of services could be really useful. I'm tired of tramping around from Facebook to LibraryThing to Google Reader to Twitter and so on, just trying to keep track of what all my friends are doing. Now the question is, are these sites just about to catch on, or are they doomed to never be quite noticed by the world at large?

By the way, if I invite my friends to join either of these services, am I being pushy? Maybe the last thing anyone wants is still yet another account on another service. Or am I just doing social networking the way it's supposed to go, trying to forge more connections? Does anyone know if Miss Manners has addressed this issue?

I managed to get both the FriendFeed and Lifestream.fm widgets into this blog, which is overkill, but I'll be taking one out sooner or later. Both are mostly made up of posts from this blog--it's oddly circular.

Thing 40: Mashup the Web

2009-06-11T16:23:00.004-05:00

Being someone who does a lot of walking in her neighborhood, I started with Walk Score. My neighborhood scored an 82 ("Very Walkable")--not bad at all. By contrast, the neighborhood I grew up in only managed a 35 ("Car-Dependent"). But looking at both maps, I see the mashup isn't taking terrain into consideration. You don't walk to the West 7th library from my apartment: I-35E lies between me and it. Back in my home town, there's a creek and a virtually unscalable river bluff between my childhood home and the amenities, so even that 35 is an overstatement. Nor is personal safety considered: while a previous neighborhood of mine was deemed 91 ("Walkers' Paradise"), let's just say walking there was an act of daring. Perhaps Walk Score should be mashed-up with CrimeReports?

Wheel of Lunch looked more gimmicky--and dizzying--than useful, but Lunchbox seemed quite practical. It might need a data update, though: a nearby Vietnamese restaurant didn't show up in a search for Vietnamese restaurants.

Searching for a mashup on my own, I discovered Reading Radar, a mashup of the New York Times bestseller lists and Amazon.com. What you get are the Amazon.com ratings for bestselling books. People do seem to enjoy the bestsellers: most of them scored around 4 stars. But I rarely read bestsellers, so I can't see myself using this all that often.

I played with Phreetings. It's a nice idea, but the site seemed to be allergic to Internet Explorer, which wasn't a good sign, and finding the instructions wasn't intuitive. But in the end, I managed a postcard.

Thing 39: Digital Storytelling

2009-06-08T17:23:00.004-05:00

I've always enjoyed the idea of scrapbooking, much as I've enjoyed the idea of journaling. The difference is that I got into the habit of journaling: all it required was a pen and paper. Scrapbooking took too much energy. It made messes. You had to plan out ahead of time what you were going to do because basically it was an ongoing art project. I never got any further than stuffing mementoes in between the pages of a scrapbook and telling myself that really, someday, I'd do something with them.

And now we're in the 21st century and there's this thing called "digital scrapbooking" to go along with all the digital photos we take nowadays. I delayed on this entry for a while, mostly because it was supposed to be about a library event, and we just don't do a lot of events at our library. But yes, finally, we had an open house to honor our retiring State Law Librarian, and I got photos.

I took a peek at Scrapbook Generator (doesn't that sound straightforward?) and was immediately repelled by all the tacky ads on the site. I then looked at Scrapblog. Much nicer. I got the hang of it fairly quickly. So much of it is just click, drag, and drop. You don't need to register to get started, but I see you have to register even to save a work in progress. Not a big deal--I'm getting really used to quickie registrations by Thing 39--but it seemed a bit misleading.

Anyway, here's the fruits of, well, far too much time for the final product. But I bet I'd speed up (or do fancier layouts) with practice:

Thing 38: Screencasting

2009-05-29T15:49:00.002-05:00

Wow. This was more fun than I thought it would be, even if the subject matter of my screencast is less than gripping.

Given the Judiciary's restrictions on downloading third-party software, Jing, Wink, and the like weren't candidates. (Screencasting didn't sound like something that would lend itself to a dial-up connection, so I did this at work). I went with ScreenToaster. I caught the hint that there weren't many tutorials for it yet, but I thought their basic introduction video worked pretty well. I wish it had explained how to do subtitles in more detail, though. I would've liked to have stopped and started my subtitles rather than just have one ongoing subtitle through the whole screencast. But I wasn't sure how to stop and start without accidentally deleting all the subtitles I'd already done.

Here's my screencast, thirty-nine mesmerizing seconds of instruction on how to search our online opinions.

Unlike so many Things, I could see us using screencasting here at the law library--heck, if this one was revamped a bit, it could be used, I suppose. I've heard our Public Services staff tell tales of how they've had to try to describe navigating our website to patrons over the phone ("Now look in the upper left...no, upper left...yes, that's it. Do you see...no, look down a bit..."). Maybe we could have some stock screencasts on hand for common navigation questions. In turn, I'm not sure when I would use this at home, but now that I know how to do it, possibilities may present themselves.

Thing 37: Photo Tales

2009-05-28T16:13:00.011-05:00

Preparing to tackle this Thing, I went off to reread the blog entries of two fellow Thingsters. Both of their embedded slideshows are dead. This isn't inspiring confidence in the Thing 37 toys.

Not quite ready to tackle a slideshow, I started with a mosaic image, using Image Mosaic Generator. Their advice is to stand back from the image about 5 meters to see it at its best. I settled for shrinking it to about 20% of original size. So see Multnomah Falls as made up of dillions of other people's images:

By the way, many of the photos that comprise those yellowish trees on the left are of rubber duckies:

Now ready to put together a slideshow, I started out by trying Animoto through Facebook. I quit after seeing that even though they had 146 reviews, they weren't scoring very high--and it looked like they'd made the reviews disappear. After that, I figured I'd just go for a no frills Flickr slideshow.

Okay, it's not playing music, but I can live with that. Pop music didn't seem to go with all those nature photos anyway.

I wouldn't say the services I tried worked "smoothly." Flickr, which you'd think would be solid and established by now, locked up when I tried to sign in. Animoto was behaving less than trustworthily. Yet I remember ten or fifteen years ago when creating a music video of your photos or video clips was a massive undertaking, done only by the truly dedicated, and now it's a free service that basically just asks for you to do some uploading. I might play around with this more when (if) I have more free time. We did a Flickr tour for our library. I doubt music and fancy transitions would improve it any, but we can always keep the possibility in mind.

Thing 36: Comic Relief--Generate Some Fun

2009-05-21T16:40:00.008-05:00

So, am I more of a Moth Willowglitter, "caster of weird dreams" and "only seen in the light of a shooting star" (Fairy Name Generator) or a Magdalene Saint Clair, "seductress of the Beltane Feasts," "presiding over the gluttonous feasts of the wickedest night of the year" (Vampire Name Generator)?

Okay, less of an organized report here, and more of a "splashing around in the pool" effort. How could I resist Convert Your Name to a Dewey Number?

Elizabeth Tuckwood's Dewey Decimal Section:

851 Italian poetry

Elizabeth Tuckwood = 52961250801313554 = 529+612+508+013+135+54 = 1851

Class:
800 Literature

Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.

What it says about you:
You're a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you're good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren't important.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Just a thought here...since I'm probably coming to Thing 36 later than many people, what are the chances that when I'm looking over the library-themed cartoons to choose one to post, that I'm choosing the work of another 23 Thingser? But here we go, with a work from Bernd:

by bernd Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com

As for one of my own:

by Twen Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com

Maybe I'd be enjoying the toon generators more if I hadn't spent a fair chunk of my life reading comic books, graphic novels, manga, and so on. I just kept thinking how clunky and amateurish the whole thing was. Instinctively, I'd say there's not much use for a library comic at our library, but this is sort of thing where in the hands of the right person who can think of the right punchline, something might come of it after all. Just don't expect me to be that person. I thought the name generators were fun, though. No real thought needed, just a few minutes of silly relaxation.

Thing 35: Books 2.0

2009-05-20T08:31:00.004-05:00

You know, you glance down a list of 23 Things and right away you see some Things that attract you more than others. Thing 35 is probably the most attractive Thing on the current list.

I've been on LibraryThing since 2006. I don't feel like picking up another site for cataloging my books since I'm mostly happy with LT in this regard, plus I have a book database on my home computer. Still, I enjoyed seeing what other sites had to offer. I liked that Lib.rario.us is set up to let you enter other media besides books, but beyond that, it just seemed to be playing catch-up to the more established book sites (and light print on a dark background is difficult to read for long periods). Ditto on catch-up for BookJetty. They're justifiably proud of being linked to library catalogs, but I can look up books in libraries--or on Amazon.com--on LT. Plus, as far as I can tell from their screenshot of a book details page, they don't include cataloging information like call numbers, which is something I specifically enjoy. ITrackMine definitely adds value with its ability to track item loans, not only that you lent a book to your friend, but in what condition your friend returned it to you (and if they returned it). This is not something LT is set up for, and while I can do that with my private database, ITrackMine's "circ module" is more sophisticated. The reports feature also looks easier to use than LT's. Too bad the design of the site makes me think of the 1950s. aNobii doesn't seem to do anything that other sites don't do (I see whoever described it on the More 23 Things wiki said, "is yet another collection management site"). I got the same impression with BookTagger, although maybe its online book clubs are easier to manage than the discussion groups in LT.

I'm not likely to be reading a book on my cell phone anytime soon, it being too primitive to support these services. If I wanted to badly enough, I'd find a way to do so, but based on these offerings, I'm not motivated to try. I thought about following TwitterLit on Twitter--they even have an iPhone app I could use--but I realized that I just wasn't that interested. For the other services...look, I carry books with me 90% of the time. I just can't work up much enthusiasm for this aspect of Web 2.0, although I'm glad it's out there in case I change my mind.

I've got over 250 unread books at home. I won't need to use a reader's advisory service for years, if ever. BookStumpers looked promising though, because I too have partially-remembered books from childhood that I'd like to track down. And I might play on ReadingTrails someday, just to get a better feel of how it works.

I'll have to get back to you later about the resources for online book clubs. I have a penchant for books that no one else wants to read. But I'm in a fledgling online book club at the moment, and since its current home (Facebook) is awkward, I may look into these and see if I should recommend that we relocate.

If I enjoyed audiobooks, I bet I'd enjoy these online ways to listen to them. Librivox sounds both ambitious and noble. I'm impressed that Open Culture gleans its materials from reputable universities (when something's "free," you might very well wonder about its quality).

I joined BookCrossing about the same time I joined LibraryThing. I've released several books into the wild; rarely does anyone report that they've found one. But yes, one of my books was last seen headed for Hawaii. It's fun, as long as you can live with the uncertainty of ever hearing of your books again.

The Internet doesn't lack book reviews--why are people wondering if reading is declining? So now I have somewhere else to go besides Amazon.com, Library Journal, Facebook, LT, BC, etc. to look for reviews. You could spend so much time researching books that you'd never have time to read them! (Did I mention the number of unread books I have at home...?). But when I look up a book review, it's because I'm either thinking about reading the book or have just read it and want to know what others think of it. With The Complete Review, it looked like they review only certain books, in an effort to promote them. I suspect our tastes will rarely overlap.

No children in my private life, no children in my professional life. So, not much need to play with Web 2.0 tools for children's books. As for the book rental services, my first thought was that why would I pay for what a library does for free? Then I saw Bookswim rents college textbooks. I'm in school. I should see if they handle MLIS texts. Suddenly, this sounds practical as all get-out.

Ah, Facebook. And ah, Facebook's book apps. I believe over the past year, I've tried them all. I'm currently using Visual Bookshelf, not because I think it's a wonderful app, but because it comes closest to what I want. What I want is for LT to put together a Facebook app, but they've been procrastinating on that since 2007 at least, and I've given up on them. I like the idea of showing off my current reads. When I find myself feeling uncomfortable about it, this is encouragement to weed my friends list on Facebook. If I'm really bothered by someone seeing what I'm reading, chances are, we're not friends in any sense of the word.

Thing 34: Is This Our Competition? Online Answer Sites

2009-05-18T16:08:00.005-05:00

Wow. After thirty seconds of looking at that list of online reference sites, I could see myself just plunging in and wallowing in information and trivia and assorted facts and never coming out again. Anyone reading this blog has noticed that it's called 23 Distractions, right?

Okay, okay, focus.

I skimmed the offered articles on online answer sites, and then went off to look at a few of them. My first visit was to WikiAnswers. I would not advise looking at their recent activity page as your introduction to the site; when I saw that "ID2907462660 asked How many miles equals eleven kilometers and said it was the same as How many miles equals 4.8 kilometers," I started getting seriously worried about the questioners, much less the answers. (WikiAnswer's home page shows far more presentable questions.) Exploring the site, I'm not sure I'd want to ask a question there, but I may set up a username later and go answer some of the questions I saw. I dunno, should I feel safer knowing that if I get an answer wrong, someone might come along and correct it, or worried knowing that some moron might come along and replace my accurate answer with nonsense? I saw both kinds of answers as I looked around on the site.

Next, I looked at Yahoo!Answers. I see this site has a different take on answers: where WikiAnswers lets you completely overwrite an earlier answer, Yahoo!Answers lists all answers and lets members vote on them. My gut instinct was to prefer the latter--give the questioner the ability to choose, don't choose for them--but if the questioner knows nothing of the subject, how would they decide? By vote, probably (if there were any), and there's nothing preventing a wrong answer from getting more votes.

So, why use these kinds of sites rather than ask a reference librarian? I can think of several reasons. Some are well-known, like the ability to ask your question at any time, or that you can be anonymous (come on, find me the person who can ask a librarian a sexually explicit question without blushing or sounding threatening...or the librarian who can manage that reference interview with perfect composure). Personally, I prefer taking in information by reading it rather than listening to it, which is what happens when you talk to a librarian. And another reason: I recently read Thomas Mann's The Oxford Guide to Library Research. He points out that many students are taught that asking the librarian for help is cheating. You may not think of that consciously after you leave school, but can you shake off that training easily?

Slam the Boards just left me shaking my head. Yes, people, we're that desperate. We're just going to force knowledge down people's throats. So what if they didn't want to come to a library to ask their questions; we'll insist that they get a library-quality answer anyway. We do have value, we do, we do, we do! (We have shaky self-esteem, is what we have).

Thing 33: Travel 2.0

2009-05-17T15:59:00.003-05:00

This is a good time to investigate this Thing: I've just gotten back from one vacation and am gearing up to plan another. I suppose it would've been even better if I'd gotten to Thing 33 before that first vacation, but nothing's perfect.

For the travel blogs, I looked at Travel 2.0 Blog and Notes from the Road. I didn't get far into Travel 2.0 before getting distracted and heading off on a link to Nextstop.com. Testing it for Portland (my recent trip), I found a review for Cupcake Jones. The reviewer liked it much better than the friend I was visiting in Portland, who took me to Saint Cupcake instead, but at least it was a review of somewhere I'd heard of. As for Notes from the Road, it mostly served to remind me that I don't get out much: not only had I been to just one location on its homepage, I hadn't heard of most of the rest (Alvord Desert? Great Guana Cay?). Nice layout and design, though.

Moving on to the review sites, I decided on TripAdvisor. Obviously this is a site focused on hotels, rentals, food: the sorts of places you want to know about before you head off to an unknown city. Me, I tend to visit local friends who take me to the spots they know well. I ended up testing this on Bloomington, practically in my backyard. I found it interesting that when one person wrote a negative review of the Sofitel, the Sofitel posted a personalized response. Ah, the interactivity of Travel 2.0.

The travel journals are definitely more my style! I want to remember both VCarious and My Life of Travel for the next time I take a trip that's more about sightseeing than just hanging out with friends. I think it would have been great if sites like these had existed lo those many years ago when I did study abroad in Scotland. I see that MapVivo takes a different approach, that it would be suitable for a trip where you stopped at several different locations, like a tour of Europe or a road trip in the U.S.

Finally there were the travel mashups. I'm not going to have to travel to make use of Hotspotr, now that I finally have wireless devices. I plugged in my zip code and got to rediscover all the Starbucks in my neighborhood--all of them marked with cute little dollar signs, of course. Oddly, no one has mentioned the Caribou Coffees in my area. I was going to contribute a couple of cafes I know of, but I learned that Hotspotr wanted my name, at which point I became shy and ran away. Maybe later.

All this was fun, but I don't see our library making use of any of these sites. The only reason you'd come to a law library to ask about travel would probably be if you wanted to learn about the laws of your destination, and I'm guessing most people would ask their travel agent or just poke around online before coming to us.

Thing 32: Google Maps and Mashups

2009-05-06T08:56:00.004-05:00

That's it? Just make a map and post it? Oh, thank you! After Thing 31, I was pretty much drained.

Yarn addict that I am, I decided to map out a few of the Twin Cities yarn stores. I didn't choose all of them for a variety of reasons:

After a few selections, I got the hang of it and didn't feel I needed to keep practicing.
We really do have a lot of yarn stores around here. I heard once that the Twin Cities have the highest number of yarn stores per capita, although I have no easy way to verify that.
May 20 is coming. Cannot spend all May perfecting this map.

View Twin Cities Yarn Shops in a larger map

Although pretty simple, there were a few tricks to putting this map together. 3 Kittens Needle Arts recently moved to a shopping center that literally isn't on Google Maps: not only is the shopping center itself not there, but none of the streets leading to it are there either. Google Maps had the proper street address, but unable to find a Main Street in Mendota Heights, they plunked the placemarker down on Main Street in St. Paul. I sense some irony in the fact that I had to look the address up on Mapquest (which did have all the streets in question) to figure out where to stick the placemarker in Google.

Another problem came up when I tried to place Knit'n From the Heart. Any other yarn store I looked up, Google showed me a map; when I looked Knit'n From the Heart up, I kept getting driving directions instead. Eventually I figured it out: the word "from" was throwing it. It was trying to tell me how to get to Knit'n from The Heart. (The solution was to search the store name as a phrase in quotation marks).

I could see uses for this in a public or academic library. But it takes a while to create one of these maps, so while it would be nice to produce one on demand, it'd make more sense to have a few choice ones ready and waiting for patrons.

Thing 31: More Twitter

2009-04-29T21:29:00.003-05:00

I just made a rough count of how many links there were to this Thing--articles, applications, badges, etc.--and came up with 118. If all the More 23 Things have that many links to explore, it truly will be a challenge to get through the program by May 20.

Suffice it to say that clicking through those approximately 118 links to do Thing 31 wasn't happening, especially as I still haven't warmed up to Twitter in the first place (but as promised, I do drop by and update it every now and then and scramble to keep up with others' tweets). I ended up skimming the list, trying to pick out the most promising. Since Thing 27, we have set up a Twitter account at work, so I forwarded the links to David Lee King's posts to our Twitterer. I also glanced over the "9 Ways Twitter Can Help in the Real World" article. I guess I've been hanging out in a law library too long: when the author jokingly listed becoming a super-stalker as one of the 9 hints, I just went, "No, that really isn't funny," and stopped reading right then. (After which, "Get Facebook friends to use Twitter without them even knowing" sounded downright creepy).

Of all the "fun" things listed for Twitter, the most attractive was the one that integrated it with LibraryThing. After all, unlike Twitter, I enjoy using LT. But then I was done in by being too much of a cataloger: when it said that it searched Amazon as the default, I just couldn't bear it (I use Library of Congress as my first search site)!

I've been more attracted to Twitter when I haven't been working through the Twitter website itself. I've got TwitterFon on my iPod touch, and it streamlines Twitter nicely. It's also easy to use when I'm out and about--which is about the only time I'm doing anything interesting enough that I'd consider twittering. I'm interested in TweetDeck too, but it's too big for a dial-up connection to handle and I haven't gotten around to downloading it somewhere else to my flash drive and carrying it home. So as you may guess, since the web is my least favorite way of accessing Twitter, I haven't done a thing with my Twitter page other than choose one of the most basic templates.

No one writes neutrally about Twitter, do they? I glanced over "The 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance" and noted that acceptance is considered the desireable outcome. Even the suggested articles for those of us "struggling" with Twitter (I am not struggling: it's not terribly complicated to use) mostly seemed to take the approach that using Twitter is what we should want to do. "The Limitations of Twitter" was irrelevant to my situation. I wanted to point out to the author of "What Exactly is the Point of Twitter?" that maybe his friends were constantly on Twitter, so that it made sense for him to check in multiple times a day and stay in touch with them that way, but my friends mostly aren't on Twitter at all, so why should I bother? That said, I did enjoy "The Inspiration that is Twitter." I don't hate Twitter and I find the phenomenon itself interesting--I just resent feeling pressured to enjoy it (sort of, if you don't find Twitter to be a crucial element of your social networking experience, you're obviously not using it properly).

Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

2009-04-28T16:08:00.003-05:00

I see there is a slight misunderstanding here. Having read through Thing 30, it sounds like the More 23 Things program believes that I am actively pursuing more RSS feeds to follow, more websites to be kept abreast of, etc., and is helpfully offering me tools to manage the flood of updates. At present, I have a talent for finding RSS feeds that rarely update at all, so I'm only having to handle 10-20 updates/day. It just seems like overkill to filter them. I don't particularly want anything emailing my RSS feeds to me--if I'm online, I can just check Google Reader or Bloglines--and if they're sent to my cell phone, I'm going to end up paying for them.

Since I wasn't finding the "normal" use of RSS enhancers all that tantalizing, I decided to poke around some of the more creative applications. Simpletracking.com sounds promising. I get a bit obsessive about wondering where my packages are, and I have a tendency to leave the confirmation emails with the tracking numbers in accounts I can't access except at home. I was disappointed to see that UPS doesn't want to play with them, since most of my packages are sent via UPS, but I will try them out the next time someone sends me something via FedEx. Or the post office, for that matter. The post office's tracking system is horrid; I suppose Simpletracking.com isn't going to be able to do anything about that.

ReminderFeed looks really useful. It seemed a bit...um...simple. Like, all I had to do was come up with something to be reminded about, plus a password? That's it? I can handle that.

I did try adding RSS feeds to my homepage and this blog. I took them off again, though. I'm satisfied with leaving a button for Google Reader in my bookmarks and Delicious toolbars and checking it when I'm in the mood. I've also got a Bloglines account, but it doesn't seem to do things much differently than Google Reader, so it mostly feels like duplication. I had been hoping that Bloglines could handle feed authentication--Google Reader adamantly refuses to do so (perhaps because their blogs can't be made private, so you don't need feed authentication to read them?)--but it seems to choke on it as well. Rumor has it that FeedDemon manages it, but I'm running out of energy to just keep signing up for new accounts everywhere.

Okay, okay, I admit I underutilize Delicious. But it just feels horribly sloppy to bookmark tons of things I'll never visit again. It wasn't until Thing 30, though, that I realized that here you're supposed to be making connections (the network) with people you don't know and aren't communicating with. I thought this was like Facebook, where there was supposed to be more of a personal connection, and since I hardly know anyone who uses Delicious--that's more like, many people I know use it, but I don't know their usernames there--I felt sort of alone. No, no--I shall now go forth and connect with all sorts of strangers. How unnatural for me.

I do like the idea of Tagrolls and Linkrolls. I'm going to finish up this post and then see if I can get one on 23 Distractions without screwing up the layout too badly.

Thing 29: Google Tools

2009-04-05T20:55:00.003-05:00

So many options, so little time. What to play with first?

I started with Google News. I'd used Newsvine for my news ever since Thing 12--which is to say, I'd used Newsvine for a while, finding it to be the least obnoxious of the social media sites, and eventually reverted to picking up headlines here and there instead. Dang it, I don't want my media to be social. I rarely even read the reader comments attached to a news story. Using Newsvine or Digg or the other social media sites was like trying to read the newspaper while sitting in a room filled with people I didn't know calling back and forth to each other about what they'd just read or had seen online or whatever: hard to concentrate. Hmph. >:(

This Thing was the first I'd heard of Google News (I suppose it's listed on various Google pages, but it hadn't caught my attention), and I was wary--please, not another social media site! Much to my relief, Google is going to try to customize the news to what it thinks I want to read, not the most popular news of a bunch of people I may have nothing in common with.

My initial reaction leans toward the positive. It'll take a while to get used to the layout, but it always takes me a while to do that. I mean, I'm not entirely used to Newsvine's layout, and that's been how many months? Google's preference for simple layouts serves them well here, although the sheer number of links on the page is pushing that simplicity to the limits. There were a couple of glitches--for example, I tried to sign up for the local news of St. Paul, MN and ended up with the local news of a St. Paul somewhere in Canada--but they were worked out quickly. I liked the timeline feature, although when I clicked on what I thought was a story from 2004, I ended up with one from 2008. And ye gods, I'm lazy: it feels like such an effort to scroll down and get the news past the first part of the screen!

For productivity tools (oh goody, we're back to productivity tools!), I chose Gmail. I've been using Gmail for a while, actually; it's the email I've been using for all the Things that demand registration. I did a bit with labels back when I used this email for mailing lists, but that was about as far as my experimentation got. But for a while now, I've been thinking that this may become my main email address, and so it was time to take a closer look at it. I'd never poked into the Labs that I can recall. Now I've done so and have set up the gadget that warns you that you might be about to send an email without its attachment. And now I know why some emails have a > in front of them while others have a >>. Cool.

Drawbacks? Well, I'm still on dial-up at home, and Gmail is definitely oriented toward high-speed connections. Yes, there's the option to go for basic HTML, which delivers the mail just fine, but a lot of the fun features disappear (and no visiting the Labs while you're on basic HTML). I'm still a bit cautious about storing my main email online forever--never mind that I've had how many computers crash on me at home and have barely saved my downloaded archives each time? But in all the time I've had this address, Google has done an excellent job of weeding out the spam--that's practically enough to make me switch regardless of any other feature.

in-between thing: twitter

2009-03-25T10:45:00.004-05:00

Some time later, and no, I have not yet experienced the ecstacy that is Twitter. It still feels like I'm saying random, meaningless drivel into the void. I have, however, started finding a practical use for Twitter when it comes to following others. Following groups, organizations, businesses, and so on is proving to be informative. The groups that are on Twitter for professional reasons aren't wasting their 140 characters in random, meaningless drivel; they're posting actual news, using links to connect readers to more in-depth information. In 140 characters, I can decide if the story is something I want to know more about, and if it isn't, I haven't spent a lot of time on it. It might be nice if some of the organizations on Facebook moved this sort of thing to Twitter. For example, I connected to Magers & Quinn (a bookstore) on Facebook. I don't mind hearing about their upcoming events or their recommended books, but Facebook is feeding that onto my Wall, the same as if they were one of my friends. I'd be satisfied with getting that sort of news in a tweet, knowing that I could learn more from their blog, their newsletter, and so on.

Thing 28: Customized Home Pages

2009-03-13T08:34:00.005-05:00

Well, this was hauntingly familiar. I'd dealt with customized home pages way back in August with Thing 13 (Online Productivity Tools). There seem to be a few more options out there this year, but the principle is the same.

Since Thing 13, I've been using iGoogle as my home page on my home computer. This time, I've been testing Netvibes and Pageflakes out as well. I want to like Netvibes more than I do, but it's been having small problems ever since I signed up. I had to sign up twice because it locked up the first time and my registration never went all the way through. Started simultaneously with Pageflakes, Netvibes takes noticeably longer to load which isn't much of a selling point, and sometimes it just doesn't load at all. And finally, something about the layout just rubs me the wrong way aesthetically. I've changed the template and colors, but it's still not to my taste. The various widgets do what they're supposed to do (mostly), but I find many of them unattractive anyway. I do like that they've got a fairly wide assortment of widgets, but iGoogle has more (so there).

Pageflakes' strong points are the things I didn't like about Netvibes: it loads faster, I like the layout better, and most of the time, with any given flake, I like its look more than Netvibes' corresponding widget. Its mail flakes seem to have more problems accessing my email than Netvibes' do, though. But at least I didn't have to sign up for it twice, and so far it hasn't had hiccups in loading.

I'm not quite ready to dump iGoogle yet. I may not like its layout quite as much as Pageflakes', but I find its basic simplicity appealing in its own right. And the gadgets I've found are mostly doing what I need them to do, although why the birthday reminder gadget occasionally just stops working puzzles me.

Some gadgets, regardless of platform, are just really useful. I like having my various email accounts viewable with a quick glance at one page, rather than traipsing around from login screen to login screen to check them all. I think Facebook and Twitter do just fine as small gadgets: it strips them down to their essentials and cuts out the noise (well, Twitter doesn't seem to have much beyond its essentials, but it still works great as a gadget--if you like it in the first place). And what's a start page without news headlines or brief weather updates?

Like giving Twitter a fair shot, I'll probably continue to try all these home pages for a while and see how they work out in the long run. There are always new gadgets/widgets/flakes to try, after all--may as well see them in three incarnations.

Thing 27: Twitter

2009-03-09T08:58:00.005-05:00

The hypothetical dedicated readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven't posted since February 4. Now part of this was because of catching That Cold and being busy at work, but it was also because I could see that the next Thing was Twitter and I just couldn't work up any enthusiasm for it. Unfortunately, I still can't.

I signed up for Twitter about a week ago and have tried to post daily. I've found a few people to follow and one person is following me (doesn't that sound like stalking?). I get that Twitter is microblogging, but my preferences run toward macroblogging: when I blog, I want to get into a topic and explore it at some length. This is not something you do when you have only 140 characters to work with.

I agree that Twitter would be more interesting if I had more connections there. More Things advises inviting people you know to join. I don't think I can in good conscience, because there's nothing to offer them. I readily admit, I wasn't enthusiastic about Facebook when I joined, but after a while, I realized that there were things about it I liked: applications that helped me socialize (vs. setting my teeth on edge), ways to find people I'd lost contact with, a way to blog while maintaining some privacy, etc. All Twitter is is the Facebook status feed. If my friends are already on Facebook, what do any of us need another status feed for? And heck, you can write more than 140 characters on Facebook. To be fair, I like that on Twitter you're not obliged to start your tweet with your name--but it looks like in Facebook's next incarnation, you may not have to deal with that either.

I note that others seem to be having trouble warming up to Twitter. The only person I get frequent tweets from has nothing to do with the More Things program. The people I'm following who are working their way through More Things have put out a few tweets and then quit. Heck, even mnmorethings, the More Things own Twitter identity, seems to have given up after January 29!

It's different for an institution like a library. I see that if you had actual news for your followers, Twitter would be a good way of getting them the bare bones quickly. Maybe I just lead too dull a life for Twitter.

I'm going to try to be quietly active on Twitter for the rest of the More Things program, to give it a fair try. Maybe I'll ask the one active tweeter in my life what she likes about it. But like with lots of the photo apps from 23 Things, this is an aspect of Web 2.0 that just doesn't fill a void in my life.

Thing 26: Join the 23 Things on a Stick Ning

2009-02-04T21:37:00.003-06:00

I joined the 23 Things on a Stick Ning way back at Thing 21. Okay, that was only five Things ago, but given the break between the two sets of Things, that was also five months ago. Not that I did much then. Heck, I'd joined Ning itself even earlier, May 2008, in conjunction with the Midwest Library Technology Conference, and hadn't done much with it then.

This time around, I am putting slightly more effort into the Ning. I finally got around to answering a friend request from last fall (in my defense, I thought I had accepted that request back when it was made), and I've just accepted another one. I've also left some comments on a wall. As it turns out, we're discussing knitting, not the 23 Things, but it's communication. (I swear, knitting has gotten me further in networking than my professional responsibilities ever have).

I have glanced over the Ning widgets and I'm not finding them compelling. For all that Ning can be used for just about any interest, because of the two groups I'm part of, it feels professional to me and no, I don't really want to add BuddyPoke! ("Express yourself! Hug, kiss, tickle, or punch your friends with your own personalized 3D avatar") to a professional group.

I considered joining another Ning group, perhaps one more in tune with my extracurricular interests. Oddly, I'm not coming up with anything. A search for "knitting" netted me some photos, but no groups--not that I really need another knitting group in my life, since I have Ravelry. "Writing" is far too general; "journaling," far too specific. Of course, the beauty of Ning is that I could run out and create groups for anything I searched for and didn't find. But that's not me. This is partly because my schedule is just crowded right now and partly because I'm only a half-hearted social networker at best. Give me an actual network of people I'm familiar with and I will participate pretty regularly. But starting one and luring people into it? Nah. I'd never follow through.

I did add the 23 Things Ning badge to my blog way back when. Indeed, that redesign that I mention in the most recent in-between thing was prompted by my realizing that the new template I'd chosen was cutting off the right edge of the badge. So if I hadn't been able to get DISQUS to work, could I have blamed Ning?

in-between thing: disqus and blogger

2009-01-30T09:13:00.006-06:00

Not being entirely satisfied with my new template, I changed it. What with DISQUS being tangled in the HTML, it changed as well. Now, regardless of whether a post has comments or not, it says "View Comments" instead of giving me the correct number (usually "0 Comments," but occasionally people do say things). Tried reinstalling DISQUS and apparently the code went in twice because it then said "0 Comments 0 Comments." This is when I learned that DISQUS's help files are practically nonexistent (the one for Blogger is "Coming Soon"). Okay, world, I'm not positively impressed by this!

[a few minutes later] Fixed this! I can't believe I figured out to fix this; I don't speak XML. Pure intuition--and it happened to work this time. But I don't think I should have had to rely on intuition in this situation. Surely many people who use DISQUS wish to redesign their blogs at some point.

in-between thing: disqus

2009-01-27T11:13:00.002-06:00

Ha. With an actual post, I see how DISQUS works. Yay: no one will be forced to sign up with DISQUS if they don't want to!

(No, I'm not saying how it works. If you've made it this far and you're curious, come comment on something from Thing 25 onwards. :) Yes, that's only two posts. I'm trying.)

Thing 25: Bloggers' Toolkit

2009-01-27T10:45:00.003-06:00

Okay, I got it: gadgets and widgets are blog bling. If I used enough of these, I could so successfully camoflage my writing that no one would ever find it.

The easiest ~~toys~~ gadgets and widgets were the ones that required the least effort on my part (duh). Since all I had to do to take advantage of the Typealyzer and the Blog Readability Test was to plug my blog's address into a box, they were the first I played with. I'm really hoping that my blog's postgrad readability rating doesn't mean that 23 Distractions is about as pleasant to read as the worst academic writing! Also, 23 Distractions scores as an ESTP blog. I'm an INTJ, and I'm spending way too much time trying to puzzle out how an anonymous computer somewhere was so off-base.

Moving on to more serious/functional stuff, I eventually decided to sign up for DISQUS. I went back and forth on this because I couldn't figure out from what I was seeing how it improved anything. I suppose I signed up for it mostly to see how it worked. Although now I'm confused: since I had to shut Blogger's comments down to get DISQUS to work, do readers have to be signed into DISQUS to make any comments at all? Gah.

Site statistics intrigue me. I'm delaying signing up for any, however, since most of them looked like overkill. But I would certainly try to set them up on a library blog: we all know libraries live and die by their statistics! So far, this hasn't seemed like a blog that would benefit from adding audio or video gadgets. If I were writing a more personal blog, though, I'd probably want to add photos and the occasional video. As for a professional blog, I'm certain we could find a use for those widgets. With this particular blog, though, it really would be bling: flashy, eye-catching, but not much in the way of functional.

The time consumption is pretty high for this Thing. Installation and sign-up usually didn't take long, but working through lists of widgets, reading about them, sorting them out in my head, testing them, and so on took quite a while. I eventually made myself stop just so I could get this posted before February. Although if we do set up a library blog at some point in the future, at least my preliminary research is taken care of.

Thing 24: Refresh Your Blog

2009-01-21T09:30:00.004-06:00

And we're back, ladies and gentlemen: blog revamped, avatar refreshed, ready to plunge into the next 23 Things.

I like Blogger just fine for blogging, but doing this Thing reminded me that I'm not happy with its layout capabilities, something I'd forgotten since the long-ago days of Thing 1. I could probably make it look like anything I wanted to if my HTML skills were good enough, but they're not, so I'm stuck with the templates. And much to my annoyance, I can't customize the templates very much. Oh, it looked like there were possibilites, but it didn't take long for me to realize that only some of the colors could be changed, that tweaking the font threw off the spacing, etc. So wait, in the months since I last posted here, Google added more gadgets but didn't plump up the template selection? Sigh. Well, I did manage to add a subscription gadget, so keeping track of my dazzling prose should be a smidgen easier.

Thing 23: Final Thoughts

2008-09-12T09:30:00.002-05:00

Oh, where to begin? I gained several favorite new Things through 23 Things. I went from having no idea what Facebook was to using it daily to keep my long-distance social life on track. I didn't understand why people want to blog (why so many people want to blog!) and now I'm tentatively considering starting a personal blog once I sign off on 23 Distractions. And let's not even get into listing the online productivity tools--those are just plain fun (and useful--a win/win situation!). Plus there were the old Things I was already familiar with that I was happy to see during the program: seeing LibraryThing on the list made me feel like I was already being trendy and innovative on my own.

Naturally in a list of multiple options, some will be less attractive than others. The idea of doing much with my photos online just leaves me feeling exhausted, not creative. I keep forgetting I have a Delicious account, much less that I can use it. Second Life may have to wait until I put grad school behind me and get a faster Internet connection. But at least now I know that these Things are out there and I've tried them, rather than just hearing about them and idly meaning to look into them someday.

I liked that I knew people, usually coworkers or fellow students, who were also going through the 23 Things. It was always interesting to read their takes on stuff; often they picked up on aspects of something that I didn't consider important or vice versa. And yes, if you do a "23 More Things" or "Another 23 Things," I'm likely to sign up.

Thing 22: What Did I Learn Today?

2008-09-12T09:07:00.002-05:00

I came into 23 Things wanting to learn more about the new stuff out there in Internet-world. I'm coming out of it knowing more and wanting to learn still yet more, so it looks like the program worked. Unlike a resolution to lose weight or break a bad habit, a resolution to keep poking around in Web 2.0 will probably be easier to keep because it promises to be interesting and often fun as well.

I've been hearing intriguing things about Lifehacker, so I'll probably get its RSS feed and try it out for a while. It sounds like it could keep me posted on useful Web 2.0 developments. I don't know how many Things I'll find a use for in our library, for all the reasons I've detailed over the past four months, but when I come upon someThing new, I'll give it a good onceover and see if we can use it. I anticipate far more success with Web 2.0 in my personal life because I can probably always find some justification for a new toy!

Thing 21: Beyond MySpace: Other Social Networks

2008-09-11T08:25:00.002-05:00

Uh-oh. More of this here socializing with perfect strangers stuff. Eek!

In a way, Thing 20 was simple. Facebook or MySpace: choose one or the other (or both) and have at it, knowing you're tackling one (or both) of the largest social networking sites. With Thing 21, I feel like I'm overwhelmed by potential. Ning? WebJunction? Bake Space? The Wikipedia list left me feeling a bit lightheaded. My membership in Ravelry counts, right?

So I have dutifully joined the 23 Things on a Stick page on Ning, but like back in May when I first joined Ning for the Midwest Library Technology Conference, I can't think of anything to say (so much for socializing). I'm debating joining Bake Space--thank you for bringing it to my attention; even if I don't choose to play there, I know someone who should know about it. I'm not entirely sure how WebJunction works, so maybe it'll become clear if I join, and I dimly remember telling myself that I'd join LinkedIn when I got to Thing 21. But given what I said in the last post about not being all that interested in socializing unless I have a connection with people in the group, plus the fact that it's just going to take time to keep up with all these groups, I'm not sure how much use I'll make of any of these social networks.

Thing 20: Libraries and Social Networks

2008-09-10T09:26:00.005-05:00

This Thing is practically anticlimactic, what with my having turned it into an in-between thing way back in June. It's good that I got three months head start on social networking before it came time to write about it, because it's taken that long to get the hang of Facebook.

At first, Facebook looked like it was in danger of drowning in inanity. The games I saw seemed silly. I'd had quite enough of posting photos after all those Flickr-related Things. It didn't look like many people I knew were on Facebook--I'm not in its biggest demographic, after all--so the social networking part wasn't working out too well.

I finally decided that Facebook's strength for me is its ability to keep one up-to-date on the minutiae in one's friends' lives. This isn't a big deal if the friends in question are local and you stay in close contact with them, but most of my friends live in different states. Even with email, we just don't stay in contact all that well, and so most communication degenerates down to birthday cards and holiday letters. And usually only the big events make it into those, so there's no context ("We're getting married!" "Married? I didn't know you were dating! Wait, who is this guy?"). Facebook encourages keeping your friends updated on anything from upcoming nuptials to whether or not you're having a bad day. Playing the online version of a board game with a friend of mine on the East Coast has resulted in more casual communication between us in a month than we've managed in the past two years.

I haven't been all that interested in the groups. I've joined a few, on topics I'm interested in, but I never remember to visit them. This lack of interest doesn't surprise me, though: I'm in groups on LibraryThing and Ravelry, and I never take the time to visit them either. I need a more personal connection than just mutual interest in a single topic. So I've joined the Library 2.0 Interest Group, but have only visited it once since then.

I looked at MySpace's homepage this morning, in the spirit of investigation. The spirit of investigation can only take one so far, however. While I appreciated that MySpace offers a rudimentary tour (Facebook apparently believes people should sign up sight unseen), advertisements for some sort of sorority program and news about Jessica Simpson left me cold. And when I ran a test-search on a name, I realized I could see much more about the people in the results than I wanted to. (After my adventure with my representative, I've got privacy issues on the brain.)

This is still yet another Thing I'm not seeing our library making much use of. Again, generational issues are a factor. I don't see a lot of teenagers or twenty-somethings having much interest in law libraries, and pushing a page or a group under their noses isn't likely to change that.

Thing 19: Podcasts

2008-09-09T20:47:00.004-05:00

Right off the bat, I can tell you that my favorite discovery about podcasts is that they can be downloaded. My connectivity issues haven't improved noticeably in the past twenty-four hours, so I was picturing staying after work trying to find very short podcasts to listen to so that I could go home at a reasonable hour. And then I learned that they could be saved to disk and the light bulb went on. This is what large capacity flash drives are for. A bit of post-work downloading and I headed home laden with podcasts to sample at my leisure.

I haven't bonded with the podcast directory sites yet. Yahoo Podcasts just seemed to be an open search box, fine if I knew what I was interested in listening to, but not much help for someone who needed a few suggestions. Podcast.net never came up when I clicked on it. Podcast.com was more promising, but when I clicked on interesting-looking titles, I repeatedly got warnings that there might be explicit content in my selection. Either I have an undiscovered instinct for homing in on naughty podcasts, Podcast.com has way too many of them, or they err on the side of overcaution in their warnings. Whatever the case, after about four of these warnings in a row, I moved on to other things (since I was downloading off my work computer, I couldn't take the risk that these really were offensive podcasts).

For my first baby steps into the world of podcasts though, I didn't really need a directory. I've been told about a variety of podcasts just in the normal course of life, and so I went off and visited them. I listened to a couple of Grammar Grater podcasts from Minnesota Public Radio plus an interview with the Yarn Harlot from the KnitPicks site, and I have plans to delve into PodCastle.net ("the fantasy fiction podcast") when I have more time. (Which may not be for a while. Must pass classes. Must get MLIS. Must not set up RSS feeds to constant sources of distraction. 23 distractions are more than sufficient.)

in-between thing: youtube

2008-09-09T20:36:00.002-05:00

Oops. I just realized that the "see alsos" at the end of YouTube videos change constantly. Between that and the fact that there are multiple videos on backwards Continental knitting (or is that Continental backwards knitting?) on YouTube, it might not be clear what video I was referring to. I meant this psychedelically-colored one:

Thing 18: YouTube & Other Online Video

2008-09-08T16:54:00.005-05:00

I dunno...you're asking a woman who has the bare minimum Netflix subscription and hasn't watched TV in months to check out online video sites?

I think YouTube is a fine idea. It's one Thing, though, that highlights a digital divide: online video might as well not exist if you have a dial-up connection. So with my home computer not even in the running and with my laptop having a few connectivity issues, I'm doing Thing 18 off my work computer and am making sure to view only Very Inoffensive Videos.

That said, I love the "Introducing the Book" video--I'd've put it in this blog, but that would probably come across as a mite unoriginal on my part. So instead, readers of this blog (all three of you) will be treated to an instructional video on backwards knitting. I want to learn to knit backwards, so you get to learn to knit backwards. And I liked the 'see also' feature. The videos this "Backwards Knitting" video refers to include another video on the same topic but done by a Continental knitter (really, that last comment makes sense if you knit). This is a good video instruction-wise, even if it's grainy: it clearly shows how to perform the technique. What more can you ask of an instructional video?

I'm almost scared to get a fast Internet connection simply because I can see myself spending far too much time looking for interesting videos. I don't feel much urge to make videos, though. Of course, maybe that's because I haven't been exposed to enough amateur video yet.

in-between thing: facebook

2008-09-05T13:35:00.003-05:00

A few days ago, I got a friend request on Facebook from my state representative. I've been procrastinating on responding to it, mostly because I'm in denial that I got it in the first place. Not that I have anything against my representative--indeed, I'm oblivious enough about politics that it took me a while to figure out who this person was who was friending me--but I'm mystified as to how they found me. Since I didn't put my home address in Facebook and I don't think our mutual friend sold me out, I'm left imagining that some poor souls on the representative's staff have been assigned to go through the entire list of registered voters in my district and friend any of us they happen to find on Facebook (and possibly MySpace, but I'm not in a position to check that).

However Representative X or their staff found me, I'm not happy about this. This in and of itself isn't going to drive me off Facebook--I believe my representative is relatively harmless and I'm capable of ignoring unwanted friend requests--but it does leave me musing on those privacy issues that keep popping up around Web 2.0.

Thing 17: ELM Productivity Tools

2008-09-05T08:15:00.003-05:00

I knew about the Electronic Library for Minnesota before I started the 23 Things. It's been very useful now that I'm back in student mode--I love being able to get journal articles without having to take the time to go over to a library and I really don't miss trying to make photocopies from bound journals. However, I didn't know that the databases came with extras before playing with Thing 17.

I think EBSCO's Personal Folder feature will be really useful. It was a lot easier to save the articles for my current class to this folder instead of downloading them to a flash drive. After all, I never remember which flash drive I used and when you save an article to a computer, the file name is a meaningless string of letters and numbers--saved to the Folder, the file name is the article title. Although my high hopes for getting all my articles neatly organized and available from any computer crashed when I realized that one of the assigned articles was from another company's database. Oh well.

The Search Alert feature was less successful. Having dinked around with it for a few days, it looks like I can set up a successful RSS feed through IE7 or Outlook, which is fine when I'm at work. But I use Firefox 3 and Thunderbird at home, and I just couldn't get the RSS feed set up on either of them successfully. Oh, it looked like it was set up in Thunderbird (Firefox couldn't "see" the RSS feed at all), but whenever a new article came in and I clicked on its link, I was sent to a login page that wanted a username and password that I didn't have. If I tried, perhaps I could get this working on Google Reader, but like I said back at Thing 3, I don't want to use Google Reader. And it wasn't clear where I should go for help. My library? EBSCO?

I've had mixed feelings about NetLibrary for years. It's a great idea, but the books included seem to mostly be a random mixture of this and that. And once I've chosen a book, the layout strikes me as odd. Maybe I'm just wired for print books more than electronic ones! But I love the idea of being able to run keyword searches on books, not just journal and magazine articles, so I hope NetLibrary (and other variants of electronic books) continue to improve.

Thing 16: Student 2.0 Tools

2008-08-27T08:08:00.002-05:00

Oh, great timing. Here I am: a Student 2.0.

I first encountered the Assignment Calculator about a year ago, although I can't remember what brought it to my attention. I tried it for a paper that was due shortly after Thanksgiving. I suppose I can't blame the Assignment Calculator for the fact that I let myself get distracted by eating turkey and baking holiday cookies and ended up staying up the night before the paper was due, writing it at the last moment just like when I was in college. Plus, the Assignment Calculator is more organized than I am, period. It talks about creating an outline and a thesis statement before starting the first draft--I've tended to skip outlining altogether and my thesis statement is often about the last thing I come up with. If the U didn't create an Assignment Calculator for grad students because they thought grad students had matured and had their acts together...well, not necessarily.

The Research Project Calculator looks like an excellent idea. If you can keep any students from developing my procrastination habits while they're still young, their future professors will thank you. However, I can't imagine us getting any students here except law students, and most of them probably hang out at their school libraries. So I don't see us using the Assignment Calculator, much less the RPC. I suppose what we need (or what our pro se patrons need, rather) is a calculator that will walk them through the steps to file an appeal on schedule, including getting a brief written. The Appeals Calculator--doesn't that sound useful?

Well, for me, another semester starts next week, bringing more opportunities to use the Assignment Calculator. I really am trying to be better about outlining and sometimes I know what my thesis is before the end of the paper, so maybe I can get more practical use out of the Assignment Calculator.

in-between thing: newsvine

2008-08-27T07:54:00.004-05:00

I said I would try this for a while, and I have. I like that Newsvine doesn't make you create an account to get anything useful out of it. But I find it irritating that when I see a story I'm interested in, clicking on the link just takes me to the comments on the story, not the story itself. I have to click a second link to go to the story. Without a context, what good are the comments?

Thing 15: Online Games and Libraries

2008-08-26T08:31:00.005-05:00

When I first looked over this Thing, I thought, Oh, something completely out of my experience. After all, I'd never heard of Puzzle Pirates and while yes, I know of Second Life, having a dial-up connection on my home computer pretty much prevented ever playing with it. But then it occurred to me that I am playing a couple of games online, albeit through Facebook. I admit I haven't done much with Knighthood other than build several buildings, but I'm still fairly new at it. And while playing a Scrabble-clone with friends is maybe not what the point of this Thing is, it's a game and it's online--I'm going to call it an online game.

Sorry: I'm just not feeling motivated to tackle Puzzle Pirates. I saw Pirates of the Caribbean and it was a fun movie, but that's the extent of my interest in piracy.

I was all ready to plunge into Second Life (if I could find a fast-enough connection) until I watched the video tour of Info Island. It was so jerky and pixelated that I decided that Second Life itself must be a really unpleasant experience. If I had to watch my avatar ~~twitching~~ walking like that, I was going to get a headache (it was so much better when the avatar finally took off and flew). This is maybe not the best video to promote this Thing with! I then watched Ohio University's video and realized that this was probably a more accurate picture of what Second Life is like. So while I've been beset with technical difficulties lately for getting a fast connection, I think I will take a closer look at Second Life, maybe even create an avatar and fly around a bit.

This is definitely one of those Things that looks to have more application for a public library or an academic library than a law library. Not that you couldn't build a law library on Info Island and stock it with the finest in brown books with red and black stripes on the spine. But I don't know how many law library patrons would want to go through Second Life to visit one. For the most part, the law is just not Fun. Maybe when today's teenage virtual reality devotees have become tomorrow's law clerks, this will be more feasible, but right now it doesn't seem worth the effort to establish a presence in Second Life.

Thing 14: LibraryThing

2008-08-24T15:50:00.006-05:00

LibraryThing. Again, whee!

I joined LibraryThing a little over two years ago. It was meant to be: I'd kept my own little card catalog since childhood, which I'd eventually migrated to an Access database, but Access was merely adequate for this purpose. LibraryThing and Book Collector (library catalog software which I'd bought just before learning about LibraryThing) were much better.

I haven't been all that social on LT. I mostly use it for the cataloging feature, although now that a couple of friends of mine have joined, I'm getting a tenuous social network going. I've joined several groups, but I just don't have time to check in on them.

While I have about 888 books in my LT catalog as of this writing, I'm not comfortable with opening my entire library to strangers. So I have created a second account for 23 Things on a Stick and dropped in about 200 books. It should at least give a taste of my collection, and if it looks a bit sparse tag-wise, well, I assure you my master collection is tagged, filled with LC call numbers, and generally maintained to the best of my abilities.

Thing 13: Online Productivity Tools

2008-08-22T08:59:00.005-05:00

Toys! Whee!

I tackled the start page first. It's not that that sort of start page is new to me: my ISP (EarthLink) has had one like that for years. But there are lots of gadgets on it that I don't like that are hard to get rid of and the look is generally cluttered, so I was willing to try another one. I went with iGoogle's page because it had a nice clean look, figuring that I can always go back to EarthLink's if iGoogle starts to annoy me. It's a bit odd getting a peek into my Gmail account instead of my EarthLink email though, since Gmail is only one of my backups.

I would get a lot more out of these tools if I didn't already have a PDA. It takes only a few seconds to turn on the PDA and three minutes bare minimum to get a computer up and running. These online tools aren't much use for reminding me to do stuff that isn't computer-based (set the rice to soaking, return the library books). The PDA has problems in this area too--it doesn't really remind me of much if I forget to check it in the first place--although I can set it to sound an alarm as a reminder, which has been helpful.

That aside, many of these things looked useful. Google's calendar was more than adequate for the events I typed in to test it with. Remember the Milk seems to be getting lots of good reviews, but when I try to enter a task, it locks up. I'll try it from another computer, but how much use will it be if I can only use it on certain computers? Backpack was probably useful as all get-out, but it was overkill. Actually Backpack looks like it might be an equivalent to Microsoft's SharePoint Server, in which case, Backpack does a much better job of explaining itself than SharePoint does. We could probably use it at work except that we've already got SharePoint.

The sticky note programs look like they have potential. But because they need to be downloaded, I'm going to try them out at home first; our IT department frets about unapproved software being installed on our work computers.

Thing 12: Do You Digg?

2008-08-20T08:51:00.003-05:00

No.

So let me get this straight: once upon a time, librarians kept abreast of the news so that they'd know what their patrons were talking about when those patrons came in wanting to know more about what was in the headlines. And now, librarians can use Digg or Mixx or Newsvine to funnel all those news stories to them instead of taking the time to skim several newspapers and glance at CNN.

This sounds like a great idea, except that I don't see Digg and its siblings fulfilling the function that scanning newspaper headlines does. The patrons of way back when had already heard the news and wanted to know more. It looks like Digg, et al. are there to give you the news for the first time. Do libraries often get patrons in asking reference librarians what's going on? If so, wouldn't it just be simpler to point them toward the newspapers?

I understand that in a time-crunched world, people would appreciate a service that would push them just the most crucial news stories. It takes time to skim a newspaper and you can't really fast-forward through a current TV news broadcast. But I don't see that letting the masses determine what I should see is any less unbiased than leaving that judgment to editors; it's just different criteria and a different number of people that are involved.

It looks like you could get these "social news" sites customized to your preferences eventually, but they mostly seem designed for you to try to get people to validate your taste in news. I'm going to give Newsvine a try--it seems more oriented to news rather than entertainment. But I think this is going to be another Web 2.0 innovation that I can't find much use for personally and none professionally.

Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

2008-08-19T08:55:00.005-05:00

Or, as they're calling themselves now: delicious. That will be easier to type, anyway.

I was first introduced to tagging via LibraryThing when I joined a couple of years ago. I took to it almost instantly: it was do-it-yourself subject cataloging without the barriers thrown up by LCSH. Not that I want to trash LCSH--I see the advantages of a controlled vocabulary--but that controlled vocabulary could be improved, and overall LCSH...well, let's not get into that right now. Suffice it to say, tags are much more useful for an individual and usually more fun as well. I've been tagging these posts as I've written them. Tagging works best for grouping similar things, so I've found tagging posts to be a bit of a challenge. I've tagged this one "LibraryThing" knowing that there's a LibraryThing Thing coming up so I'll have at least two posts with the tag, but I haven't peeked ahead enough to know if the "tagging" or "Delicious" tags I'm using will ever be used again.

I joined Delicious a couple of years ago as well. I don't know why I don't use Delicious more, since if nothing else, the idea of saving bookmarks to a website where you can access them from any computer makes so much sense. But I've memorized the addresses to the sites I visit the most and I just never think to go to Delicious. Maybe I'm just not adventurous enough: obviously I should be going out, finding new sites faster than I can memorize them, and seeing more of the Internet!

Since I barely use Delicious for its most fundamental purpose, as you may guess, I haven't been using the social networking aspect at all. I think some of my friends must have Delicious accounts, but we never talk about them, I have no idea what their account names are, and if I had an interesting link I wanted them to see, I'd just email it to them. Nor have I felt much urge to poke around in strangers' bookmarks. I just popped over to Delicious and looked at the popular tags...no, nothing called.

Despite my lack of personal enthusiasm for Delicious, I think it would be a good tool at work. Saving a collection of work-related bookmarks to an account that anyone on staff could access would be useful, and it would also be nice to browse Delicious for other potential bookmarks relating to law libraries, to see things we would probably otherwise miss.

Thing 10: Wikis

2008-08-15T11:18:00.004-05:00

So now I've worked with both Google Docs and the wiki we're developing here at work. It's a matter of scale, isn't it? If only a few people need to contribute to a document, use Google Docs or a similar service. But if you want input from anywhere from several people to the world, you'd be better served by a wiki.

I don't think I'm enough of a free spirit to truly enjoy a wiki. I like a little uniformity in my documents (note that possessive pronoun). The wiki at work is intended to replace our procedures manual(s) and several people are contributing.This is excellent for many reasons: the person who understands her/his job best is the one writing it up, the work is shared with everyone and not just dumped on the hapless soul who couldn't get away fast enough, and if we remember to keep it up, the wiki will be reasonably current. But no two people have the same writing style, so each entry is organized differently--heck, no two people really agree on layout. And yes, I'm a perfectionist, but that touch of chaos irritates me. Other wikis out there look like they have more uniformity--perhaps someone lightly edits the whole thing, or they have templates to work from?

My obsessive-compulsive tendencies aside, wikis have a lot of potential. Wikipedia has been on my mind recently because of the reference class I'm in. The professor has not wanted us to use Wikipedia, and I haven't been sure if that's simply because it's the easy answer (and in a reference class, understandably, you want students to familiarize themselves with several sources) or because of Wikipedia's slightly unsavory reputation. When I've looked up a subject on Wikipedia that I know enough about to catch errors, the articles have been accurate, so I think of it as a good place to find a "good-enough" answer. Perhaps Wikipedia just needs a little more time to gain acceptance. After all, a co-worker told me that when she went through library school, in the pre-Wikipedia days, the reference professors wouldn't let them use Google to look anything up--it wasn't seen as being as reputable as Yahoo.

Thing 9: Online Collaboration Tools

2008-08-15T08:29:00.002-05:00

[I've asked for editing rights to the test documents for this Thing. But it looks like some people have had trouble accessing the documents even with permission, and I'm not sure when the permission will come through, so I'm going ahead with what I already know.]

My experience with online collaboration has been recent, but positive. I'm in a class this summer, and last week we had a group paper and presentation due. What with jobs, family commitments, school, etc., my group of four was finding it almost impossible to find a time when we could all meet. I was not looking forward to emailing a document back and forth. And then another group member suggested we do the project on Google Docs. It was easy to get all of us editing rights. We worked on our sections of the paper separately, uploaded them to Google Docs, and then one of us pulled the whole thing together and made it hand-in-able. In addition, we also used the Presentation module (Google's equivalent to PowerPoint) to make slides for the presentation. While we didn't take the time to use Presentation's templates so our presentation was a bit on the bare bones side, the basics were there and it worked smoothly on the classroom computer, which doesn't always happen when you're trying to run a PowerPoint presentation off your flash drive.

Collaborative documents is a Web 2.0 innovation that I can see many uses for and which could make life easier. And it seems to be taking off: I got an email from Microsoft inviting me to try Microsoft Office Live Workspace, which I gather is their attempt to catch up in this area.

Thing 8: Share Your Creations

2008-08-14T09:02:00.005-05:00

I take it PictureTrail's target audience is teenage girls? The default templates for their various Flicks are laden with sparkly stars, butterflies, pink and silver swirls, and so on. But I have slogged through the sugary collection and found a frame that at least doesn't twinkle, and a way of displaying the photos that won't make me seasick. Apparently continually moving pictures are not my forte.

Of course the Internet is a visual medium. But I find myself working through all these photo-oriented Things thinking, Yes, more ways to share photos. Been there, done that. Isn't there anything else one can do with Library 2.0? Not fair, I know: blogging (Thing 1), after all, is primarily verbal, and all those activities on Thing 7 weren't about photo-sharing.

I thought PictureTrail itself was easy enough to navigate, and I'm relieved to see that they'll delete my account if I never upgrade it--one fewer unused account cluttering up the Internet. Boy, they're not subtle about the advertising. I don't see myself using PictureTrail either personally or professionally (sparkly hearts and swirls just say LAW LIBRARY, now don't they?). But I might be able to come up with a use for the shared database or possibly eFolio.

Thing 7: Web 2.0 Communication Tools

2008-07-02T08:11:00.002-05:00

Oh and doesn't this Thing cover a lot of territory? Jumping right in...

I don't feel as if email is draining away all my time and energy, but I think that's because I don't get much email in the first place. Most of my coworkers, if they go away for even a day or two, spend much of their first day back slogging through their inboxes. Me, I have to be gone for a week before that becomes a noticeable problem. I don't feel out of touch; it's just that my work-related mailing lists don't generate much email. I think email has slightly improved my productivity, although more in terms of quality than quantity. I'm much more likely to fire off an email to someone than to try to call that person--I find it easier to express myself in writing, and there's that ability to attach files (better than having to print out a file and mail it).

We have begun experimenting with instant messaging. We're considering offering IM as a way for patrons to ask reference questions, although we're going to thoroughly test the system first and see if we have enough staff to handle this. We're using Google Talk for these first tests because many people on staff already have Google accounts and because it's web-based so we don't have to get permission from our IT department to use it, but we're thinking about using Meebo if we decide to IM with the public. I must admit that the two of us who tried it yesterday were less than impressed. We couldn't see much difference between using Google Talk and using email, except that at least we know when we get new emails, and the web form of Google Talk didn't let you know when the other party said anything. You had to be staring right at the box to know, which meant you pretty much couldn't get anything else done.

Of course, an IM conversation between two coworkers might not be anything like a reference interaction between a librarian and a patron. Although this may not make things easier. One of the readings describes IM reference as "a sped-up email transaction." Fine, but some answers will take time to research, no matter which medium is used to ask the question. How patient will an IMing patron be if the librarian needs ten minutes or so to go track down the answer? If the librarian comes up with the answer only to come back to the desk and find that the the patron is offline, will the librarian feel as if she's wasted her time? If it had been an email transaction, she could just send the answer along anyway, but as I understand IM, both parties need to be present. "Speed is important but don't feel rushed," burbled that same article. Yeah, right.

Text messaging? One thing at a time. It's not a priority for our library at this time.

We've been participating in web conferencing for years now. It's definitely an improvement over driving all over the Twin Cities (or Minnesota) for meetings that only take an hour or so. The only problem I've experienced with web conferencing is that if you're in a cubicle instead of an office, it's difficult to participate without bothering your neighbors.

in-between thing: blog lists

2008-06-26T11:23:00.002-05:00

Blogger has been highlighting their new Blog List feature for some time; I've only just now gotten around to checking it out. I'm playing with it partially for the experience, partially to make it really easy to find the blogs I've chosen to list, and partially just because I can. Find my blog, find my co-workers'.

If the State Law Library had a blog, I suspect we could list other blogs we thought patrons might find useful. What those would be, I have no idea, but I bet there are some good ones out there somewhere.

Thing 6: Online Image Generators

2008-06-26T08:46:00.009-05:00

I will resist the urge to name this post Flickr III, but playing around with the online image generators was a lot like playing around with the Flickr toys. But this time I'm getting glimmers of ideas of ways that we could use these at work. For example, the State Law Library hosts the occasional series of lunchtime showcases. It may be possible to use some of these images when we advertise these.

As requested, one trading card:

I don't think I'm going to get very far with Toon Doo. I clicked on the link and managed to look at their page for all of about ten seconds before the chaotic layout drove me away. I thought Image Chef was more fun (more navigable, anyway), and came up with these images:

(from our motto First Rung on the Ladder of Justice)

We're a library. These are books. It had to be done.

Thing 5: Flickr (II)

2008-06-21T12:06:00.007-05:00

Yes, the Flickr toys were fun to play with. I think I may be able to find a use for Palette Generator (from Big Huge Labs). Palette Generator analyzes a photo and then generates color swatches from that photo. If I could just get an accurate-ish color printout of those swatches, I could hie off to a yarn store and see if I really could make a sweater using the colors of a gorgeous landscape. I can't figure out how to put a sample picture and its swatches into this blog, but I'll toss in a jigsaw puzzle instead (also fun; even fewer ideas for how to use it practically).

But I digress.

I'm not bubbling over with job-related applications for these toys. It's the nature of our library, in part. Most of our patrons don't come to us for entertainment or even casual learning. For those in the Judiciary, their visits are probably work-related; for the general public, I'm guessing a mood of desperation is more likely. We do host the occasional library event; perhaps by the time the next one rolls around, I'll have played more with Flickr and its accessories and may have ideas of how to incorporate something.

Thing 4: Flickr (I)

2008-06-17T10:23:00.005-05:00

It is not that I am completely ignorant of the features of Web 2.0. In some cases, I have played around with them and found them not to my taste. Flickr would be one of these cases, hence the delay in tackling Thing 4.

One of the "Things" I play with in the Web 2.0 world is Ravelry, a sort of LibraryThing for knitters and crocheters. Ravelry doesn't have a photos feature of its own; it piggybacks off of Flickr. So that's mainly why I have a Flickr account: it holds the photos themselves, and then I describe and tag and comment on those photos through Ravelry, which is much better suited to that purpose.

I haven't figured out what else I would do with Flickr personally. I suppose I could put vacation photos up (note to self: must take a vacation sometime). This would probably be the socially acceptable way to show vacation photos: interested friends could go look, while the uninterested wouldn't have to tell me to my face that they didn't want to--they could just not look. Hmm. Okay, okay, that has possibilities. But I'm still not convinced I'm a Flickr devotee!

That said, how to use Flickr in a library context? Some time ago, a former coworker of mine had the idea of putting together a tour for our library using Flickr, which we did. For the sake of this exercise, a current coworker who's doing the 23 Things as well had the idea of freshening up that tour. So, a new photo here, a revised comment there, and our refashioned tour is ready for visitors.

in-between thing: facebook

2008-06-11T21:15:00.003-05:00

Make that 23 Things Not Necessarily in Any Particular Order on a Stick. Well before Thing 20 appeared on the horizon, I joined Facebook. Blame peer pressure for this one. One minute, it looked like I could ignore Facebook indefinitely and not miss a thing by doing so. Then within the space of a week, I learned that several members of a mailing list I'm on had joined, that a close friend had just joined, that another close friend had been a member for months...finally curiosity won out.

Does it live up to the hype? I'm not sure yet. Getting constant updates on the status of people I'm not all that close to feels pretty unnecessary. But then, those same updates on my friends' statuses let me feel a little closer. Some of the applications amuse me--many seem like complete wastes of time and of my profile page space. It's probably good that I signed on early. By the time Thing 20 rolls around, I may have a much better sense of how Facebook and I will relate.

Thing 3: RSS

2008-06-04T21:07:00.003-05:00

Finally: something 2.0-ish that I was already familiar with. My first foray into the world of RSS was with Sage, a Firefox add-on. I suppose it worked decently enough--I used it for months and I still haven't uninstalled it--but I never really was all that fond of it either. Sage mostly just gives you the text of whatever it is you've linked to, and after a while I missed the bells and whistles of people's sites. And it wasn't much use at all for keeping up with a webcomic!

A number of months ago, I created a Google Reader account. The problem here was that even though I have a link to Google Reader in Firefox's Bookmarks toolbar, which is about as much in my face as you can get, I never get around to actually clicking on the link.

Lately, I've been doing RSS through my various email programs. Both Outlook and Thunderbird can handle RSS feeds. This is proving to be the most satisfactory solution yet. Every time I go online I check my email, and both programs just check RSS feeds automatically while looking for new mail. And once I see that there's something new to read, I'm usually curious enough to go and read it.

I mostly just happen upon RSS feeds that I want to pursue. Funny: in the end, there just aren't that many sites I need to be constantly on top of.

Thing 2: Perspectives on Library 2.0

2008-06-02T21:15:00.003-05:00

Okay, Library 2.0 sounds fun. I mean, this entry has been delayed because when I figured out that all I'd be doing for Thing 2 was reading articles and blogs and watching a video, my motivation just drained away. I wanted to be actively doing things, not just sitting around reading. And there are so many things one can be doing: creating content, sharing content, forming community online...it's going to be a wonderful time to be a user.

I don't know how I'm supposed to fit into the brave new world as a librarian.

Once upon a time, librarians helped patrons navigate the arcana of call numbers and subject headings to find books. They guided patrons through indexes to get them half-hidden journal articles. If a patron had enjoyed all the books of Author A and wanted to read more, a librarian could suggest Author B as a good next read. Through all of this, for the most part, the patrons had questions and the librarians either had answers or had an idea of how to find answers.

We were helping the patrons learn. Well, they (we) have. Now what? Patrons with questions are becoming users who can create their own answers. It seems to me that the commentators were more focused on explaining Library 2.0 than really speculating on the nitty-gritty details of how Libraries 2.0 will really function on a day-to-day basis. It's understandable: so far we're all just speculating on what will happen. But I find myself thinking that there are probably far fewer bank tellers nowadays than before ATMs became ubiquitous and that maybe that's what's going to happen to librarians. People who can do their own banking are probably more than ready to do their own librarianship. Yes, there are still bank tellers--there are still things best done in person at your local bank. There will still be librarians--there will still be things that need the personal touch at libraries. It simply sounds like there won't be as many of those librarians.

You did catch the part at the beginning of this post where I said Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 sound like fun, right? But I would've liked it if some of those commentators had speculated for a moment or two on what roles are left for tech services staff who have fewer books and serials to process, reference librarians who won't be seeing as much of patrons who can now look up their answers from their own computers, and circ staff who can be replaced by self-service check-out machines. But at the same time, I've checked out my own materials without serious injury, researched issues on the Internet and felt proud for finding answers, and have been happy not to have needed to lug home books for my papers--I don't want to go back to the way things were!

in-between thing: ning

2008-05-25T22:23:00.003-05:00

Going straight from Thing 1 to Thing 21 was not my idea. But as it happens, I'm attending the Midwest Library Technology Conference this week, and they asked us to join Ning. So after a bit of clicking about--how much of my real identity do I want for this account, what privacy policy, click where?--I now seem to be successfully Ninged. I even managed to work my brand-new avatar into Ning, although I ended up downloading the file and then cropping it. If Ning says what they're looking for in photo sizes, I haven't seen that yet.

So all that effort, and then it looks like not much is happening on the conference site. Something to check back on before the conference, I suppose.

Thing 1: Beginning Blogging

2008-05-21T21:36:00.002-05:00

Or Beginning Blogging and Avatars to be more accurate. I think most of my energy went into trying to create the avatar. Who would have thought a casual outfit of jeans and a plain sweatshirt, or shorts and a t-shirt (the kind of clothes I envisioned my avatar wearing) would be so hard to pull together? I can feel the cataloging instinct kicking in: I was dismayed to realize that I was going to have to click through 60-odd pages to see all the possible outfits for my avatar--doesn't this just cry out for a better system of organization? Any organization at all would be an improvement. Tagging, maybe.

Blogging? Well, I'll get back to y'all about whether I like it or not. At the moment, it feels like writing a letter to a vast mass of strangers, and that feels unnatural as all get-out. Heck, if I'm going to write letters, I have friends who'd love to hear from me.

23 Things on a Stick? Sounds like a good idea. I've already tried some of the things on the list (LibraryThing = yay! Del.icio.us = uh, whatever), but I could've drifted for years more without trying blogging and who knows if I'd've ever gotten around to sampling Facebook or MySpace. (Did I just commit myself to making it that far through this program? Uh-oh).