Thing 8: Second Life

I watched all three of the videos listed, and I read the article by Stephen Abrams, which in turn linked to an hour long slide show from a presentation done in April 07 about SL, and I listened to that whole thing too, which was very similar to your presentation, Danielle. Its at http://sirsidynixinstitute.com/seminar_page.php?sid=76.

I was very favorably impressed to learn that you get to keep your intellectual property rights to anything you create in SL, which I guess I knew but it helped to be reminded. I think that bodes very well for its future health and growth. It was also interesting to hear it compared to an operating system rather than a game. Its all in what you use it for, it is intrinsically neutral in terms of purpose. I agree that it is like early stages of the web right now, and that as the technology gets better (like adding real time voice in world which the conference said was in beta) it will really become more apparent what this can be used for. Already I see the educational benefits of being able to live in ancient Rome or walk through the Old Globe Theater. Once you can access the web live from within SL and you have real voice then I think library reference will really blossom there, since currently our reference is so web dependent. Anything that encourages more creativity and nonlinear thinking is a good thing.

Thing 7: Social Networks 2

Hello. I'd like to respectfully request credit for creating a profile in Facebook and for joining groups there and adding friends there instead of creating a profile in MySpace. To verify my work you will have to create a login for facebook then search for me by my real name. Currently I'm the only one with that name in there, plus I uploaded a photo so you can see its me. I joined the McHenry Library group in FB, and plan to join some other library groups there too. A group I discovered that I will not be joining is the UCSC group for people who are pledging to have sex in McHenry Library before the end of the year. That group has 77 members. Yikes.

Thing 6: Social Networks 1

I looked at MySpace and was completely turned off by the chaos of the homepage and particularly the chaos of the sample pages I looked at (leopard spot backgrounds, etc.). Facebook is much more appealing, and is where all the other academic librarians I know are hanging out. So I joined FB and created my own profile there (very easy) and immediately added two friends (biomedical librarians from UC San Diego) and started chatting with them about how they are using FB. One of them has also listed her del.icio.us bookmarks in her FB profile too, which is inspiring me to care more about that (thing 9) as well. I also did look at Ning and didn't get how it was any better than FB where you can also create groups.

Thing 5b

OK, I had almost given up on the 23 things, but I'll inch along and see if I can still finish. For Thing 5b I'm most appreciative of the "sub with bloglines" bookmarklet, which I had not taken advantage of before. The exercise has also made me actually checkin with bloglines again after an absence, and I'm seeing more and more posts about Facebook, which is encouraging me to continue this 23 Things exercise and get to Item 6 but I may want to try Facebook instead of MySpace. So I've added some new blogs to my Bloglines account, read some of my Bloglines posts, and am ready to move on to Thing #6.