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.

Thing #5a - Bloglines

I've been using Bloglines for a long time now. (Can it be years?) Over time I've really pared down the number of sites that I have the notify turned on for, because its too daunting to see that there are hundreds of new posts every morning in the little bloglines balloon at the bottom of my screen. As I said in an earlier post I'm looking for some new feeds to reinvigorate my interest in keeping up with the blogosphere, so this exercise of seeing what other participants here have in their blogrolls and the next exercise of searching for some new feeds is helping with that. I do still like to have journal tables of contents sent to me in email, though, because I check email so much more often than I check bloglines. Also, today when I subscribed to the feeds of two of our participants as per the instructions I noticed that what I could read in bloglines was a post or two behind what I see when I go directly to the participants blogs. That makes me wonder if the email option is better for things that need to be timely.

Thing #4 - Flickr

Here is a Creative Commons photo of the Capitola pier taken by Simon Bisson. I like the stormy sky.

Its been very gratifying to see such a large number of Creative Commons photos available on Flickr. I wish they would make it easier to find the photographer's real name for giving credit, though. Its easy to get their Flickr username but more clicks to get their real names, and sometimes real names aren't even available. Still, I'm grateful that they are using CC licenses.

My brother and his girlfriend just had a baby in May, and they are putting all their photos on Flickr, but are not using CC licenses so I'm not going to post a photo of my cute nephew until I ask permission.

I love the Flickr Spell application -- that I will definitely use again when I want an eye-catching graphic heading (all CC licenses, too!). But I really don't see any applications for library stuff here. I would post library photos of an event on a library web page before I'd post to Flickr, and I would rather use photos of our own libraries than of other libraries. But I guess if I was looking for examples of other library buildings that I liked and I needed to make a presentation for someone on that topic it would be a good source of material. But thats not something I do.

Thing #3 - Blogging 2 (week 2)

I am finding blog searching very time consuming, partly because I get distracted following non-related postings in long trails and have to pull myself back to the task at hand, but partly because, as Lee noted, the uncontrolled and casual nature of the medium means that a lot of the blogs I visited turned out to have little or nothing to do with my topic or were not substantive or not authoritative. But on the positive side the creative serendipity I experienced just following my nose was very refreshing. I just don't see how that serendipity could be productively incorporated into my work life other than allowing myself an hour once a month to blogosphere surf.

I've had bloglines for over a year and find it difficult to even find time to read the new posts on the very small number of blogs that I've decided to watch. I'd like to have a way to find new inspiring blogs to put on my bloglines watch list but it seems to take a lot of time to find a blog that is worth watching, not to mention the time to read it! Thanks very much for the LibDex and LisZen suggestions. When I have a moment I'll try to mine those for decent blogs. They seem more hopeful than the blog search engines I tried. Maybe we should share our very short lists of good blogs among ourselves periodically? So far the academic library blog I find most worth while is Stephen's Lighthouse, by Stephen Abram who is the chair elect of SLA. Its here: http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/ What's your favorite?

Of the search engines listed for us to review I liked Ask best. I liked the discernment between posts, feeds and news, and I liked the options to sort by relevance, popularity or most recent. Relevance ranking in blog searching is not that helpful as it is really term weighting which doesn't do as good a job of ranking conversations that are not using controlled vocabulary IMHO. I also liked the top feeds listing on the results page so the feed were specific to your topic. Too bad the subscribe button I tried didn't work. Nice thought though.

Sphere was an interesting and worthy attempt to connect news in mainstream sources with blogs, but its not something I would use regularly. It also was not clear if it was searching blogs or just RSS feeds or what and I got some wonky search results (way fewer hits than seemed likely in some cases).

Technorati was overwhelming and didn't seem to zero in on anything good. At first I liked the fact that it goes to the blog summary page first but then I wasn't finding the summary page that helpful and it became annoying. The directory search was not very helpful with the term "academic libraries" in my opinion. I had more success with the search term for an actual thing (a solatube tubular skylight) in the non-directory search.

This weeks work seemed to take a lot of time. There is just soooooooooo much out there in blogland!