This final week of class, we are looking at Mash ups. Now, I have to say that all the mash ups on Twitter and music videos did not really interest me all that much. I haven’t caught the Twitter bug, yet, and I feel fine with looking for videos on Youtube, but I did finally find a Mashup that seemed very important.
It’s the WiiFinder mashup offered by findnearby.net. My first impression upon going to the site was, wow, it can tell that I’m in North Carolina. My second thought was that I could send it to my friends that have still not been able to get a Wii. Since I have a Wii and love it to death, I have nothing but the greatest of sympathy for my friends that haven’t found one yet.
So, what does WiiFinder do? Well, the search that ran instantly looked at e-bay and gave prices and times left in the auction. It also looked at Amazon.com, Walmart, and Circuit City. For the Walmarts and Circuit city’s, it provided addresses and phone numbers. Also, if you clicked on the link, it would show you that store on the map and offer to get you directions. In some instances, the date for when the Wii’s were being shipped in was given. This information appears to be updated by the general public.
Tabs exist to take you to Wii Auctions, News, and Games and Accessories. Overall, it’s a pretty neat site.
This week’s second assignment was to use rollyo.com and a pre-built librarian blog search to find blog entries on privacy and post the results. Well, I glanced through a few and read one. Most of the blogs seemed to be speaking about privacy issues in terms of generational values and social media or Web 2.0. I have to say that a lot of it seems a bit alarmist to me. Yes, it is true that privacy has a different meaning these days. I know a lot of people that don’t restrict access to their personal blogs. Why? Well, they don’t care who reads it for one, and the second point is that they don’t see why anyone other than friends would read it. I think they might be right. I don’t read personal blogs of anyone that I don’t know.
Now, I know some people like to bring up the whole potential bosses Googling their candidates. What if they find the blog? Well, don’t use your real name, I guess. The other point, and I think this is common sense, don’t put information up in a public domain if you don’t want people to see it. My mom always told us not to write anything down that you didn’t want people to know, so I’ve never been that into diaries. I actually feel safer putting my stuff up on the web under an alias than having a physical diary laying around to tell you the truth.
I guess the easiest part to start with is the use of podcasting in libraries. My library currently has a project called Research First Aid in the works. What it is, is a collaborative effort between the main campus library and our health sciences library to inform our users about the different resources and services that both libraries provide. You can find out more by going to http://www.ecu.edu/laupuslibrary/researchfirstaid.cfm. Podcasting offers libraries new ways to market their services. Another project our library is engaged in is providing podcasts for our history of medicine lecture series.
When it comes to YouTube, I find it very useful for people who can’t place things on the University servers due to bandwidth issues. It might even be the best place for users to find videos created by the libraries because they are on YouTube more than they are on our pages.
This week, I played around with Flickr a bit. I’m still a bigger fan of Picasa because it works with my computer at home, and links with all my friends in gmail automatically. So, basically, Picasa works for me because I already have the account and can easily use it to share photos with my friends.
I do see the advantage of Flickr, though, since I did not have to download anything to my computer to use it. It was very simple.
As to library uses, I think of photo sharing as a way to advertise events or for digital collections, but can’t think of many other possible uses.
Here’s a link to my flickr account if anyone is interested. MAC 2007
So, I have just finished my exploration of Google Docs. I’ve actually been using yahoo docs for a bit in my MAC committee work.
I didn’t realize how much fun Google Docs could be. I had a couple of my gmail friends play around with it, and we discovered that we could all be in the document at the same time and tell that we were all editing at the same time. The greatest part was that it didn’t seem to cause any problems. My friend said she could see my stuff appear, which I guess took place after I saved.
I think this will revolutionize the way that collaborative work is done. I dont’ know that it’s quite ready to replace the desktop, though.
Now, I did also look at Zoho and Microsoft Live. Microsoft Live is pretty much the same as Google docs from what I could tell. Zoho has a lot of bells and whistles, but doesn’t really seem like something I would use at this point. I wanted to play around with the web conferencing feature, and might do that at a later time, but for now, it didn’t seem worth the time.
To be perfectly honest, the first time I heard about social bookmarking, I wasn’t that impressed at all. I didn’t see a need to sign up for yet another account with another password that I would likely forget.
However, a year has gone by, and I’ve completely changed my mind. I love the idea, now. I like that I can tag my favorite webpages and add notes, and I look forward to looking at other people’s social bookmarking accounts in the future. I think this can be a really great way to figure out what other pages people are looking at, and I think I will use it for tracking those blogs that don’t have an RSS feed with them.
So, I’m going to be very boring, and I’m just going to answer the questions asked.
How can social networking be used by MLA to connect members
I think it can be used to increase our potential networking. Recently, I decided to attend the Social Networking event in Baltimore. I went to my Facebook account and remembered that I had met someone at the annual MAC meeting that lived in Baltimore, contacted her, and now I’m going to stay with her during the mini-conference. I think this is a great way to keep up with the people we meet at conferences and to share idea, application, and even events.
Should your library have a Facebook or MySpace page?
I don’t really think there is a need for it at this point and time. Before I would take the time to create a Facebook account for the library, I would want to know if it was something the students would use. Also, I would need to find out what sort of applications I or the IT department here would be able to create to add value to a Facebook profile. So far, all the articles I’ve read and discussions I have been in about Facebook or Myspace for health sciences library has said that it is not really something worth pursuing.
Are there privacy concerns for individuals when using social networking sites.
I think there are privacy issues with regards to everything. People just need to be aware of the issues and then respond to them accordingly. You don’t have to put your whole life story up on the internet. You put up what you want people to know.
What did you like or not like about your experience with Facebook or MySpace.
I have finally given into using my Facebook account for professional networking as well as private personal communications, and I am pretty happy with it. The applications are silly and frustrating when they don’t work, but overall, I think it’s a great tool, and I look forward to using the event function more in the future. As to Myspace, I still see that as a more fun and free form of keeping in touch with people. I also like that Myspace has so many more options for customizing the way a page looks and etc.
So, what is the difference between a blog and a wiki? Well, I think the biggest difference right off the bat is the amount of contributors. Usually, a blog is only posted to by one person. There are instances where a group has a blog, and then, more people post, but I don’t think they are the norm. The other thing about a blog is that it is generally arranged in chronilogical order.
A wiki is more like a living web page. It has multiple contributors. A wiki generally has several different pages and the different members of the wiki can modify, edit, or add to any of the pages based on the permission the wiki’s owner gives out.
Blogs are good tools for updates or news items. Also, blogs are a good place for static information. Generally, you write an entry, and then you leave it be. You don’t go back and change it or update it. When you want to share new information, you create a new post.
On the contrary, wikis are good for information that is constantly changing or being updated. Wikis are good places for collaborative projects or for documents that are worked on by more than one person.
Since many of the databases my library subscribes to use RSS feeds, now, in addition to the traditional SDI auto-alerts, I plan to create a class that will assist our users with using RSS readers. I also think there is potential for setting up RSS feeds for different searches and then pushing the articles retrieved from the feeder to our users via email.
