The end!

Although I often felt like I was on a moving sidewalk, passing a tempting buffet of ideas that I could only taste, this was a great experience. Even though I gave more attention to some parts of 23 Things than others, I now feel that when someone talks about something on the web, I am not totally clueless. Even better I have learned about some Web 2.0 pieces that I know I will use again: Flickr, del.icio.us, Library Thing, wikis. I have found some great blogs that I will continue to follow and I expect to keep blogging for at least personal use. The challenge for all of us is to keep 23 Things alive and active in our work, not just personally. We can use wikis and blogs for communicating with our customers as well as managing projects. Someone pointed out to me that del.icio.us is a great way to track favorites from the web without worrying that a library's computer could crash and all the files would be lost. Flickr is a great way of organizing and sharing photos of library events. We could use podcasts and youtube for mini training pieces or to offer mini book talks to our customers. This really is a matter of just letting the mind roam and trying things out. However, I have to go back to the article by Dr. Wendy Schultz http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/6.htm where she talks about what comes after Web 2.0. I came away feeling that while we were all learning how to organize our blogs and discussing whether or not to use Myspace, the rest of the world is now in Secondlife and our next branch should be located there. How far are we from Library 4.0 with its combination of old fashioned print and holograms of children's picture books which are accessible through some microchip that we carry in our wrists? I was amused by the end of her article where she described a cozy virtual space that she called the knowledge spa. She said that it would recreate the old image of a country house library with the smell of leather, the provision of fine brandy and the rustle of pages. Definitely the dream of a Boomer. In the best of all possible worlds we will be able to provide her vision, and at the same time create the far livelier space of bright lights, colors and noise with energy drinks and snacks for a younger generation who want to gather in groups to enjoy a lively interchange via whatever technology is big while at the same time talking to the people immediately next to them. And it will all be available when everyone wants it at the time that want it with minimal effort.

Podcasting

This turned out to be much more frustrating than I expected. I had no trouble pulling up the little Merlin lesson, but then when I tried to find something to listen to on podcast.net, I kept coming up with messages that they couldn't find anything even though I was putting in things like Terry Gross who I knew had podcasts. So then I moved on to Podcast Alley. I had much better success in finding podcasts on topics that I dreamt up, but I was having a hard time following the instructions on how to download them. So I moved on to Yahoo podcasts. Just like Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, this one was "just right." Of course it helped that I found some topics on their "most popular" listings that looked interesting, but the whole process of getting something going was just much easier. This all reminded me of my ill fated attempts to download audio books to my MP3 player a couple of years ago. Ugh. That and the difficulty I have with audio quality between my poor hearing and the speakers on my computer don't make this a very happy option for me.
I decided for the last exercise to take a look at Project Gutenberg, which I haven't seen since its very early days. Through random selection, I picked "Nat Love, better known in cattle country as Deadeye Dick." I had no trouble downloading it and the print looks like basic typescript. Then I realized that I was supposed to be working with downloadable audio books. I have downloaded audiobooks to my computer before although my attempts to go from there to an MP3 player have failed in the past and I gave the player to my daughter.

Yelp!

I picked Yelp from the Web 2.0 awards list, since I am always looking for travel information. I selected two cities that I know fairly well, San Francisco and Chicago, and then started messing around. I spent the most time with San Francisco and generally thought the comments on restaurants were on target. The basic problem for me is that the people posting are all way below my age range, which means that probably for much of the shopping, they are focusing on things that would appeal to a very skinny, very young audience. I would have to spend a lot more time on the site getting used to how it is put together to see how helpful it would be if I didn't know anything about a city.

Zoho

Zoho really is as neat as everyone has been saying. And easy to use! I was able to post my grocery list to the blog with no hassle at all. However, when I printed it out, the only part that came was the grocery list and not the little introductory piece about multi-tasking.
This is something I would really like to play around with some more to see how it works when I am trying to use it as an alternate to Microsoft Office. The thought of not having to worry whether I am storing it on my home computer or my work computer or something else in between is great. Of course, I do have to have access to the web...

test grocery list

OK, so here I am in zoho. It looks enough like Microsoft word that it isn't very intimidating. In the spirit of multitasking, I am going to create my grocery list:

milk

bread

eggs

juice

limes

plain yogurt (small)

Wikis!

When I first heard about wikipedia, I must admit that I was doubtful about its usefulness, but after reading about it in a variety of places, I started using it and became a convert. I particularly like it for popular culture kinds of things. For example I had been wondering for years whatever happened to Patience and Prudence (the singers, not the character traits). You never hear their songs played on Oldies but Moldies radio stations and I had started to think that I had hallucinated them. Then I heard John Waters talking about a CD that he has put out "John Waters' Love Songs" and one of their songs was on it, which got me thinking about them all over again. So I looked on wikipedia and there they were! This is getting a little off track. At the last library where I worked, we turned our version of Passport into a wiki and were really pleased with the result. So I had used wikis before "23 Things," but I found it very interesting to look at the samples in our exercise. I liked the simplicity of the wiki for St. Joseph's County Library, although it took a couple of tries to get out of the wiki and into their catalog when I decided I wanted to see more than just their chosen selections. I have always thought of wikis in terms of plain vanilla styles, so I was very impressed with the book lovers' wiki from Princeton Public Library. I usually think of blogs for readers' advisory, but I think the wiki worked really well and think it is a very classy site. By the time I got to Bull Run's wiki, I was starting to get impatient again and I just ran through it quickly. So I am not sure how they intend to use it as they move out of "work in progress" status. It looks like they have a lot of information in one place, but I don't know how easy it would be to find any particular thing. Then I went to the Sandbox wiki and posted my thoughts on going to the Farmer's Market in the fall. I have thought for some time that wikis might help us organize programs like SRP. It would give us the ability to put everything in one place, enable people to add their thoughts about programs and would help clean up email. Maybe 23 Things will help me make that argument with others.

Perspectives on Web 2.0

I read the piece from OCLC "Web 2.0: Where will it take us?" and then several of the attached commentaries, Rich Anderson, Michael Stephens and Wendy Schultz. Actually this piece really belongs at the end of 23 Things with our final thoughts since everything I read led me to a "what next?" frame of mind. All the comments reinforce my thinking that it is past time for us to seriously reconsider how library staff spend much of their time. The days (well, actually evenings) of people being six deep at a reference desk waiting for help with print materials or maybe microforms are long gone. Yet we still act as if the reference desk is the mainstay of our existence. If we are going to incorporate 23 Things and whatever the next 23 Things might be into our work, we need to restructure job descriptions and expectations so that staff have the time to not only learn Web 2.0 (and then 3.0 and 4.0), but actually have time to use it in their work day. Wendy Schultz talks about library services that will emphasize the virtual over the physical where customers rate the best librarian avatar who creates buzz on the newest books in whatever format is preferred. You, too, can be Nancy Pearl in SecondLife, but exactly when is this going to happen in the work day? 23 Things can't just be about adding things on; it has to bolster the discussion of dropping things off.

As the days dwindle down...

Well, the pressure is really on and the days remaining are very few. I have started the bad habit of hopping around within the 23 Things as the spirit moves me. It keeps me interested, but it also leads me to think that I am further along than I actually am. Before I backtrack and talk about a couple of sites that are further back on the list, I have to talk about the wonderful YouTube clip that I found and posted. Actually finding it wasn't serendipitous. I was at a dinner party with some New Jersey buddies and they were bragging about the the MTV ad that they had done for QandANJ (the New Jersey of Ask Us Now). Since I knew the chances of me catching it on MTV were pretty slim, I figured that I wasn't going to get to see it, but then they said it was on YouTube. Voila! I love it and I hope that anyone who reads this blog enjoys it, also. So now I have two YouTube postings, the Harry Potter finger puppets and QandANJ. Do I get extra credit? I didn't think so.
Moving backwards, after having fun with Library Thing, I took a look at Rollyo and sort of ground to a halt. Part of my problem is that as I run out of time, I pull different sites up and start to look at them, and if their use doesn't jump out at me immediately, I don't want to take the time to play around with them or find someone who can explain why a particular site is beneficial to humankind. That is how I felt about Rollyo. Because I was hopping around, I had already found del.icio.us and really got into it. Then I realized that I had missed looking at Rollyo and went backwards, but I just couldn't get all fired up. That was when I jumped forward and started looking at YouTube. After posting the Harry Potter puppets, I decided that I had to get more structured and went back to Technorati. Although I enjoyed finding Boing Boing and was fascinated to see how Arianna Huffington's blog had evolved since the last time that I looked at it several years ago, I wasn't that interested in pursuing the finer points of Technorati. I finally have come to the conclusion that what 23 Things is doing is introducing us to a wide variety of things that overlap in their capabilities. Duh. Well, I am a slow learner.

QandANJ: Now You're Library is Open Late Night Too!

Potter Puppet Pals in

My daughter turned me on to these Harry Potter youtube puppet shows. I immediately became addicted.

Where has the time gone???

I was shocked , shocked to realize that the last time I put anything in the blog was in July! Here I have been plowing my way through the various tasks and not writing them down and now I hope I can recall half of what I did.

I messed around with RSS feeds and subscribed to Bloglines. Then I spent a couple of hours finding blogs to add. One that I have been enjoying is Pop Goes the Library, but I have to confess that I am biased because I used to work with Sophie Brookover who is one of the main contributers. Others that I like are Library Garden, It's All Good and Tame the Web. I also took a look at MERLIN. I think you really need to look at this stuff often to really start getting some meaning from it all.

Then I messed around with avatars for a while. My problem is that although it is fun to make believe that I look like a 20 something chickie with spiked purple hair and a mini and thigh high boots, it does seem like false advertising to post that on my blog when I am really a pug faced white Persian with an elegant demeanor.

So then I looked at Library Thing and really had some fun. I think this one is a keeper. What's more I have been telling all my friends about it, so maybe we can do some book sharing.

Whoops! I just realized that I haven't checked otu Rollyo yet. So I will have to back up, but I really got into Del.icio.us. At first I felt like I was just wasting time finding things to stick on my site, but then my daughter said something about putting recipes on it, and it all just clicked into place. since then I have been really having a good time adding just about everything to it. I figure as long as I can come up with a variety of tags, I can find it all again.

Sooooo, it looks like I had better back track and find out what Rollyo is.

Well, I spent time with bloglines.com and got an account. The challenge then was coming up with some blogs to link with. I finally remembered that someone that I worked with did a blog, and so I linked with that. Then I discovered a list of blogs that her site recommends and came up with another. I feel like I am missing something here, but maybe as I go along I will find more blogs to link with.

Well, I am finally in week 3 although it is really more like week 6. I started playing around with Flickr and before I knew it about 90 minutes had passed, which is the problem I have with technology. It just eats up tons and tons of time and although it may be sort of enjoyable, I never feel very productive at the end. Despite that I went back to Flickr tonight and started an account and then realized that I needed to post some photos. So I pulled up some photos from our trip to Scotland two years ago that have been sitting on our computer since the trip. When we got back, I spent about ten hours (I am not exaggerating) attempting to arrange them in some free online photo site. I would add all kinds of clever captions, and try to block some of the shots so they were centered better. Then after spending a few hours doing that, I would try to save my work only to discover that I hadn't and it would all disappear. So imagine my delight when I pulled a couple of photos up, tagged them, captioned them, tagged them some more, saved them and then could find them again! I would upload more photos, but I am so far behind, I need to move on to RSS feeds.

I had hoped to blog while I was at ALA, but I really find it a pain to do a lot of typing on a laptop keyboard. So hopefully I will be able to remember the highlights. This was the first time in many years when most of my time wasn't taken up with meetings. So I was able to attend three of the Transformation track programs that were part of Leslie Burger's presidential program. There were five or six programs in total. If you attended at least three, you got a free t-shirt. I passed on the opportunity since I have enough t-shirts to last me the rest of my life (truly!). The first program I attended was the introduction to the set. The first speaker was Joan Frye Williams who gave the rules of appropriate behavior for the audience. It was amusing to hear her list of "do nots" and "shall nots" but it was also an uncomfortable reminder of how often a trip to the library is diminished by overwhelming rules and regulations. The next speaker was George Needham from OCLC who noted that when libraries began, resources were precious and people had time. Now we are in the opposite situation. Information resources are plentiful, but people's time is precious. However many libraries act like their customers have unlimited time and patience to get what they want. Too many libraries work from the assumption that the people working in libraries are smarter than the general public; most problems can be solved with written procedures; and the general public has low standards. However when OCLC surveyed people in English speaking countries around the world, they were told that they don't want help; they want service. George's recommendation is that we stop thinking of ourselves as information workers, but instead become idea workers.

OK, here I go with my blog for 23 things in an effort to win an MP3 player. Actually my dirty little secret is that I have no problem starting blogs. I have started at least four of them. My problem is that I can never remember the password, or the name of my blogs. So they are out there, littering the blogosphere with empty blog templates, preventing people from using the blog titles.

So this time I tried to keep it simple and on task. We will see what happens!