"Hello, I'm Marne, and I'm a Facebook junkie"

At least according to my co-worker Chad, I'm a Facebook junkie. While I certainly don't feel that I am compared to some of my undergraduate acquaintances, I guess it is true in the library world. Lorraine had asked me to talk about Facebook and why I like it in the Learning 2.0 workshop yesterday, so I thought I would summarize some of what I said here and let this be my post on social networking. (I apologize for taking the lessons all out of order.)

Since I'm kind of shy in real life, I often put off talking to people until I really, really need to, and then it's often awkward because I haven't talked to them in a long, long time. One of the great things about Facebook is that it lets you stay in contact with your acquaintances in an unobtrusive way and keep tabs on what's going on in their life. That way, when you want to talk to that person from choir that you haven't seen since last May, you already know that she just got engaged and that her dog was sick for a while but has gotten much better. It's also been a good way of keeping up with my Latin American studies students who all seem to be studying in some foreign country this summer. I know none of them would ever send me long emails describing their travels, but it's nice to get periodic updates on their adventures through Facebook.

On the other hand, I really like to be in constant contact with my good friends, and I have the impulse to tell them every little interesting thing that happens to me. But I've found that you can't keep calling or emailing them every 5 minutes to give them status updates, or they start to resent you! Facebook is a way that I can post some little thing before I forget (like, for instance, the fact that I saw a turtle while walking to work on Monday) and they can read about it at their leisure if they're interested. Kind of like a micro-version of this blog, I guess.

I haven't signed up for any of the other social networking sites. MySpace strikes me as rather chaotic, and the fact that you don't need to register to see people's profiles means that I can occasionally look at someone there without actually having to register. LinkedIn did look kind of cool when Janet Carleton demonstrated it, but I'm not sure what I would actually use it for.

Wikis

Like other people from my department, I'm going to say that I didn't learn much about wikis from this assignment because we already have so many wikis that we use here. I did especially like the first two examples on the list. The first because it used the wiki software to make the layout of the subject guides standardized and easy on the eye, and the second because it actually opened the wiki up to the library patrons in a way most libraries (including our own department) seem afraid to do. So for me, I would say wikis are good for two separate reasons: they make things easy to organize, and they let your users chime in.

Views of Library 2.0

I read all 5 opinions on Library 2.0, and the first two, by the practicing librarians, were the ones that made the most sense to me. I agree with Rick Andersen that as institutions get bigger and libraries don't, we can no longer support as much instruction as we once did, and I think that we can make use of Web 2.0 capabilities to judiciously replace some of this instruction. I also like Michael Stephens' points that we need to pay special attention to what users actually want, and that we shouldn't become blinded by "technolust" and build things for the sake of building them. To me, I guess, technology is a tool that we should use when appropriate, but never for its own sake. Users always should be primary.

I'm back!

I'm back in the library, and I hope to get back on track with the assignments soon. Right now I'm just catching up on my "real work."

Snowie on vacation

I'm going on vacation for two weeks, so my blog is going to be dormant during that time. I'm sure all 3 of you who are reading this will go into withdrawals! :)

Technorati

I'm enjoying using Technorati. I'd often wished for a way to search just blogs, and I was thrilled recently to discover the Google Blog Search. But that tool doesn't have very sophisticated search capabilities, and it was often like finding a needle in a haystack to pick out good posts by real people from among the irrelevant things that also seemed to turn up (like fake blogs and shopping sites). Technorati seems to have solved those problems by letting you search for either words in the blogs themselves or tags assigned to the blogs, which would seem to help narrow things down considerably. Blogs also accumulate "authority" by being linked to by other blogs, so you can kind of tell which blogs have been judged important by other humans.

I wanted to search for my own blog in Technorati, and I eventually did find it, but first I found a post that linked to my blog. It was from someone at another library (apparently a public library, judging by the context) also doing Learning 2.0 this summer. It was amazing for me to discover that other people are actually reading this! Hello to all of you, and feel free to leave a comment if you want to introduce yourself!

Very tasty indeed

I tried Del.icio.us, and I'm having great fun with it, although I'm not using it for the purposes for which it was intended. It almost seems to me like someone would need to use either RSS feeds or del.icio.us, but not both. If I've got all the sites I check all the time on RSS, why would I need to bookmark them so carefully as well? But what I am doing with del.icio.us is checking it to see what sites have been tagged with different keywords. It's bringing up different things than I might have found by searching otherwise. For instance, I tried Doctor Who (as always), and I got all the usual suspects, but I also found a TARDIS USB hub that looks very cute, and a site with patterns to knit the 4th Doctor's scarf, and other quirky little sites like that. I guess people bookmark little quirky things they like to look at once in a while, not just the big important sites on a topic. And maybe that answers my first question up above!