The Wiki Thing

My experience with wikis to this point has been mostly limited to Wikipedia, which I use almost on a daily basis. I have made minor edits to a few entries, including one on slipstream, an obscure fiction genre.

So seeing how libraries are using wikis (e.g. SJCPL Subject Guides , Book Lovers Wiki) was interesting, though it seems most of the other examples are from academic libraries.

A wiki on frequently used print resources and websites for reference and/or readers’ advisory might be useful. Even a reference FAQ could come in handy and save time. All this assuming administrators and staff would contribute and keep things updated. Same goes for a policies and procedures wiki.

As for adding/editing an entry, maybe I’ll contribute to this wiki on chess variants, though like newly-created wikis it looks more like discussion forums at this point.

willcat #2

The 2.0 Thing

I already had my own idea of websites I consider Web 2.0 and have been using the web2.0 tag on del.icio.us. But reading some of the Wikipedia entry gave me a better grasp of the concepts involved. I then went on to read Where will the next generation of the web it take libraries?, Away from Icebergs; Into a new world of librarianship; and A Librarian’s Anti-2.0 Manifesto. The third article I listed, by Michael Stevens, is a nice breakdown of what library 2.0 means.

The Technorati Thing

Man there’s a lot of blogs out there. So it’s nice that sites like Technorati exist to funnel the blogosphere by popularity, topic, tag, etc. It was interesting seeing search results for “learning 2.0″, but I’m still a little confused about how the Blog Directory search works. Does it search by the tags that a blog uses most often? I do like the authority number visible next to every blog or post heading, and I’m sure I’ll visit Technorati again, if only to search for blogs on topics I’m interested in.

I didn’t register an account with Technorati because I’m not interested in “claiming” this blog or any such thing. I did, however, explore Digg recently, and registered there, mostly because “digging” an article seemed fun and keeping a history of diggs might be useful.

Delicious and popular

Soon after starting this blog I jumped ahead to del.icio.us and have been bookmarking ever since. It’s one of those things I can’t believe I wasn’t already using. I soon added an RSS of my del.icio.us links to my blog here and proceeded to install the firefox extension to every computer I use both at home and work. (I just realized there’s a newer version of the extension I should look into.)

One site I bookmarked recently, which I think I’ll be visiting often is pop urls, a site that aggregates headlines and links from all the most popular web2.0 news, video, bookmarking, and blog sites, all on a single page. Basically, the mother of all mashups.

I’m starting to fall behind in the 23 1/2 things, but I’ve added a page to my blog to keep track of my progress. Next up, Technorati.

Rolled my own

Finally got around to creating a searchroll. Since I like reading record reviews at certain sites, I created a music reviews search. I don’t think I’ll use it often though, since metacritic.com still seems a better way to look for reviews. Some of the news/info searchrolls that people have created might be more useful, but I think I’ll just wait until Google comes out with a faster, more functional version of this. Oh wait, they already have.