Wikis

I have used Wikipedia for as far back as I can remember. Whenever I was in high school and doing so, reliability and the open access aspects never seemed to bother me. If I allow myself to, I can spend all day on Wikipedia discovering different things that I have no prior knowledge of. There are many reasons why it is so intriguing. I think that Wikipedia has a super easy-to-use interface and find their "subject headings" to be very useful and helpful.

I was in charge of maintaining a Wiki at my previous library job. I found the experience to be interesting because all staff members could edit the wiki at any time. There were no meetings or wasted time in creating our pages because all of us could edit them whenever we wanted. While the library wikis we looked at were creative and cutting edge, I personally think a wiki is better suited to organizing staff meetings, pathfinders, etc. as opposed to making one for the general public. Wikis, however, do provide an incredible opportunity to reach out to all users due to its interactive nature.

Technorati

Technorati was extremely helpful to me in the finding RSS feeds exercise. As I began to explore it more, I realized that it is very useful as a starting place to look for blogs. It was interesting and somewhat peculiar to read about how people can index their blogs to be found by Technorati. I have absolutely no interest in doing this. I currently have multiple other blogs (which are public) that are not indexed by any search engines. To me, it takes away a significant privacy factor. Yes, anyone would be able to access my blog if they possessed the URL. One would never be able to find the URL, though, via any search engine or keyword searching. Whenever the user sets up a blog, there is a usually a box to uncheck saying "Allow search engines to index my blog." Again, it all depends on the user and their particular needs.

The top 100 blogs search on Technorati was a nice feature. I would like to subscribe to many of those through my Google Reader account.

Del.icio.us

I have a severe bone to pick with tagging. Librarians do two things - organize and provide access to information. Part of organizing information is providing access through controlled vocabulary. Let's think about LOC subjects headings for a minute. Yes, one could make a case for finding bias within them. Sometimes they provide the user with a lot of options in terms of describing their subject. However, if one finds the proper subject heading and does a search in a library catalog, he or she will see ALL of the items that match that particular subject. It is only accomplished through controlled vocabulary. With no authority control, tagging helps perpetuate the information overload because everyone uses different words to describe items. If the user was given a thesaurus (think of the Ebsco's in the ERIC database) and was told "instead of "kitten" USE "cats," tagging would prove to be effective. That way, everyone who was looking for that particular item or subject would see EVERYTHING instead of searching for kittens, kitten, cat, cats, felines, etc.

Overall, Delicious was an interesting site but I failed to see how this is significantly different from Diigo. Both are wonderful ways to bookmark websites and provide many advantages to just bookmarking them on your computer.

Finding Feeds

Exploring the four search engines for feeds proved to be interesting. Feeds are not something I usually seek out. Rather, I seem to stumble on them by accident whenever I enjoy a specific website or blog and want to continue reading it with minimal effort. It was great to learn about the different search engines as they would prove to be very useful to discover new types of blogs. RSS Micro's server was "busy" and would not return any results for my searches. Technoroti and Topix were most useful to me because they returned many relevant results. I found tons of feeds about Buffalo. These will keep me updated on the local goings on.

RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds are a wonderful way to save yourself lots of work. I use them all the time to keep myself updated with my friends' blogs and news websites I frequent. I had never used Google Reader before. Instead, when subscribing to RSS feeds, I would bookmark them on my browser and do the search that way. I was very happy with Google Reader because it's much more convenient to have all of the feeds go to one place instead of manually looking at each bookmark.

This technology could be very useful if implemented into a library setting. Some libraries, such as the UB Music Library, already have options on their blogs to subscribe via RSS feeds. The reason this technology is wonderful is because it saves a lot of work. A user is more likely to read new library news in their Google Reader than to solely keep it on your blog.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks are a wonderful way for patrons to "read" if they are visually impaired or want something different. I always find it easier to listen to an audiobook of a difficult work (take something by Nietzsche, for example) than to actually read it myself. As an employee at Borders, I find older people and children to like audiobooks the most. They're even more convenient if you are going on a long drive somewhere or have a flight to catch.

I was not previously familiar with LibriVox. This site is a wonderful FREE place to find audiobooks. Given the universal format of the sound files (.mp3 mostly), patrons would find it simple to download the chapters they want and upload them to an iPod (or even burn them to a CD). In a school library setting, this would be an incredibly useful source as schools have lost library funding and many high schoolers need help with understanding and reading classics. I searched for 4 or 5 public domain books and LibriVox had all of them.

So far, this is the only tool that has been worth learning about because of its apparent practical implications in a library setting. I hope the forthcoming ones are more along these lines and not a waste of time and completely irrelevant like Flickr or creating a blog (because who didn't do that in high school?).

Podcasts

I usually find podcasts to be useful. Many of the ones I have listened to have come via iTunes. So, for this exercise, I decided to explore the online directories instead of what I was used to. To begin with, the options listed were somewhat limited. Podcast.net is no longer live and Yahoo Podcast Directory was shut down in 2007. Thus, I was only able to explore one of the sites which was podcastalley.com. The site was quite cumbersome to use. The search feature did not work well and returned no results for multiple searches. I decided to browse by genre to see if this would help. Unfortunately, it would not allow me to browse for individual podcasts.

In a library setting, I question how useful podcasts would be. If the patron subscribes via RSS feed, I could see potential of people actually listening (mainly because it would alert of the of updates automatically). However, I think this is another tool information professionals need to know about rather than use it in a library setting. I think it bears repeating that I advocate for Facebook in libraries (and possibly Twitter). You have to meet the users where they are. They WILL NOT come to you. In specific instances, I think podcasts would be plausible option. However, reality implies otherwise.