#13 Tagging, folksomonies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is so cool! One of my tags is documentaries, and I found all these great new websites that offer free documentaries.

What I really like about this site is that it helps you find high quality sites about your interests without having to wade through all the junk you find on search engines.

This could be great for libraries. Not only could we share our bookmarked sites with the world, but this could help us find great sites for customers doing research. I'm definitely going to play around a lot more with Del.icio.us

Thing #12 Getting to Know You--MySpace and Facebook

Wow--I'm feeling deeply disturbed now. I searched for friends on MySpace. I can't believe the stuff I saw. Two things in particular stand out in my mind. People on MySpace get to choose their "Headline"--kind of like their message to the world. In my short searches (less than 15 minutes), I saw two headlines by two separate guys, "Dead Girls Don't Say No" and "There are two types of people in the world: Those who rape, and those who get raped."

You can find me on MySpace by going to http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=184214250. Feel free to send me a "Friend" request!!

But, if you want to see a cool MySpace done by a library, check out Denver Public's at http://www.myspace.com/denver_evolver. This is one of the positives of MySpace. It lets us, as the library, reach teens where teens are (if we can get the support of our larger organization--that is, the City.)

Facebook is much more positive. I found three friends and it was fun. I'm glad Facebook is giving an alternative to those of us who find MySpace to be bordering on offensive at best.

# 11 -- A "Thing" About Library Thing

The link to my catalog is http://www.librarything.com/catalog/staciefowler. I had fun creating this catalog and reviewing the books. Honestly, I could have spent hours doing it!

I also enjoyed the Book Suggester and the UnSuggester. Very cool. Only trouble is, since I work in a library, I already have more books on my "to-read" list than I can possibly get to. But I will happily suggest this site to folks seeking readers-advisory assistance. I like it much better than Novelist.

Thing 10 -- Online Image Generators

I had a whole lotta fun using online image generators. This is the flickr "bead" generator. I actually took this picture in La Jolla. I found this one on http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/beads.php.

I also made this motivational poster at http://www.ronyasoft.com/products/poster-forge/index.html. I took this picture and created the quote myself (somewhat cheesy, but impromtu). I think this could be a great feature for creating posters of the regular teens in Knowasis for our wall art.

I had so much fun with these online image generators! I just wish you could get a good view of what they actually create on this blog. Honestly, this does not do these photos justice. Next, perhaps I'll "Warhol" myself...

Finding Feeds Exercise

The method of finding feeds that I found easiest was the Bloglines search tool. I found that if I logged into Bloglines first, searching was much easier. I found it cool that, once logged in, I could click "Add" to insert the URL of the feeds I wanted to subscribe to.

For the most part, I just subscribed to feeds from websites I already knew I was interested in.

One thing, I'm generally not that interested in subscribing to blogs. Most of the time, using any of the search tools for finding feeds, the results were mostly comprised of blogs. I do think that finding "meaty" feeds--that is, the one's actually worth your time finding and following--is somewhat difficult. Most search results provide a lot of fluff without a lot of meat...

RSS Exercise

Here's the link to my blog subscriptions: http://www.bloglines.com/public/az-freebird. I LOVED this exercise. It was as difficult as promised--the blog posting said it was the most difficult of all our exercises and my experience is that this statement is true!! However, I learned so much that it was definitely worth it.

I found out that I can subscribe to my friends' blogs--which is awesome. One of my closest friends has a blog that I love to read, and now I will know when she has a new posting. I also learned that I can subscribe to my friends photo albums to find out when they post new pictures. How cool is that?!!?

And it really is an easy way to choose your news. I must admit that celebrity "news" sickens me. I much prefer to know what is going on in Darfur or with the Middle East. Now, I can simply subscribe to what interests me. No more Britney for me!! YEAH!!!!! Instead, I can read up on the latest Wired stories or what's hot from Scientific American.

So how do I see libraries using RSS technology? Well, we can subscribe to the feeds of local news, world news, book reviews, etc., in order to stay up on the questions we are most likely to get asked by our customers. We can also offer RSS feeds on our website to keep our customers up with our latest books, programs, movies, etc. I'm sure there are lots of other great things libraries could do--I'm just scratching the surface here.

More Flickr Fun

So here's my Librarian Trading Card. I had fun making it, but it honestly took much longer than I expected. (If you are making one and experiencing difficulty with the upload photo feature, let me know!)

But what I really had a blast with was the web app I discovered on the Flickr site called Bubblr. Bubblr allows you to take photos that are already on Flickr and add bubble captions to them. I happen to love birds (especially cockatiels), so I used tagged photos of them. Check out my comic strip, Cockatiels with attitudes by Stacie Fowler. Make sure you view the whole strip (there are 5 total). My favorite is the one who hasn't had his coffee yet, since I can relate!!

This discovery has shown me once again all the cool things you can find out there when you take the time to PLAY. Like I said before, play is the key to discovery. I am definitely learning...