Thing 6: Blog Readers

Signed up for Google Reader to keep track of some the 23 Things blogs. Also signed up for the "staff recommendations bundle." After a quick examination I dumped about half of the staff picks. The diversity of blogs is endless but the quality seems to be another matter.

The Google reader interface is attractive and easy to use. The Google mobile app on the iPhone looks great, too.

My initial reaction to the content available is that the amount of material out there is absolutely dizzying. As librarians one way we can help our patrons is to help them find their way through this maze of information.

Image Generators

The possibilities are endless, aren't they?
The Big Huge Labs site is a lot of fun.

Flickr Mashups

Way too much fun. No end to the possibilities with these apps.

Flickr: Cars, Guitars, and Buzzards

This was a fun one. I enjoyed flickr. (I must ask, though, why no "e"? Why must so many web apps be so hostile to spelling? Educators have it tough enough already, no?

I had fun with flickr (fn wth flckr...great) pouring over exterior and interior photos of libraries from around the world. I like the storage and easy sharing aspects, worthy of more investigation for sure. I created an account and posted a few pictures to get started:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39071294@N02/

I didn't check but I doubt there are other flickr pages with the tags: cars guitars buzzards, but that's just the photo trio I had handy. My car, two of my guitars, and a buzzard who decided to perch outside my office window recently for twenty minutes or so, staring into my office much of that time. Not the bird middle-aged men want hanging around, but its visit did make for some iPhone photo fun.

On top of that, I'm pretty sure just typing theses words:

"iPhone Buzzard Pics"

just created a little more work for a tireless Google bot somewhere, bless its pointy little, algebraic head.

Flickr mashups next time. Looks like special effects fun.

My photo mashup may star-- or not: The Buzzard.

Learning about Web 2.0

Trying to catch up on the 23 Things--have done some of the Things but haven't blogged about them yet. I read the articles and watched the videos on "Learning about Library 2.o" I found Tim O'Reilly's article to be the most informative. I found his description here to be helpful:

"Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core."

The article is four years old, but as my alter ego, the 1,047 year-old (we had a birthday last week) Scottish monk might remind us: The latest ain't always the greatest. He would also like to remind us that electronic storage is not stable and predicts someday we will be asking to borrow his quill and inkwell.

He's a bit of a humbug, that old monk.

In essence, it seems Web 2.0 should be used to help us share information with our colleagues and to help steer our students and patrons to better information sources. I guess we'll see how close we get to those goals by the time we're through with this experience.