del-a

Deliverable A is now finished and submitted. I love researching; you start with one idea, but you never know where you'll end up. I'm convinced that for every crazy topic you can think of, someone's published a paper or even held a conference on it. In my research for this deliverable, I even saw several papers on the most effective online dating strategies, the use of friends lists on Facebook, and lots of other random topics. That's going to be really interesting to look at in the future. Will folks in future decades look at what we've researched and published, and think "were they really so desperate to publish something that they resorted to that?" Or will it all be old news? Hmmm...maybe I should study anthropology.

MMIS 621 topic - Del-a

I've been letting the various topics percolate in the back of my mind for a bit now, and I think I've decided to go with #9 - "the usefulness of groupware for managing projects especially in relation to workflow (wikis here too)." I don't expect to put a lot of focus on wikis in particular, since there are so many options for groupware out there these days, but they are one important type of group support system. I'm also thinking particularly about geographically diverse project teams, since the idea of people working together from all over the country and the world fascinates me.

Del.icio.us, tags, and Library 2.0

I first heard of Del.icio.us when I was in library school. I was in our computer lab, probably working on a paper, and I overheard a couple of other students talking about it. I looked at it briefly but didn't really think about it much after that(probably because I have trouble remembering where to put the dots, and what's the point of using a URL that you can't remember?), although I did hear about it on periodically. Looking at it now, I do see it as useful, although I tend to just keep my list of favorite websites in my head. I can see it being useful, though, especially if I were to use multiple computers on a regular basis. It would also be particularly useful in situations involving roving reference. I guess that's part of what Library 2.0 means to me - the ability to share information and resources that we find useful in ways that make them more convenient and likely to be found. That's not to say that everything works or is a good idea for every library, or even every person, but in this networked world, we have to figure out ways to make the technology work with us.

I found Technorati to be a good place to "visit," although I'm not sure I'd want to encourage my blog to "live" there by using its tags. Perhaps if I wanted to keep a "professional" blog I'd want to be listed, but I generally try to keep my non-library life offline, or at least make it difficult to find. Besides, I already have plenty of ways to lose hours on end (especially now that I've learned about so many through TLC 2.0)!

Wikis

Although I've used wikis before for various reasons, I've never done any editing on one. I must admit that I'd rather use html than the tools provided in the pbwiki site to apply styles, but that's mainly because it's easier to just keep the fingers on the keyboard. The mouse is just so far away! Okay, maybe not. :) But despite the bad press sites such as wikipedia get, wikis are tremendously useful. I've taken classes where students in group projects used closed wikis as a collaborative medium to share thoughts, ideas, and their work. In libraries, wikis can be especially useful to share information and ideas among library staff.

So I haven't quite completed all 23 things yet (vacation really threw me off!), but I still can summarize my thoughts on what I've done so far. Then if I have more thoughts on those things I haven't done yet, well, that's what the "Edit Posts" function is for! :)

Overall this has been a really good experience to introduce me to some things that I hadn't really considered before. I had heard of almost all of the things in the 23 tasks before, although there were many that I hadn't actually looked at, or that I hadn't looked at beyond a cursory glance. A few were things with which I was already pretty familiar, which tends to be par for the course in just about any learning experience. After all, starting completely from scratch on something is frequently extremely difficult!

I had a lot of fun with Facebook, since that's something I'd been meaning to get around to eventually anyway. The mashups, image generators, and poking around on YouTube were all a little more time-consuming than I would have liked, although that's just due to the fact that they were fun to play with. It's good to have set tasks, since a cursory glance or quick play with various tools often doesn't really provide you with enough information to know whether you really want to use them. I enjoyed the Second Life workshop, and although it's technically not Web 2.0, it's one of the "extra things," so I'm counting it here. I wish I had more time to explore many of these resources, as I suspect I'll be hearing and learning more about them in the future.

Podcasts

Just as with feeds (don't you like how I'm tying two posts together?), I tend not to go out looking specifically for podcasts. I suspect that if I had an MP3 player, I might do it more, especially if I could make myself get back to the gym, where I'd actually be likely to listen to them. I do listen to several regularly, though, Car Talk and Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me (both also heard on NPR) being by far the most regular.

By the way, if you ever feel as if you don't know what's going on in the world, Wait Wait is a very fun one-hour summary of what went on in the world over the past week. It's also good exercise (ooh, now I'm tying two paragraphs in this post together), since you spend a lot of time laughing, and laughter is supposed to be very good exercise.

When I went searching for podcasts through the directories provided, I came across this reading of the news in German especially for non-native speakers. This gives me a little more hope that I can get back into my German again!

RSS and newsreaders; finding feeds

Although I subscribe to a few RSS feeds via other sources, I've never actually tried to set one up or actively searched for them. I generally just either stumble across something with a feed I want or already know of something with a feed that I want to keep an eye on. Although it did take a bit to really figure out what was going on and find some feeds that I wanted, I did end up finding some that I think will be useful. As far as the search tools for feeds, I may be showing some of my weirdness, but the one I liked best was Syndic8, largely because it focused on text rather than the pretty formatting of the others. When I go looking for news or other information, I prefer to not be distracted by all the other neat things that are out there (well, I don't mind finding out about other things, just not when I'm looking for something in particular!). One problem with setting up and subscribing to feeds like this is that, while it helps to cut down on time spent reading or listening to a variety of sources, it encourages you to subscribe to even more than you (or at least I!) normally would, which doesn't help to cut down on time. But ah, well, I guess that's the price we have to pay in this information-rich world. I can definitely see using a feed for comments to this blog, since I don't have Blogger set up to automatically email them email to me.