Social Tagging

Tagging in Delicious intrigues me. But I have more questions than formed thoughts about it. Could it replace collections of links on library web pages? What happens when the tagged site goes dead? Would our users find the sites easier through Delcious or our web site? Would other people's tags be specific enough for our users? Or for us to find good sites? "Music" just doesn't cut it as a tag in the music library.

I'm in the process of a manual check of our links, so I'm concerned about links to dead sites cluttering up the site. The question of dead links is probably my biggest concern for Delicious.

There's a part of me that would like to transfer our links to something like Delicious. Or duplicate them. Would it be time worth spent?

Flittering with Twitter

In starting this exercise, I made the mistake of using an e-mail address in which I don't keep any contacts, so initially finding friends was somewhat difficult. Although it was easy to type a short message in the box, other aspects were not quite so easy.

When I was out of the country over Thanksgiving, I did hear about people using Twitter for citizen journalism in the Mumbai crisis. And to provide info as to their safety.

What am I doing? I'm sitting at a reference desk on a quiet afternoon, working with this 2.0 application. It could be used for reference or targeting quick messages to library customers, including PR. But first the library needs some friends.

Library Thing

Library Thing was very easy to use, especially adding books that have ISBNs. I added books I personally own to my library, but I can see more use in having a library that keeps track of the library books one has read, or wants to read. If one is doing book talks, writing the reviews and rating the books, then gathering them by the tags one has added, could really help with preparation for the book talk. Library Thing does have potential as a library tool.

Technology -- a few thoughts

In thinking about technology, I decided to go back to the dictionary sitting on my office shelves. Webster's 9th Collegiate Dictionary defines technology as:

• technical language
• applied science
• a scientific method of achieving a practical purpose
• the totality of means employed to provide objects necessary for human sustenance and comfort

In looking at the definition, I see technology as a means to an end.

That goes along with the post-modern values described in yesterday's Urban Libraries Council audio-conference, Foresight 2020 -- that the emphasis is not on the technology itself, but rather if it enhances life. There's a disenchantment with science and technology during postmodernization, as the emphasis goes beyond the material to the existential.

I was traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday, and I did see citizen journalism come of age with the coverage of the terriorist attacks in Mumbai. People were able to make contact with their friends and loved ones using Facebook, and they were able to provide information through their cell phone cameras. Twittering offered comfort and on the spot information. But what if the terriorists had also been twittering -- would that not have put even more people in danger?

I want to use technology that will help me do what I need to do, better and more efficiently. I'm willing to try things, but they have to meet the test before I'll really adopt them. And as a post-modernite, I have more important things to do with my life than to spend my personal time wired/wireless/connected via the ether. At work, it's another matter, as I must meet the traditionalists and moderns in whatever space they inhabit.

Give me functionality, sustainability, appropriateness and simplicity in my technology.

Finding RSS Feeds

I've tried several ways of finding RSS feeds. For my purposes, the easiest way, or maybe the best way for my purposes, was looking for the RSS icon on places I'd found otherwise that I knew I'd want to follow. Most of my computer viewing is one time specific purpose use, so the RSS feed would really be of limited use. But for those few places I want to follow and see the updates or new posts, RSS could save time.

As for the RSS search tools, I got mostly false hits from Technorati. The Google Blog Search gave me the best results of all the search tools and was easy to use.

I think that RSS feeds can work in the library setting as verifying that sites one uses regularly are being maintained and updated.