And then we came to the end

As one of the people who has 12:00 flashing on her VCR, I take the teeniest exception to Seth Godin's assertion that I am therefore an incurious person. I have enough clocks in my house, and only use the VCR to play back things, not record things, so setting the correct time on my VCR is not a huge priority. But I am somehow incurious because of this? Harumph.

Oh. It was a metaphor? Never mind.

Anyway, I would be amused to know if any Project Players say "No, not me. I'm not a curious person." Of course we're all curious. Just like we're all unfailingly patient with our children, and never just gesture in the general direction of the cookbooks instead of taking the patron there, and especially never feel like saying, with just a tinge of sarcasm in our voices, "Under that big yellow sign that says TAX FORMS."

I think incurious types wouldn't have signed up for PP in the first place. Some of us may be more at ease with the technology and conventions of Web 2.0, but this was too much of a commitment [and I mean that in the best possible way] to see through to the end for anyone lacking in the curiosity department.

It's been quite a ride. I have learned so much, and have some very cool new tools to play around with. Tops for me have been Remember the Milk, GoogleDocs, Bloglines, del.icio.us, and podcasts. I've already implemented lessons from PP in my work and personal life, and I have lots of ideas for tackling some work challenges with new tools in my toolkit. Once a productivity enhancer, always a productivity enhancer...

I know Web 2.0 isn't going anywhere, and I'm far from a Luddite. However, as I think I've made clear throughout my blog, I have an issue or two with information overload and the general overall quality of much user-generated content. As an interesting coincidence, I listened to a podcast yesterday of To the Best of Our Knowledge called Dumbing Down, Smartening Up which was a nice capstone to PP. [I'll be back later to add the link; gotta get Junior off to school now]. It covers more than just Web 2.o, but includes an interesting interview about Wikipedia and makes some really good points about problems with the anonymity of user-generated content. Food for thought.

Well, I hope we keep on playing in some form. It's been real! So long...

Monster Mashup

That's what I created when I played around with this week's toys. I wound up with an iGoogle page tricked out like a Christmas tree. Cute cat photo widgets? Sure, I'll take two. Photos from NASA? Why not? Cleaning tips? Yeah, need that one. And I just love how the sun travels across the top of the page throughout the day. (Those little details make such a difference.)

Best of all, I mashed together Google Calendar and Remember the Milk and made it show up on my page, along with the day's weather forecast. I do this with some trepidation, since it essentially means I am currently maintaining two calendars, which is a great big time management no-no in my book. I think, however that I have discovered a way to sync my trusty Palm with my Google Calendar, without having to buy a smart phone to do it. It does involve some software downloads and installations, so who knows if I will really be able to pull it off?

Anyway, I probably spent more time exploring and playing around with mashups than any other single Project Play gizmo. The zip code census dashboard has me awestruck. Such a simple way to get that demographic info you need for the report that's overdue. (How did anybody get anything done Way Back When?) I couldn't ever get it to load right, but if Every Block Chicago works the way I think it's supposed to, it would be cool to have something similar for one's own locality. I can get squarely behind this kind of user-generated content.

Too much of a good thing? Maybe. I pared down my iGoogle page with an eye toward making it functional instead of including every bell and whistle I could find. Still, I had to keep the Bush Quote Generator. You know what they say about all work and no play.

And now for something completely different...

Let's try embedding a vid and see if it works.

Tubular

Two and a half hours of my life that I will never get back.

That's what I just spent poking around YouTube, looking at silly videos with, shall we say, minimal production values. An awful lot of bandwidth is being used to show the world jerky amateur films of college boys doing bad Paula Deen imitations. And worse.

And yet. It had never occurred to me that I could use YouTube to view a clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. Now THAT could be useful, and I really haven't ever used the words "useful" and "YouTube" in the same thought or sentence before. I'm thinking about my student days as a history major and marvelling at how easy it would be now to view certain kinds of primary source material. No chattering projector required!

Other things I like about YT: it's kind of fun to find clips of live performances (although picture and sound quality are frequently dreadful), and to search for things like the name of your high school and see what you get. Fun, but not all that useful.

I don't like how there doesn't seem to be a great way to improve the precision of your search results. At least for the searches I did, there is always a lot of noise, and no obvious ways of whittling down your results, except by adding more search terms of course. Like all of Web 2.0, there's tons of dreck mixed in with the gold nuggets. Just because YouTube "doesn't allow" gross-out videos and porn doesn't mean I feel confident that I (or my kids) couldn't stumble across something icky that flew under their radar. And please, save me from the inane comments and vulgar language that seems to pass for discourse in much of the Web 2.0 world.

So I guess YouTube gets a mixed review from me. Of course we'll all be using the technology at work soon enough. But cute kitty videos, stupid human tricks, and flatulence wear thin after a while and all the silly and stupid stuff dilutes the power of YouTube, IMHO. Maybe the Google people could split YouTube into two sites: one for the America's Funniest Home Videos stuff and another for clips that perform a function other than making people laugh so hard they pee their pants.

All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up

Obviously I was not thinking clearly during week 6 when I opined that podcasts would be a good way to release me from having to teach people how to set up email accounts. Booktalks, OK. To The Best of our Knowledge, I'm there. Talking someone through a process, not so much.

I am struck by the wide variations in quality in the screencasts I looked at. Some had a lot of annoying microphone noise, which was very distracting. The tutorial on setting up a Gmail account? Bleahhhh. If you aren't computer savvy enough to do it without a tutorial, I doubt it would help much. Some, like the University of Calgary, were just awesome. It is very apparent that having a script makes your screencast sound worlds more professional, and less like something you did in your garage or basement.

How would I use screencasts? Well, obviously, I was jumping the gun a few weeks ago with my email tutorial idea. Something I do a lot of at the desk is demoing how to search and place holds from home, as well as how to use some of our databases, especially EBSCO. Invariably I wind up showing the patron and writing down the steps on a piece of paper so they can replicate the search at home. How much better it would be for me to give them the URL and say, There's a tutorial embedded right there that will walk you through it as you're doing it, instead of handing them a scrap of paper covered in my scrawly handwriting that they will undoubtedly lose anyway. I think I would still show them while they were with me, because it goes against my nature not to demonstrate things when asked about them, but I would totally stop writing down the steps for sure.

I'm not sure if I'll get to the optional assignment or not. I'm doing pretty well to complete this assignment before we get the next one. It's nice to know how to do it, though, so that Frenzied Librarian and I can get together and whip out useful screencasts in our copious off-desk time.

(Pod)casting the net a bit wider

Oh dear. More goodies to keep me chained to the computer. I fear that podcasts will become like library books for me: "That one looks good; oh I need that one; whaddya mean I can't renew it anymore, I haven't started reading it yet!" My Bloglines feeds keep growing and growing, just like the pile of books on the floor next to my bed. Gotta get that iPod.

Once again, TMI. Maybe if I just stop sleeping, I'll have enough time to read, listen and fool around with the computer. Nah, I'd probably have to stop working, eating and raising my children too. Thanks a lot, Project Play.

The thing I like about podcasts for libraries is that there are so many different ways to use them. Booktalks and book reviews. Teen applications. Stories for kids (though I must say, I'm having trouble with the idea of plopping a kid down in front of the computer to listen to a story, however artfully it is told by Disembodied Children's Librarian Voice. Parents, there's just no Web 2.0 substitute for plopping the kid down on your lap and reading the book together).

Maybe podcasts could take over some of the one-on-one computer training we currently do. If I never had to walk someone through the process of setting up an email account again, I wouldn't complain. And syndicating programs for people who just couldn't make it to the library that day? Sweet. What a great way to reach beyond the walls of the library. And if only two people show up to your program, you can tell yourself that it wasn't a dismal failure after all, since undoubtedly hundreds more will listen to the podcast.

I have to stop now. My computer chair is in serious danger of permanently molding itself into the shape of my posterior, and my kids are starting to tell me that I've really had enough screen time.

It's not you, I just need MySpace

Oh, MySpace. If we kept stats on that sort of thing, I've little doubt it would be the most visited site on my library's public internet computers. After school, we should just hang out a "MySpace Cafe" sign and forget about that whole book thing.

I have a couple of favorite MySpace stories. The first happened several months ago, when I was trying to help a young patron with a misbehaving computer. He just gave me a withering look and said, "This is MySpace. You don't know anything about this." The latest happened this past week when we found it necessary to ban three young men from our hallowed halls for an extended period of time. They use our 'brary in the evening and on Saturdays, when we have fewer staff on duty, so some of my comrades were not sure they knew who the guys were. I found one of them on MySpace, and got to the other two's profiles because they were Friends of the one I could find. I snagged their pictures, printed them out on our color printer, and now feel confident that they won't be able to sneak in when someone they don't recognize is working.

I felt like a latter-day Nancy Drew. Kinda clever, if I do say so myself, although probably not what the Project Play folks had in mind for libraries using MySpace.

But anyway. Generally speaking, MySpace just gives me a headache. All the backgrounds and the page elements make for very difficult viewing. It just screams bad design to me. Something else I thought was not so cool was one library's page that had lots of comments from what appeared to be patrons (good thing), but a lot of the comments were just stupid (Thanks for the add, Jessie! Thanx 4 wishing me a happy b-day luv ya and hope 2 c u today), and one frequent poster goes by the name Shithead. Call me a grumpy old librarian, but I don't find that things like that really add anything useful or positive to that library's web presence. Of course, this isn't confined to MySpace. Any site where people can post comments gets cluttered with stupidity. I can't read the news online without wading through loads of comments that are just dumb, ignorant, and (worst of all) ungrammatical. I should just stop reading the comments, but sometimes there are good insights there underneath all the garbage. Someone should invent a "dumb comment filter" for Web 2.0 applications. I could get behind that.

I digress. I liked the screen shots from Facebook much better, though I haven't created an account there yet. Maybe later. The layouts just seemed crisper, less distracting, more useful and navigable.

While I do buy into the notion of meeting our users where they are (and Lord knows they are on MySpace), I just can't get excited about my library having a presence there. We have users and potential users in Home Depot too, but we don't set up a satellite branch there (next to the hot dog stand in the entrance) with books from our home improvement collection. We don't set up a table at the hip-hop club to let people know we have hip-hop CDs at the library.

We're all trying to do more with less, and I don't think that having a MySpace page is something a library should necessarily do unless it can do it well.That's not to say that a younger generation of librarians won't be able to do it right, but not this curmudgeon. Is there anything more horrifying than a middle-aged mom trying to dress and sound like her teenage daughter and not quite getting it right?

Shudder.

Besides, I kind of like them to think I don't know anything about what they're doing. Mwahahaaaaaa.....