I take it back.
I didn't like del.icio.us before. I didn't really care so much about other people's bookmarks. Plus, it didn't work so hot on the work computers, where security controls interfere with the installation of the browser buttons.
But then I had an epiphany.
I'm working on a project that requires me to go to a particular web site, and while I have no trouble remembering the name of the site, I can never remember how to get to the part of it I am working with. Plus, I get interrupted a lot, plus I work on multiple computers at work, so I was accessing this site by an embarrassingly convoluted process that I will not describe here.
So I was wasting valuable time yesterday trying to find the damn thing, when I realized that if I had bookmarks that could travel with me, I only had to find this once and then never again. If only such a thing existed!
I'm a little slow on the uptake.
When I went home, where security controls do not prohibit me from installing browser buttons, I started setting up my bookmarks in del.icio.us and tagging my heart out. This will be a little clunky to get going, since I don't have the buttons at work, but maybe there's a work-around I haven't figured out yet.
Oh, the possibilities. All those emails I have saved with interesting links in them, intending to return and investigate them some day? (Yeah, right) Their days are numbered. Now I can look at the links, decide if they are something that will be useful to access again, ORGANIZE them so I can RETRIEVE them when needed (imagine that), and then hit the blessed DELETE button!
I'm gonna be a lean, mean, del.icio.us machine.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Monday, December 10, 2007
Wrap it up (and put a tag on it?)
Here I go, under the wire.
There were times during Project Play when I really thought that my head was going to explode. Even so, this was completely and totally the right way for me to dangle my feet in the water of these applications and ideas.
I'm not entirely ready to embrace every part of Web 2.0. I'm a Productivity Enhancer, and not sure I'll ever be an Omnivore, but I'm OK with that. I've learned a lot, and I'm looking forward to learning more.
Over the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about the whole information overload thing. I can't recall any of the specific numbers, but I remember about 20 years ago it was a truism that we had to absorb more information in [some short period of time] than [some previous generation] had to process in a lifetime. Think of how that increased with the advent of the Internet. Web 2.0 must represent another order of magnitude beyond even that.
No wonder I sometimes feel like my head will explode.
I like blogging more than I thought I would, although that casual, punchy writing style that characterizes my favorite bloggers tends to elude me. I am also severely impaired in the visual design department, so I fear I will never have the cool graphics I envy so much on other blogs.
I was skeptical about Bloglines, but I'm a convert. It's a real timesaver.
Flickr made me slightly insane, but I feel motivated now to get my personal digital pics uploaded and tagged--just not for the whole world to see.
My 2.0 goals before Semester 2 starts up: read more Project Play-er's blogs to get other perspectives on these issues; get some photos uploaded and tagged for my personal use; work on setting up del.icio.us to do my bidding rather than just annoying me; explore the idea of a staff wiki for my branch to capture all that "How do we do this?" and "Where do we keep that?" information.
That's a little ambitious, and no iPod dangling out there in front of me to spur me on to action.
We'll see how it goes.
There were times during Project Play when I really thought that my head was going to explode. Even so, this was completely and totally the right way for me to dangle my feet in the water of these applications and ideas.
I'm not entirely ready to embrace every part of Web 2.0. I'm a Productivity Enhancer, and not sure I'll ever be an Omnivore, but I'm OK with that. I've learned a lot, and I'm looking forward to learning more.
Over the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about the whole information overload thing. I can't recall any of the specific numbers, but I remember about 20 years ago it was a truism that we had to absorb more information in [some short period of time] than [some previous generation] had to process in a lifetime. Think of how that increased with the advent of the Internet. Web 2.0 must represent another order of magnitude beyond even that.
No wonder I sometimes feel like my head will explode.
I like blogging more than I thought I would, although that casual, punchy writing style that characterizes my favorite bloggers tends to elude me. I am also severely impaired in the visual design department, so I fear I will never have the cool graphics I envy so much on other blogs.
I was skeptical about Bloglines, but I'm a convert. It's a real timesaver.
Flickr made me slightly insane, but I feel motivated now to get my personal digital pics uploaded and tagged--just not for the whole world to see.
My 2.0 goals before Semester 2 starts up: read more Project Play-er's blogs to get other perspectives on these issues; get some photos uploaded and tagged for my personal use; work on setting up del.icio.us to do my bidding rather than just annoying me; explore the idea of a staff wiki for my branch to capture all that "How do we do this?" and "Where do we keep that?" information.
That's a little ambitious, and no iPod dangling out there in front of me to spur me on to action.
We'll see how it goes.
Wiki Wacky
You learn something new every day.
I didn't realize that the granddaddy of all wikis, Wikipedia, is something of an anomaly in the wiki world. When I think of the drawbacks of wikis, I think of Wikipedia, which evidently is not typical of the way most wikis are created and used.
Interesting.
One of the things that I must admit I like about Wikipedia is the way it provides access to information that might be considered too trivial or too detailed to be included in a traditionally published source. For example, there used to be a list of Beatles songs arranged by which Beatle sang the lead vocal. I see that has evidently been replaced by a table of Beatles songs that has columns for which album the song appeared on, who wrote it, chart positions in the UK and US, all of which are sortable.
That's a little geeky, but kind of cool at the same time.
One of the ways I tend to use Wikipedia is to get a fast answer to a question that I then turn around and verify in a more authoritative source. I'm having a hard time thinking of an actual example, but it's similar to the way I might do a quick Google search to verify a title or author I'm having trouble producing for a patron, and then go to the catalog or FirstSearch for the final word.
I have long thought that a wiki would be the best way to keep staff up to the minute on library policies and procedures. These things often undergo revisions or even just slight modifications and it isn't easy to keep up with it all, especially for things you don't do every day. I, for example, just cannot seem to remember how long someone has to wait to reorder an ILL that they missed picking up. Procedures for dealing with parts missing or damaged items seem to change all the time. It would be great to have a source to go to that is [presumably] up to date with the latest information, instead of wondering if the email you saved or the memo you found in the file has been superseded by something more recent.
The linking abilities of wikis just make them so flexible. You can capture information that people need to know, but that might not be substantial enough to deserve a full-blown memo or written procedure. Kind of a way to harness the collective wisdom, and bring order to chaos.
I didn't realize that the granddaddy of all wikis, Wikipedia, is something of an anomaly in the wiki world. When I think of the drawbacks of wikis, I think of Wikipedia, which evidently is not typical of the way most wikis are created and used.
Interesting.
One of the things that I must admit I like about Wikipedia is the way it provides access to information that might be considered too trivial or too detailed to be included in a traditionally published source. For example, there used to be a list of Beatles songs arranged by which Beatle sang the lead vocal. I see that has evidently been replaced by a table of Beatles songs that has columns for which album the song appeared on, who wrote it, chart positions in the UK and US, all of which are sortable.
That's a little geeky, but kind of cool at the same time.
One of the ways I tend to use Wikipedia is to get a fast answer to a question that I then turn around and verify in a more authoritative source. I'm having a hard time thinking of an actual example, but it's similar to the way I might do a quick Google search to verify a title or author I'm having trouble producing for a patron, and then go to the catalog or FirstSearch for the final word.
I have long thought that a wiki would be the best way to keep staff up to the minute on library policies and procedures. These things often undergo revisions or even just slight modifications and it isn't easy to keep up with it all, especially for things you don't do every day. I, for example, just cannot seem to remember how long someone has to wait to reorder an ILL that they missed picking up. Procedures for dealing with parts missing or damaged items seem to change all the time. It would be great to have a source to go to that is [presumably] up to date with the latest information, instead of wondering if the email you saved or the memo you found in the file has been superseded by something more recent.
The linking abilities of wikis just make them so flexible. You can capture information that people need to know, but that might not be substantial enough to deserve a full-blown memo or written procedure. Kind of a way to harness the collective wisdom, and bring order to chaos.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Blecch
That's my reaction to Del.icio.us.
That's a little unfair. I guess my feelings about this are similar to my feelings about Flickr. As a way to access my own bookmarks, cool. Very cool, even. As a way to organize recommended websites for patrons, cool. Very cool, even.
As a way to find useful, relevant and meaningful information? Again I say, Blecch!
Searching on cats yields a slew of cat photos and cat humor. If you want to know something useful about cats, never mind. Well, maybe it's there, farther down in the results but I admit to not having the patience to slog through the whole list. Weirdly, it doesn't even display the sites most frequently tagged with cats at the top of the results. There must be an organizing principle here, but I'm not getting it.
A search on divorce produced one result called "Best divorce letter ever" which was supposed to be humorous but was really just vile and offensive. Even if one did not find it offensive, it would have been of absolutely no use to someone who wanted actual information about divorce.
It all goes back to those tags, doesn't it?
That's a little unfair. I guess my feelings about this are similar to my feelings about Flickr. As a way to access my own bookmarks, cool. Very cool, even. As a way to organize recommended websites for patrons, cool. Very cool, even.
As a way to find useful, relevant and meaningful information? Again I say, Blecch!
Searching on cats yields a slew of cat photos and cat humor. If you want to know something useful about cats, never mind. Well, maybe it's there, farther down in the results but I admit to not having the patience to slog through the whole list. Weirdly, it doesn't even display the sites most frequently tagged with cats at the top of the results. There must be an organizing principle here, but I'm not getting it.
A search on divorce produced one result called "Best divorce letter ever" which was supposed to be humorous but was really just vile and offensive. Even if one did not find it offensive, it would have been of absolutely no use to someone who wanted actual information about divorce.
It all goes back to those tags, doesn't it?
Tag Sale
I have a fairly passionate love/hate relationships with tags and tagging.
The love part: I completely adore the ability to describe something in a multifaceted way, and to retrieve it through very different paths. In fact, in my own small way, I like to think I was a little ahead of the curve on this concept. For quite some time now, I have had a program called PDA Cookbook on my Palm. I enter recipes that we have especially enjoyed, which is a big help when I'm wrestling with the What's-for-dinner dilemma. PDA Cookbook allows you to assign multiple categories (tags) to your recipes. So unlike a more traditional recipe file, where you are forced to put your food-splattered recipies in only one folder or section, you can assign tags, such as beef, entrees, slow-cooker,or winter.
This is cool and useful, because sometimes I menu-plan with different criteria in mind. Crazy-busy night coming up? I can search on Quick or Slow-cooker and find something that works. Everyone's sick of chicken? I can search on Meatless or Fish to offer some variety. Some of my more creative tags: Good for company, Freezes well, Make again, Old standbys, and (my favorite) Sides for iffy entrees. [This is used for side dishes that my kids will reliably eat, when I'm planning to cook something that I think they won't go for. It prevents starvation and keeps me from being a short-order cook]. I also put seasonal tags on recipes, since I don't typically feel like pot roast in August or grilled chicken in February.
With my paper recipes, it was always a judgment call whether to file something by main ingredient, type of dish (soup, casserole, etc), or some other criteria. Tags are an elegant solution to the dilemma.
The other thing I love about tags is that they tend to circumvent the sometimes obtuse library-ese of subject headings. To stick with the food example, a cookbook could be tagged with cookbook, cooking, recipes, cook, food, vegetarian cooking, yummies, gastronomy, gourmet, Food Network, Paula Deen, eating, or even (gasp!) cookery. So depending on how you personally conceptualize cookbooks, you can retrieve them without having to know that a committee of librarians decreed decades ago that Cookbooks Shall be Assigned the Subject Heading of Cookery.
The flip side of all of this fabulous retrieval is the lack of authority control which absolutely does give me the heebie-jeebies. So if we got wild and crazy and opened up the catalog to the masses, we would likely get some records tagged well and thoughtfully, and others tagged by people who can't spell their way out of a paper bag. And of course you would only retrieve items that were tagged according to your own conceptualization of the topic, thereby missing items that had only one tag, or other tags that were not part of your mindset. If you're a gastronomy person, you won't hit the record tagged yummies. Though if you're a gastronomy person, you may well not be interested the same books as a yummies person.
But of course, as it stands with controlled vocabulary, you are rather out of luck if you don't conceptualize cookbooks as cookery, so there you go. At least tags give you some other options, I guess.
I also find that I get a lot of noise in my search results when I search something by a tag. This offends my librarian sensibilities. Also, without a thesaurus, I find that I don't always think of things in the same way. While I was retro-tagging my posts, I called some of them photo sharing and some of them image sharing. Not intentionally, I just forgot which term I had used previously. This was before I discovered that Blogger pops up a list of labels you have already used when you're tagging.
Something I noticed about the library catalogs that have patron-added tags is that they skew toward certain types of books. Some of the top ten tags in the Ann Arbor District Library's catalog are fantasy, manga, anime, shonen, and shonen jump. So the depth of the "cataloging" must vary widely. People who are into tagging will tag the books they read or are interested in, while readers of other books or genres may have no interest in tagging, so those books are orphaned in the tagging department.
So what could libraries do? Reconceptualize subject cataloging, maybe? We aren't constrained by how many access points we can fit on a catalog card anymore, so why not apply the concept of tagging to the cataloging process? One of the things that drove me nuts about cataloging class was the necessity of deciding on one or a very few things that a book was supposedly "about." If catalogers tagged, think of the awesome access we could provide. Hey, we could even help patrons find that book they remember that was red! Patrons could submit tags, and librarians could put those tags through a disambiguation process (job security, you know). In this fantasy world, all books would have at least a baseline level of tagging. We could capture the spirit of massive amounts of participation, while perhaps minimizing some of the drawbacks of it.
Yeah, and we all have the staff and the budget for this. Retrospectively, even.
I'll be back later with thoughts on del.ico.us and wikis...I am determined to finish by December 10!
The love part: I completely adore the ability to describe something in a multifaceted way, and to retrieve it through very different paths. In fact, in my own small way, I like to think I was a little ahead of the curve on this concept. For quite some time now, I have had a program called PDA Cookbook on my Palm. I enter recipes that we have especially enjoyed, which is a big help when I'm wrestling with the What's-for-dinner dilemma. PDA Cookbook allows you to assign multiple categories (tags) to your recipes. So unlike a more traditional recipe file, where you are forced to put your food-splattered recipies in only one folder or section, you can assign tags, such as beef, entrees, slow-cooker,or winter.
This is cool and useful, because sometimes I menu-plan with different criteria in mind. Crazy-busy night coming up? I can search on Quick or Slow-cooker and find something that works. Everyone's sick of chicken? I can search on Meatless or Fish to offer some variety. Some of my more creative tags: Good for company, Freezes well, Make again, Old standbys, and (my favorite) Sides for iffy entrees. [This is used for side dishes that my kids will reliably eat, when I'm planning to cook something that I think they won't go for. It prevents starvation and keeps me from being a short-order cook]. I also put seasonal tags on recipes, since I don't typically feel like pot roast in August or grilled chicken in February.
With my paper recipes, it was always a judgment call whether to file something by main ingredient, type of dish (soup, casserole, etc), or some other criteria. Tags are an elegant solution to the dilemma.
The other thing I love about tags is that they tend to circumvent the sometimes obtuse library-ese of subject headings. To stick with the food example, a cookbook could be tagged with cookbook, cooking, recipes, cook, food, vegetarian cooking, yummies, gastronomy, gourmet, Food Network, Paula Deen, eating, or even (gasp!) cookery. So depending on how you personally conceptualize cookbooks, you can retrieve them without having to know that a committee of librarians decreed decades ago that Cookbooks Shall be Assigned the Subject Heading of Cookery.
The flip side of all of this fabulous retrieval is the lack of authority control which absolutely does give me the heebie-jeebies. So if we got wild and crazy and opened up the catalog to the masses, we would likely get some records tagged well and thoughtfully, and others tagged by people who can't spell their way out of a paper bag. And of course you would only retrieve items that were tagged according to your own conceptualization of the topic, thereby missing items that had only one tag, or other tags that were not part of your mindset. If you're a gastronomy person, you won't hit the record tagged yummies. Though if you're a gastronomy person, you may well not be interested the same books as a yummies person.
But of course, as it stands with controlled vocabulary, you are rather out of luck if you don't conceptualize cookbooks as cookery, so there you go. At least tags give you some other options, I guess.
I also find that I get a lot of noise in my search results when I search something by a tag. This offends my librarian sensibilities. Also, without a thesaurus, I find that I don't always think of things in the same way. While I was retro-tagging my posts, I called some of them photo sharing and some of them image sharing. Not intentionally, I just forgot which term I had used previously. This was before I discovered that Blogger pops up a list of labels you have already used when you're tagging.
Something I noticed about the library catalogs that have patron-added tags is that they skew toward certain types of books. Some of the top ten tags in the Ann Arbor District Library's catalog are fantasy, manga, anime, shonen, and shonen jump. So the depth of the "cataloging" must vary widely. People who are into tagging will tag the books they read or are interested in, while readers of other books or genres may have no interest in tagging, so those books are orphaned in the tagging department.
So what could libraries do? Reconceptualize subject cataloging, maybe? We aren't constrained by how many access points we can fit on a catalog card anymore, so why not apply the concept of tagging to the cataloging process? One of the things that drove me nuts about cataloging class was the necessity of deciding on one or a very few things that a book was supposedly "about." If catalogers tagged, think of the awesome access we could provide. Hey, we could even help patrons find that book they remember that was red! Patrons could submit tags, and librarians could put those tags through a disambiguation process (job security, you know). In this fantasy world, all books would have at least a baseline level of tagging. We could capture the spirit of massive amounts of participation, while perhaps minimizing some of the drawbacks of it.
Yeah, and we all have the staff and the budget for this. Retrospectively, even.
I'll be back later with thoughts on del.ico.us and wikis...I am determined to finish by December 10!
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Wild (Library) Thing
You make my heart sing.
I would not use LT to catalog my own personal library. For one thing, I don't have a large personal library. (That's what the public library is for).
I could see using it for keeping track of books I have read and/or want to read. I have BookBag in my Palm, but it's kind of old and clunky and I don't keep it up so well.
I can't honestly say I see myself doing a lot of tagging, except of the "to be read" or "owned" variety. I already know what the books I've read are about and thinking up tags for them is not something I am so sure I want to devote a huge amount of time to. Maybe I'll rethink that as I use LT more.
One feature I adore about LTFL is that it shows other editions, translations, formats etc. I hate to think of how often patron's go away empty handed because they don't realize we have more than one edition of a book and they are on different records, or that the large print would work just fine for them but they didn't realize we had it.
Browsing the LT author cloud, I notice that LT users REALLY like Neil Gaiman and JRR Tolkein. And JK Rowling? At least as big or possibly a little bigger than Shakespeare. I wonder what, if anything, those observations say about LT users? Yeah, probably not much.
The applications to reader's advisory seem obvious, sort of, but to really work for RA, books need to be tagged according to appeal factors, and it's kind of hard for me to imagine that happening consistently on a large-scale basis.[Does that demonstrate a woeful lack of 2.0 imagination on my part?] The suggestions are OK, but they don't really get at what it is about a certain book that made you like it and want to read something else similar to it.
For Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story, LT suggested Trucks by Byron Barton. Now I might be going out on a limb here, but there's no way a children's board book about trucks is in any way a readalike for Michael Perry. To be fair, this was not found by using the suggester, but both books are similarly tagged. That to me is a weakness of tagging--they both have the truck tag, but have nothing to do with each other.
LT suggested One for the Money by Janet Evanovich when I put in Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I have read both, and the only commonality I can home in on is that they both have female protagonists that could be described as tough or gutsy. But Claire and Stephanie are tough and gutsy in completely different ways, and the two books don't in any way have the same feel.
After my traumatic experience of trying to put in a link to Flickr account, I am a little afraid to try linking to my account, but here goes:
I would not use LT to catalog my own personal library. For one thing, I don't have a large personal library. (That's what the public library is for).
I could see using it for keeping track of books I have read and/or want to read. I have BookBag in my Palm, but it's kind of old and clunky and I don't keep it up so well.
I can't honestly say I see myself doing a lot of tagging, except of the "to be read" or "owned" variety. I already know what the books I've read are about and thinking up tags for them is not something I am so sure I want to devote a huge amount of time to. Maybe I'll rethink that as I use LT more.
One feature I adore about LTFL is that it shows other editions, translations, formats etc. I hate to think of how often patron's go away empty handed because they don't realize we have more than one edition of a book and they are on different records, or that the large print would work just fine for them but they didn't realize we had it.
Browsing the LT author cloud, I notice that LT users REALLY like Neil Gaiman and JRR Tolkein. And JK Rowling? At least as big or possibly a little bigger than Shakespeare. I wonder what, if anything, those observations say about LT users? Yeah, probably not much.
The applications to reader's advisory seem obvious, sort of, but to really work for RA, books need to be tagged according to appeal factors, and it's kind of hard for me to imagine that happening consistently on a large-scale basis.[Does that demonstrate a woeful lack of 2.0 imagination on my part?] The suggestions are OK, but they don't really get at what it is about a certain book that made you like it and want to read something else similar to it.
For Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story, LT suggested Trucks by Byron Barton. Now I might be going out on a limb here, but there's no way a children's board book about trucks is in any way a readalike for Michael Perry. To be fair, this was not found by using the suggester, but both books are similarly tagged. That to me is a weakness of tagging--they both have the truck tag, but have nothing to do with each other.
LT suggested One for the Money by Janet Evanovich when I put in Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I have read both, and the only commonality I can home in on is that they both have female protagonists that could be described as tough or gutsy. But Claire and Stephanie are tough and gutsy in completely different ways, and the two books don't in any way have the same feel.
After my traumatic experience of trying to put in a link to Flickr account, I am a little afraid to try linking to my account, but here goes:
Back yard view
That wasn't too hard
I'm not sure where to start typing after all that code. I guess this will be a surprise!
This is a picture of my back yard (well, not all of it was my yard) in a former life. We pause now for a moment of silence while the grief washes over me.
The hardest part was finding a photo without my or other people's kids in it. Seems lots easier than Flickr, but to be fair I haven't tried setting up a Flickr account yet.
Clearly, my previous attempt to post a link failed spectacularly. Here's hoping this works!
This is not my cat
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
My Friend Flickr
Or maybe my un-friend.
It makes my head spin.
[Sure, I'll have some cheese to go with my whine]
It seems so gol-dang cool, but the physical act of doing anything more advanced than spending mucho time browsing other people's pictures makes me hyperventilate.
I am determined to complete the assignment and will post again with my picture, but for now I'm trying to get my reflections done during a slow night on the desk.
It is cool to be able to look at other libraries' signage, displays, furniture etc. I can see using this as a source of ideas and an easy way to share information visually. Assuming I can leap over the technical hurdles of actually uploading something, it seems like a great way to share photos with friends and family. The thought of my precious personal photos living on someone else's server, a machine over which I have no control, makes me a little queasy.
[As if I actually have any control over my own PC. Har, that's a good one.]
Of course all of the toys are a lot of fun too, but at the end of the day the whole thing just feels unwieldy and disorganized to me. I get confused about sets and collections, and I think there's something about groups, but that's people, not pictures, right? So the library set (or maybe it's the collection?) is not the same thing as the library group?
Probably it will be clearer if I actually use it, but in theory it just seems like a big muddle. When you search for something common, like cats, you get thousands upon thousands of images with no discernibly reliable way to narrow things down a bit. If photos are well-tagged, of course you can use that but not all photos are well-tagged, and don't EVEN get me started on the lack of authority control.
And while I love the extensive tags that some people use (which are especially fabulous for categorizing your own personal photos), the multiple access points can result in photos showing up in your search that appear to have nothing to do with your query.
I'm actually complaining about too many access points. I need to go lie down.
Flickr's community standards guidelines just make me laugh and laugh.They basically say, if you think anyone, anywhere in the world might find your photo offensive, don't make it public. I think that gives the average Flickr-using Joe waaay too much credit for being culturally sensitive.
So I guess to sum up, I think Flickr is uber-cool for one's own personal use. When you start getting the rest of the world involved in viewing your vacation photos, not so much.
Not very 2.0 of me, eh?
It makes my head spin.
[Sure, I'll have some cheese to go with my whine]
It seems so gol-dang cool, but the physical act of doing anything more advanced than spending mucho time browsing other people's pictures makes me hyperventilate.
I am determined to complete the assignment and will post again with my picture, but for now I'm trying to get my reflections done during a slow night on the desk.
It is cool to be able to look at other libraries' signage, displays, furniture etc. I can see using this as a source of ideas and an easy way to share information visually. Assuming I can leap over the technical hurdles of actually uploading something, it seems like a great way to share photos with friends and family. The thought of my precious personal photos living on someone else's server, a machine over which I have no control, makes me a little queasy.
[As if I actually have any control over my own PC. Har, that's a good one.]
Of course all of the toys are a lot of fun too, but at the end of the day the whole thing just feels unwieldy and disorganized to me. I get confused about sets and collections, and I think there's something about groups, but that's people, not pictures, right? So the library set (or maybe it's the collection?) is not the same thing as the library group?
Probably it will be clearer if I actually use it, but in theory it just seems like a big muddle. When you search for something common, like cats, you get thousands upon thousands of images with no discernibly reliable way to narrow things down a bit. If photos are well-tagged, of course you can use that but not all photos are well-tagged, and don't EVEN get me started on the lack of authority control.
And while I love the extensive tags that some people use (which are especially fabulous for categorizing your own personal photos), the multiple access points can result in photos showing up in your search that appear to have nothing to do with your query.
I'm actually complaining about too many access points. I need to go lie down.
Flickr's community standards guidelines just make me laugh and laugh.They basically say, if you think anyone, anywhere in the world might find your photo offensive, don't make it public. I think that gives the average Flickr-using Joe waaay too much credit for being culturally sensitive.
So I guess to sum up, I think Flickr is uber-cool for one's own personal use. When you start getting the rest of the world involved in viewing your vacation photos, not so much.
Not very 2.0 of me, eh?
Monday, November 26, 2007
Feedback on Feedback
Harumph.
I was trying to do all my assigments for Feedback Thingys. I messed about with my settings, trying to make my blog as comment-friendly as possible. It seems that my pre-messing about posts are open for comments, but my post-messing about posts are not, or at least not as obviously (that is, there is no link that says 0 comments).
So obviously, a barrier to feedback thingys, at least for me, is getting the gol-dang things to work correctly.
I would love to be able to use feedback thingys as a mechanism for gathering information from users of our specific branch. Problems: our actual branch users (vs. MPL users in general, or the world at large)locating such a thingy. Sure, we might get a comment that someone would be interested in such-and-such an adult program, but if the comment really came from North Dakota it isn't of much use to me. But then, if someone from North Dakota is making specific suggestions for my library, he or she has waaaay too much time on his or her hands.
A significant portion of our patrons don't interact with the library via the web, so we would miss out on feedback from a lot of our users this way. Still, some is better than none, no? I just worry that feedback is skewed toward a certain segment of our users, but I guess that is also the case with non-web feedback as well.
Back to more mucking about in my settings. If you're trying to comment,I'M WORKING ON IT!
I was trying to do all my assigments for Feedback Thingys. I messed about with my settings, trying to make my blog as comment-friendly as possible. It seems that my pre-messing about posts are open for comments, but my post-messing about posts are not, or at least not as obviously (that is, there is no link that says 0 comments).
So obviously, a barrier to feedback thingys, at least for me, is getting the gol-dang things to work correctly.
I would love to be able to use feedback thingys as a mechanism for gathering information from users of our specific branch. Problems: our actual branch users (vs. MPL users in general, or the world at large)locating such a thingy. Sure, we might get a comment that someone would be interested in such-and-such an adult program, but if the comment really came from North Dakota it isn't of much use to me. But then, if someone from North Dakota is making specific suggestions for my library, he or she has waaaay too much time on his or her hands.
A significant portion of our patrons don't interact with the library via the web, so we would miss out on feedback from a lot of our users this way. Still, some is better than none, no? I just worry that feedback is skewed toward a certain segment of our users, but I guess that is also the case with non-web feedback as well.
Back to more mucking about in my settings. If you're trying to comment,I'M WORKING ON IT!
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Ellipsis Anonymous
I seem to have a penchant for putting ellipsis in my blog headers.
Hi, my name is [your name here] and I have a punctuation problem.
Hi, my name is [your name here] and I have a punctuation problem.
Survey says......
Continuing in my hopeless quest to catch up, herewith is my Thanksgiving-themed survey. Since I am so behind, I fear none of my colleagues will bother to visit my poor little blog and take my survey. Boo hoo hoo. Woe is me.
Let's see if I can manage to properly copy a link.
Click Here to take survey
Let's see if I can manage to properly copy a link.
Click Here to take survey
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
OK, so I'm a little behind......
Here's my Week 3 post.....during, what is it, Week 9? I had good intentions. Now I'm using part of my day off to try to catch up. Even though I am allowed to do this on work time, I never seem to be able to make that happen.
Bloglines. Hmmm. I set up an account long before Project Play came along. And promptly ignored it.
I'm a creature of habit. I have some sites I check regularly, including things like my bank account and my kids' lunch accounts, that I can't use a newsreader for. Stubbornly, I insist on visiting my bookmarked sites in order, regardless of whether they could be "RSSd" or not. Clearly, I am not living in the Web 2.0 world.
If I were a wise person, I would just bookmark Bloglines, and get rid of the "RSSable" bookmarks entirely.
Perhaps wisdom will visit me someday.
What I like about Bloglines (or what I would like if I would use it):
Eliminating the need to check on sites that haven't been updated after all.
What I don't like (or think I don't like):
I'm a bit afraid of getting buried in content, so I am hesitant to subscribe to sites--like news sites--with frequent updates. When I check a news site now, I'm seeing what' s going on now. If I missed something that happened yesterday, well, what I don't know won't hurt me. I'll just have to struggle through my life without knowing about the latest development in the Britney/K-Fed custody battle. I am concerned that if I add news to my Bloglines account, it will be the same as saving up unread newspapers and feeling as though I need to read all the old ones. Whoosh, there goes all that time I just saved not repeatedly checking websites, and then some.
I dislike that you lose some of a blogger's personality when viewing their content through Bloglines. The blogs all look the same, and that makes me a little sad...like I'm having a cup of coffee at Starbucks instead of the neighborhood coffee shop.
Bloglines. Hmmm. I set up an account long before Project Play came along. And promptly ignored it.
I'm a creature of habit. I have some sites I check regularly, including things like my bank account and my kids' lunch accounts, that I can't use a newsreader for. Stubbornly, I insist on visiting my bookmarked sites in order, regardless of whether they could be "RSSd" or not. Clearly, I am not living in the Web 2.0 world.
If I were a wise person, I would just bookmark Bloglines, and get rid of the "RSSable" bookmarks entirely.
Perhaps wisdom will visit me someday.
What I like about Bloglines (or what I would like if I would use it):
Eliminating the need to check on sites that haven't been updated after all.
What I don't like (or think I don't like):
I'm a bit afraid of getting buried in content, so I am hesitant to subscribe to sites--like news sites--with frequent updates. When I check a news site now, I'm seeing what' s going on now. If I missed something that happened yesterday, well, what I don't know won't hurt me. I'll just have to struggle through my life without knowing about the latest development in the Britney/K-Fed custody battle. I am concerned that if I add news to my Bloglines account, it will be the same as saving up unread newspapers and feeling as though I need to read all the old ones. Whoosh, there goes all that time I just saved not repeatedly checking websites, and then some.
I dislike that you lose some of a blogger's personality when viewing their content through Bloglines. The blogs all look the same, and that makes me a little sad...like I'm having a cup of coffee at Starbucks instead of the neighborhood coffee shop.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
I didn't need to know about that.....
I signed in intending to write something else, but was distracted by the rolling list of recently-updated blogs displaying themselves on the blogger sign in page.
Pantie pissing?
Fistingxxx?
Is this really necessary?
I don't have a problem with whatever it is that floats your boat, but really, the rest of us just don't need to know about it.
Pantie pissing?
Fistingxxx?
Is this really necessary?
I don't have a problem with whatever it is that floats your boat, but really, the rest of us just don't need to know about it.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
TMI
So I guess I have information overload issues with Web 2.0.
Take Week 2's Project Play assignments. Lots of interesting reading in there. But one link just leads to another, and I'm clicking around, going off on lots of tangents and before I know it, I've been at the 'puter for two hours and I'm taking a quiz to see what I can do to improve my sleep.
Not that it wasn't all fun and interesting. [Well, actually, a lot of it was just stupid or mediocre comments to blog posts, but that's another topic.] And yeah, I know, one link leading to another is Kind of The Point.
But I get a little frustrated with all the jumping around from thing to thing. I either lose the thread I was pursuing, or I see something tangential that is interesting and can't find my way back to it later.
This might not be so bad if I had no other life, but I really don't have time for all this. It isn't only a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff; there's just Too Much Stuff out there, both good and bad. How to keep it from taking over my brain and my life.......?
Take Week 2's Project Play assignments. Lots of interesting reading in there. But one link just leads to another, and I'm clicking around, going off on lots of tangents and before I know it, I've been at the 'puter for two hours and I'm taking a quiz to see what I can do to improve my sleep.
Not that it wasn't all fun and interesting. [Well, actually, a lot of it was just stupid or mediocre comments to blog posts, but that's another topic.] And yeah, I know, one link leading to another is Kind of The Point.
But I get a little frustrated with all the jumping around from thing to thing. I either lose the thread I was pursuing, or I see something tangential that is interesting and can't find my way back to it later.
This might not be so bad if I had no other life, but I really don't have time for all this. It isn't only a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff; there's just Too Much Stuff out there, both good and bad. How to keep it from taking over my brain and my life.......?
Testing...1-2-3
My first blog post. Assuming it works, that is.
Setting this blog up was an astonishingly angst-ridden process. What should I call it? What should my name be? How to be clever, but not too cute? How will any of these decisions come back to haunt me in the future?
And, perhaps most important, why will anyone care?
I have much more to say, but for now I'm just trying to get my PP homework done. And see if this works.
Setting this blog up was an astonishingly angst-ridden process. What should I call it? What should my name be? How to be clever, but not too cute? How will any of these decisions come back to haunt me in the future?
And, perhaps most important, why will anyone care?
I have much more to say, but for now I'm just trying to get my PP homework done. And see if this works.
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