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...

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.

(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.

Makin' a list and Jottin' it twice

Oh. My. God.

This could be life-altering.

I can't really say that I'm an inveterate list-maker, but I am an inveterate list-loser. If I had a nickel for every list I've started and lost....well, I wouldn't be sitting here doing work things at 11:45 on a Sunday night with the temperature a lovely six below zero. I completely love the idea of lists, but the actual implementation of them is where I sort of fall down. [Click here for a book that, by strange coincidence, I happen to be reading at the mo.]

I don't just love to-do lists. I am prone to making lists of all kinds, and some of these now exist in my brand-new Remember the Milk account. Such as Wish List (things I don't have, but want like an iPod and a microplane grater), Organizing Needs (things I don't have, but need to solve an organizing problem at home, like a container to corrall my various electronic device chargers) and MP3s (songs I would put on that iPod, like Radar Love and Thunder Road.)

I rely heavily on my PalmPilot to keep me organized, but one feature I have never had much luck using is the To-Do list. Much as I liked the idea of having all my to-dos in one spot, with no pesky paper scraps to lose, it has just never worked for me to do all of that data entry. I'm not entirely sure that RTM will work any better for me, but I'm willing to give it a go. At a bare minimum, I can type a lot faster than I can write with a stylus.

I find the interface to be a little clunky, and it seriously bothers me how things jump and move when you mouse over them. I think it will take a while for the whole thing to become second-nature, and to start using all of the functionality to its fullest capacity. For a start, though, I can envision reading my email with RTM open in another window, transfering to-dos into it and DELETING the email instead of leaving it in my inbox to get lost among the other email clutter. That's something.

One problem I can foresee, especially at home, is that I don't always happen to have the computer on when I need to make note of a to-do. Oh, wait, that's where Jott comes in, right? I must say, though, that calling Jott from my cell phone to remind myself to buy toilet paper while I'm sitting in my living room approaches the bounds of the surreal for me.

Jott transcribed the Jotts I sent perfectly, but for giggles I want to try out a few accents and see what happens. I noticed some goofs in the Project Play list, such as where someone who clearly meant "bring the wood in" got transcribed as "bring the wooden." (Bring the wooden.....what? And where should I bring it?)

Cool as all this is, my problems with information overload continue. So now, besides my work email and personal email, I also have inboxes on RTM and Jott. How many inboxes does one person really need?

This could all be even slicker if I didn't have a geriatric Palm that does not have Internet capabilities. Maybe I need to put a Palm upgrade on my Wish List. Or maybe what I really need is an iPhone, so I could send myself a Jott, which I could access on the iPhone, reminding myself to download The Farmer and the Cowman Should be Friends, which would go into my MP3 list on RTM, and which would prompt me to put the song...on the iPhone.

Is that full circle, or just way too complicated?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.......?