Tuesday, October 30, 2007

RSS & the recovering over-reader

So my RSS feed experience has been not dissimilar to my experience with tagging, fine & dandy and should have happened a long time ago. The difference is that I actually had control of the RSS beast once before, but I let it get out of hand: too many feeds. I'm sure I could have skipped all my classes and stayed home all day to read rss when I was in college and eventually ended up ceasing to read them altogether besides a random few who I'd been reading for so long that their urls are permanently fused into my circutry (if the metaphor is broken its okay I'm not a elctrowiz). SO with this activity I've turned over a new leaf I've added to my Google Reader only the feeds related to 2.0 and those hardwired urls.
Mostly these blogs have stuck with me because i find them humorous or thought provoking and so I thought I should shared these because probably anyone could use a little laugh or to have their brain poked at.

http://miss-information.blogspot.com/
http://waiterrant.net/
http://mightygirl.com/
devotedbee.com/
http://www.explodingdog.com/

Thursday, October 25, 2007

134. Blue Bed Sheets Bring Babies (The Truth, or not, of Old Wives Tales)
135. Yarn Harlot by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
136. Kushiel's Justice

the post about tagging

My delicious site is up: http://del.icio.us/poet13. I do wish I'd known about this a year ago, my poor lap top is laguishing, disconnected from the world at large ("the internet") since last december and full of my favorites from the 4 years previous. It's sad really and will have to be remedied. We shall get there, this is much like my librarything account which has gone un updated since Febuary or so...very sad that.
I think that as much as we need to figure out ways to make tools like del.icio.us useful for library staff use we would do well to get patrons into it. As I see it this could easily fill a major gap in using public terminals: the inability to quickly and easily save where a person has been browsing. I like it.
In the Library Journal articule, there was a bit about using a delicious page to help with a school topic we might know is being covered as well as to keep people us on evens which could be used both for library events as well as local news, a little word of mouth via technology. Thats sort of what makes the tagging thing sensible, its organic, it's a website and the internet, techie-mumbo-jumbo, but its also like show-and-tell just blown to a giant scale if you want that much information.
And I'm now having found memories of ridiculous glee the first time I looked at the subject cloud in my librarything.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

first post, rambling thoughts to various Library 2.0 information

So... new blog. The girl & the blog. I have another blog; it doesn't get much use really. It has reverted into a list of books I read. This may become that in a few months. This is a blog for one of my employers to know I can use this internet tool. I can and we do.

I have a running debate with a good friend of mine about the possible evil of the library and the internet merging, the end result being the disappearance of books. I like the internet. Some of the best relationships in my life began or are maintained through it. I like books too, love is probably more accurate... the way they smell... textures of different paper... preserving some vary carefully... manipulating others that have passed from traditional usefulness. I'm not even talking about content at this point because I'm addicted to stories.

I'm not against library people becoming more internet savey, for the record. I think that to do anything less that utilize it as a resource would be neglectful both towards our own intellects as well as to the patron that approach us with damningly basic questions. "Damning" here refering to the test of one's ability to keep a straight face for some questions...

I think the more information is possible the more we, humanity, desire to have it, more and more. I've just finished a house/dog-sitty job where the internet was down for the majority of two weeks and I've lived in a town where my "transitory" status as a college student meant I was not allowed to sign up for a card at the local public library. I'd perfer to not to repeat either any time soon. I'm hooked on access to anything that I can think of looking up. It isn't just me, or we wouldn't be doing this.