Library Thing's the thing!

I've looked at Library Thing before but never bothered to sign up before now and I just love it. It's really like the ultimate reader advisory service and will be a great way of keeping track of my reading. I can usually remember if I've read a book and if I enjoyed it but often can't remember anything about the plot, so with Library Thing I can tag and add notes or reviews to entries in my library.

Away in the cloud

I think I have my head around what cloud computing is all about now. The module readings were fine in theory but it all became much clearer after looking at some of the applications and working through the exercises. Loving Google Docs! I have been aware of it for some time but had never used it. I think this is an application I could see myself actually using - so much quicker and more convenient than emailing documents back and forth when you're working collaboratively on something. I guess some people might be concerned about not having their documents stored on their own computers. Does this bother you?

Am writing this post in Zoho Writer to see how it compares. I prefer Google Docs personally as the interface seems more straightforward to me. Both seem pretty easy to use though. Which do you prefer?

Google Calendar also looks quite good. Looks better than my Outlook Calendar and has more features e.g. there's a link from the location in your events through to Google Maps (cool!). Right, I am going to try posting this to my blog direct from Zoho. Let's see if it works...

Social networking

I've really enjoyed this module and I think I have a greater appreciation now for what social networking tools can offer in terms of facilitating communication and collaboration between people and communities. The Building the Social Library Online slideshow is definitely worth looking at. They outline quite nicely the characteristics of social software and also how libraries can utilise Web 2.0 tools e.g. to disseminate information, start conversations with our customers/communities, provide services where are customers are, capitalise on the collective wisdom of the crowd etc. I definitely agree with their advice to "avoid technolust" when implementing social software and to first ask "will it improve library services?" and "will people use it?" - I've talked about this in a previous post. That being said, they do provide some really interesting examples of how libraries are using social software and it's got me thinking about how we might use some of these tools to better engage with our customers.

Mashups and more

Have been looking at some mashups and other image tools. I love the Flickr Color Pickr - it's so pretty! The Flickr Montager is quite clever and fun to play with but I don't think I would bother to go back to it. I feel the same way about Wordle - it was kinda fun but I can't thing of too many uses I would have for it - maybe as part of a library poster or display? I created a Wordle of my blog which I tried to add to this post but I couldn't get it to work. Read the Wordle FAQs but still couldn't do it. Anyone know how?

CCL photos on Flickr

I have finally got back this after a week off. I found some old photos of the New Brighton Library 5th birthday staff party from 2004 on my computer so I uploaded them to the CCL Staff account on Flickr. It was actually pretty straightforward. This is a picture of our cake:

Flickr

I'm progressing really slowly through this module because I got totally diverted looking at all the CCL photos on Flickr. There's a lot of interesting stuff on there...

Facebook

I'm already signed up to Facebook and I really like it even though I'm not a particularly active user. My brother has been living overseas for a long time and I only see him every year or two so I initially joined to see his travel photos. I'm not really interested in collecting lots of 'friends' - I have just a small number of people who are all either family or my actual friends, not work friends who I see every day. One of my friends has over 600 Facebook friends - what's the point? I'm pretty lazy at keeping in touch with people, so I find Facebook useful as I can check on my friends all in one place. Facebook has also enabled me to reconnect with a couple of old friends who I had lost touch with, which has been really cool. I do sometimes think about the privacy aspect of social networking sites though. In the recent Sophie Elliot murder case, there was evidence presented during the trial (and then splashed across the media) concerning her Facebook activity e.g. her photos, whose profiles she was looking at etc. Terrible for her family to see her life exposed in that way. It is a good reminder that anything you do online is traceable and therefore public.