23 Things Completed!

Well, I've done them all!  I enjoyed the format of this learning experience and I dabbled with a whole lot of things I'd known about but never tried.  So I do feel a lot more informed about a range of 2.0 technologies now.  I don't actually expect to use too many of them on a regular basis, but I may now be a more intelligent conversation partner.  And the promise of cake at the wrap-up party makes it all even more worthwhile. :)

Worlde and Library Thing

Wordle was lots of fun.   I seem to recall somebody using it for a presentation once too -- so it can be used to make a point, not just for entertainment.  I'd heard about Library Thing ages ago but had never checked it out.  But in searching for a book I'd read in order to add it to my library I discovered that another one in the same series came out last year -- and I missed it.  So now I've got to stop playing with these applications and get some reading done!

Community Walk

Unlike some of the other applications, this one was really easy to use.  I can see this being something I use before I travel to new cities.  In fact, the map I made today was for a few key places that I'll be visiting in New Orleans when I go to ALA.  The only goofy thing was that when I made a path from one point on the map to another it did not follow the actual roads -- it was 'as the crow flies'.  That isn't really that useful at all.  I loved that all of the sites I wanted to add came up when I searched for them in the search box.  That made adding them all super easy. I like it!

Widgets

I have seen widgets on some library pages -- for IM, for example.  But when I looked at Heather's WorldCat widget I realized that those handy search boxes right in many Google results must also be widgets.  I love those, and they make a lot of sense in libray land since so much of what we're about is searching and finding.  Maybe widgets for my most-used databases?  The library catalogue? Customizable ones for our users who are so inclined would make a lot of sense.  Must investigate further.

Bookmarking

I've long intended to try a social bookmarking sites.  Today I signed up on Diigo.  I wonder how that is pronounced?  I found it not really intuitive to use and I stumbled around a bit.  I'm not a compulsive surfer or bookmarker, so this is probably more than I need in order to manage my few 'favorites'.  The sticky note idea is fun --too bad we can't use it on our work machines!  That I would have tried.  The one adavantage I can see is not so much storing my own bookmarks, but using the bookmarks and tags of others to help identify popular sites on a topic of interest.  I suppose my Google searches are ranked as well, but by machines rather than people.  This may offer a different perspective.

Tweeting

My tweet was not noteworthy, but I tweeted.  And I don't expect I will again in the near future.  But it was interesting to see some of my facebook friends there, and realize that their fb status updates are also tweets -- I hadn't thought about how all these networking things fit together.  So now I get that I think.  I also wondered why people I wasn't following on twitter showed up in the stream of tweets on my page.  That's when I learned about retweeting.  And I was also surprised some of the tweeters refer back to their webpages, which is actually where their context is.  So you don't actually get much that's useful on twitter in those cases.  Yes, I was aware of the 140 character limit, but I thought that people would then be clever enough to use Twitter well as a standalone medium.  Anyway, pretty easy to do all this, but will I login to twitter, igoogle, etc every day to get my fix of largely peripheral information?  Probably not so much.

Flickr

I used Flickr to find photos of places I've already been.  Searching by 'tags only' usually yields fewer results, not surprisingly.  I took the 'tour' and thought there were a lot of neat features.  But I haven't seen any photos/collections that actually use ANY of them!

The photo I really wanted to post was of my hometown public library, but alas downloads were not allowed.  So I'll settle for this peaceful scene, added to Flickr by BluePail, which we visited only two months ago:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/22/183129680_8fc53a38f0.jpg