Too many videos, too little time...

Everyone has heard of YouTube, but I have to admit this was my first experience searching for something there. Mostly I'd seen a few of the One Minute Critic videos Sam had posted on YouTube, and I think I'd seen some other random "hey-you-should-watch-this" videos other people had pointed out to me. For my search, I typed in "Library Week," which brought up ALA's videos that I wanted plus other videos I didn't particularly care about. Revising my search to "National Library Week" helped a bit with that. I also got to view a short video from some university library that was pretty cool--video of the library on campus overlaid with clips of students talking about their favorite places in the library & why & what they'd like to change if they could. That was fun!

And I like the option YouTube gave me to put one of the videos (I chose the Nat'l Library Week video about Reference) on my Facebook profile. Very cool!

Next was blip.tv and another search on "National Library Week." That brought up a whole list of videos in a format that was much easier to scan. I like it better than YouTube's too-crowded layout. Here's my favorite Reference video (the same one I posted on Facebook):



Blip.tv makes it really easy to embed their videos. I appreciate that! Plus, on their site, the videos are larger (easier to see) than on YouTube. You can even click a little icon and make them full-screen, which is fabulous!! (note: I just discovered almost by accident that YouTube offers this feature, too. That's good!)

I also discovered that blip.tv has a drop-down menu off to the side of the video you're watching that lets you "share" the video via a selection of options which includes Facebook. I think I'll try it and compare the two....OK, at first glance they appear the same, but clicking on the postings to view the videos has two different effects: blip.tv takes you to their site in a new tab, while YouTube lets you view right there within Facebook. I prefer the latter, I think. Still, it's good that no matter which of the two sites I'm on, I can add a favorite video to my Facebook account. (So again, why in the world would you need one of those tumblelogs??)

As for library applications, well, bring on the videos! Sam's One Minute Critic program should be advertised on our FVRL website with all kinds of videos--he's certainly got enough to choose from! Why are we not taking advantage of them? He's been posting them on YouTube & blip.tv & elsewhere for months. But why not here, where our audience/participants are likely to be?

Likewise, I think we as a library system should be using videos and podcasts to advertise all kinds of library programs and activities. Currently we're only just beginning to do this, and mostly through our teen MySpace pages, etc. This is fine--a good thing--but not enough. We're not maximizing our potential yet. (Incidentally, why can I not find links to these MySpace pages from the FVRL website? Am I just looking in the wrong place, or do you need to go to MySpace directly and then search for FVRL?)

The tricky part is overcoming search quirks. How can we be consistent in our tagging so that all related things can be found by unrelated users? Tags and titles are crucial for the ever-important "findability" factor. It's why I prefer Goodreads to LibraryThing and why I like Blogger's "show all" option for a post's labels--so that I can see what tags (or bookshelf titles) I've used in the past and remember to use them again for related items. I don't have any magic answers here. Just my opinion that there is great potential out there in techland to reach new and returning patrons, and we should be thoughtful in how we go about doing it. That's my 2 cents' worth. For today. Tune in tomorrow....

Dealing with Del.icio.us

This whole Del.icio.us thing makes sense to me...in theory. Sounds great! Love the tagging concept. In reality, however, it's more confusing and difficult to navigate. I tend to ignore it because I can never remember the IS desk password to even see our account tags. And this week when I've been playing around on our account, finding all kinds of great things, I've only barely managed to navigate anywhere on purpose. It seems like I find most things via serendipity, especially since I only just realized you can scroll down forever & ever to view all the listed tags. But so much of the site depends on the tagger & the searcher thinking of the same word(s) to describe the same thing. And I discovered by accident that depending on when a particular link got added (tagged) and where the tagger's brain was that day, not all similar links are grouped under the same tag(s). For example, it took several tries of floundering around within the One Minute Critic link to find all of the videos I'd done--a known quantity--so how can you ever be certain you've found all related items in the event that you don't know how many exist?

And why can you not search within an account's tags? You can search the Del.icio.us site as a whole, or the whole web, but not the account. What's up with that?

Bottom line: I think Del.icio.us has great potential, but it's nowhere near as useful yet as I would wish it to be for making my daily (work) life easier. Maybe spending more time getting accustomed to it would help. Or maybe it would just frustrate me more. Only one way to find out, I suppose! So onward to the next step in this 2.0 process....