It's a Wiki World Out There

On the Info Desk, we refer to the IS Fugitive Facts wiki quite frequently, and some days it feels like every other reference question requires a trip to Wikipedia to get a handle on the topic before we can even know where to begin our search. So I've been familiar with wikis for a while now. The one thing I haven't yet done is actually edit a wiki for myself. Jen keeps pestering us to add to our YA Wiki, but thus far I haven't come up with anything brilliant to contribute.

My biggest concern with wikis is the usual: who gets to edit, and how do you know the information is reliable? I sort of vaguely knew before getting to this 2.0 item that not all wikis are open for anyone to edit, but it was nice to get confirmation of that when I read several of the articles for this Item. I was impressed by the St. Joseph County Public Library Subject Guides wiki. That one is edited only by the librarians, and it seems to do a great job of pulling together a great deal of useful information and links--the kind of information we've tried to do on our website, only SJCPL has done a better job (in my opinion) of grouping the information and making it easier to find and browse. I'd love to see us create something like that--sort of a cross between our IS Fugitive Facts wiki and the information we've gathered for our website. I think our patrons (and staff!) would find it enormously useful, especially for the layout that puts local links & other links up near the top and then the "articles" below the table of contents for each page. In fact, I'd bet our patrons would use a wiki like this far more than they use our website because it would be far easier to navigate than our current website is. (Sad to say, I'm continually discovering new, great links on our site entirely by accident because I stumble across them while searching for something else entirely--I never seem to find these things on purpose, and our site often feels too "busy" for my taste.) Just my $.02!

LibraryThing vs. Goodreads

I already had an account with Goodreads, so for this program I signed up with LibraryThing. It's been interesting to compare the two. I think Goodreads is more intuitive to use at first, easier to add books, but I really like that you can rate with half stars on LibraryThing. It was really helpful to have a total stranger comment right away on one of my reviews because she's the one who told me about the half-star capability. That never happened to me on Goodreads! Well, to be fair, I set higher privacy levels when I signed up for Goodreads last year, so that could be a big reason why I rarely receive comments on my reviews.

I think I like LibraryThing's displays a little better, although I like the choices lots better on Goodreads now that Discover 2.0 helped me accidentally stumble across them. :) I do not, however, like the way you add tags on LibraryThing--I can never remember what ones I've used before, so I'm quite likely to have similar things NOT grouped by tags purely through faulty memory. I MUCH prefer the "bookshelves" concept of Goodreads. It's so much easier to choose from a list of options that I've created and can edit at any time. On the other hand, Goodreads' version of tagging that occurs at the bottom of the review, when you say who else would like the book is, well, not at all useful so far as I can determine. Where does that go, and what does it do?

I do like that both sites create "clouds" based on my tags/bookshelves. That's kind of a cool visual of what I like to read. And it's another way to find likely books to recommend for reader's advisory, which is the reason I joined in the first place--because my memory isn't good enough to keep track of what I've read for longer than a nanosecond.

I love that LibraryThing lets you add favorite authors to your profile--in a totally different manner than Goodreads, which just lets you list things about yourself. But I don't like that you have to pay (admittedly not very much) to add more than 200 books to LibraryThing. I know it's not unreasonable for them to charge for their services, but still...I like free. :)

I REALLY like how LibraryThing keeps track of who has similar libraries to mine and what my ratings statistics are, etc. That's very cool. But it's too many steps to add books from other libraries or from an author's profile page to my library. Once you're on a book's page, clicking "add to my library" should do just that, not make you go select the book from a search page, and especially not a search page that doesn't even come up with the right book at the top of the list, as happened to me once! What's up with that? Goodreads is much more streamlined and easy to use.

Bottom line? Each of the two sites has their moments of greatness, and both are useful in a library setting when you want to find something to recommend to a patron, but I think overall I prefer Goodreads purely for ease of use.

Technorati...nope, not a fan

Sorry, but I do not understand how or why I should be using Technorati. For this section of our Discover 2.0 project we were supposed to watch the video/take the tour & play around with the Percolating & Popular features. Problem is, I can't figure out how to navigate their site without going back to the FVRL Discover 2.0 blog and clicking the links. In other words, I haven't figured out how to go anywhere directly & on purpose. Plus, it's kind of boring. Maybe that's the frustration talking.

I did eventually sort of figure out how to do the Advanced Search to search for "Learning 2.0" in the tags & in the posts. (Got different results with some overlap.) Never figured out how to search the blog directory. Couldn't even find the directory except as it was linked from the blog post that's linked from the FVRL blog. Not useful to me! I did watch that video embedded in the 2006 blog post (the one linked from the FVRL blog). Tiny screen, zooming around doing...I don't even remember what. And it seems like they've changed their interface since the time they made the video, because it looks totally different to me. Or else I was in the wrong spot? I don't know. I seriously doubt I'll be using this in the future. Not unless someone comes up with a better explanation for why or how I should.

Did I just miss something? Something obvious or useful that my brain is too tired to see right now?

More funny Library Week videos!

These just crack me up, so I have to share the latest ones. Enjoy!!










Now don't these just make your day a little brighter? :)

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....

Playing around on Facebook & Meebo

Ooooh, telling us to sign up with Facebook (or MySpace) is a dangerous thing! I've become addicted, especially since I rediscovered several long-lost friends from childhood & college. I learned how to upload some photos, post on people's walls, send messages.... I'm still trying to figure out the deal with all these applications you can add. And what is the point of this "poking" thing? Very strange.

Today on Meebo I figured out how to change my buddy icon. Not very personalized yet, but at least it's not the photo of some man I don't recognize. (My first attempt was sort of an accident.) Now I need to start remembering to change my status message when I leave my desk or whatnot. But I like the Firefox Meebo add-on Sara told me about that keeps my buddy list in a side pane within Firefox so I can still get things done online and keep an eye on who's logged in all at the same time. (Thankfully, most of my friends seem to be offline most of the time, thereby reducing the temptation to chat instead of work.)

One thing I find REALLY annoying is how often Facebook is too busy to load. What's up with that? They need to add more servers or something. Drives me crazy when I can't navigate the site or post something and have to keep trying & trying until suddenly it goes through or the page decides it's now in the mood to load. Argh. Still...I keep trying. Addiction is a powerful motivator. Or perhaps Facebook is really some sociology professor's grand experiment? With young adults instead of mice, and computers instead of pushing bars to get the food pellets? Something to think about....

Hilarious videos!! (for National Library Week)