Thing 22 - Mashups

Some fun stuff here! I really liked Mappr. It’s fun to be able to look at photos and see where they might have been taken. It’s a little like taking a vacation in your easy chair!

And the spell with flickr was really fun too! Not sure what I would use this for, but typing in various names, changing the letters you don’t like, and so on, was so much fun for the creative side of me!

Thing 21 - Tagging

In its most simple form, tagging allows for easy labeling and searching of photos you might find interesting. So if I’m interested in temari, I can search for photos of temari and have a fun time browsing the results.

Although I do quite a bit of photography, I don’t have a Flickr account – mostly because I don’t trust people to not abuse the copyright or Creative Commons license that I might select. I have some really good photographs that I wouldn’t want abused that way. I suppose if I was just taking snapshots I’d feel differently, but maybe not. Apparently there are some different photo sharing sites which allow you to watermark your photos – maybe I’d feel better with that.

Ideally, tagging allows users with similar interests to connect. While I understand the logic of that, I don’t personally find that appealing. Just because I have one thing in common with a stranger, an interest in temari, doesn’t mean we would connect in any other way. I guess I’m picky in “real” life about who I connect with, and that carries over to any online relationships or associations I might make.

Thing 20 - Flickr

I found a wonderful group of photographs of the State Library of Victoria, Australia. It’s a beautiful building, completed around 1913, with all the elegance of the times. The large dome in the middle is 35m x 35m, which was the largest concrete dome in the world at the time it was built. If you’re a library person, you can’t help but wonder and imagine what it would be like to work in such a huge, beautiful facility! Here is one photo of the dome. Enjoy!

Thing 19 - Web 2.0 Awards

This was fun – I looked at widgets. I think I knew about them a bit before many people because I use an Mac at home and I’ve had customizable widgets on there for a long time. There were some fun widgets on the awards site and I played some games.

From a library standpoint, there were some that could be helpful…maybe a clock for local time, weather, even a Quote of the Day could be fun and add an interactive element on a library website. Because Virginia Beach is a tourist destination, it could be helpful to have a map widget and a photo widget of popular destinations.

Thing 18 - Technorati

I had high hopes for this exercise, watched the YouTube video, explored Technorati’s explore and discover features, but when I went to try the searches, there was no option (no dropdowns) to search in the three ways the video explained. Very disappointing to say the least. My co-workers didn’t have any success either. Maybe Technorati has taken this feature away (temporarily?).

I like what Technorati can do, that is, some of the features of it and the layout they use. However, I’m not much into reading blogs, looking at photos online, etc., so I’m not likely to use this very much. I can see how it would be popular with a great many people, however.

Thing 17 – Tagging/Folksonomy/del.icio.us

I’m already familiar with tagging and some of the benefits after having used LibraryThing for a class at school. We used both class-specific tags and our own tags to identify various books we had to read for a literature class. It was helpful and easy to find the books that fellow classmates read merely by searching for our class-specific tag.

I went ahead and created my del.icio.us account, something I’d been meaning to get to for a while. I don’t bookmark a whole lot, generally speaking, but will see how useful I find this tool. Certainly at work it will be more helpful since we hop from one computer to another all day long!

Thing 16 - MySpace

I found the MySpace Help page quite confusing and felt that didn’t bode too well! I suspect if I did create a page it would be fairly easy. Yet again, I looked at my niece’s page and it’s so busy, so much stuff on there, she has lots of animation and so on, that I don’t think I’d ever be able to create something like that.

A bunch of people here at the library have been challenging each other to play Scrabble on Facebook. That sounds really neat and they are having lots of fun with it. I might someday be willing to create a profile just to be able to play Scrabble!

I think a lot of the attraction to MySpace for many people is that they can make it reflect who they are – limitless customization possibilities. But I also think those pages give people an inflated or maybe false sense of ego. Sorry, but I read about some person who had over 4,900 “friends” and I think that kind of thing is nonsense.