Thing #12 and Thing #13: Wikis

Wikipedia is a powerful tool for research; I use it almost every day to find information about artists and works (and I've even edited a few entries, myself). Although it is open to misinformation and hacking, the best entries are documented with scholarly bibliographies, just like a print encyclopedia.

The visual resource collection curators of the 10 UC campuses (the "Sliders") have recently begun using a private wiki to collaborate on the shared digital image collection project. It allows us to organize discussions and upload documents for comments and editing. In the future, it will serve as place for curators to list what images they have digitized and can add to the shared collection, so that other curators won't have to duplicate their work.

Exercise: I visited the Learning 2.0 wiki and edited the listing for the VRC.

Thing #11: Folksonomies and LibraryThing

"When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other."

LibraryThing is wonderful; now I need someone to come to my house and enter all my books into it. The "recommendations machine" works brilliantly, the UnSuggester is amusing, and looking at other people's reading lists is fun. <3 <3 <3

Thing #10: Tagging and pinging

This was easy and worked as predicted, for both Technorati and Ping-o-Matic. An hour after the pings, a search on "melancholiacs" found my blog.

Tagging (i.e., cataloging) makes information more accessible, and is a good thing. However, the amount of information available online is often overwhelming. Technorati provides search results in order of posting, with the most recent posts first. It also ranks blogs by "authority", evaluating a blog by counting how many other blogs link to it-- authority in this case having nothing to do with scholarly soundness, but rather with popularity or even notoriety...

Thing #9: del.icio.us

This is a great service for those who access the internet from several computers; however, I don't find it helpful. In Firefox, I've organized my bookmarks to museum catalogs into folders by continent, and then alphabetized them by city; when I imported them into del.icio.us, all of this organization disappeared. There are 22 pages of bookmarks, which must be searched to find the one museum I happen to need.

I must be missing something, but this seems to add several steps to the process of getting to a favorite site.

Thing #8: Second Life

"Few people, I said, could say of themselves that they were free of the belief that they could have made the world. Nay, go further, Madame: few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination."

Ok, I signed up for Second Life one Saturday. Spent a couple of hours working through the tutorial, changing my appearance... flying around. However, since I hate shopping and fussing with my appearance in real life (hey, don't laugh), I don't really want to do it virtually, either. I read that Suzanne Vega performed in Second Life-- maybe I'd show up for a virtual concert, but otherwise, I'd rather be killing things with my [Seth's Graphite Fishing Pole] in WoW.

On the other hand, as a distance education tool, Second Life looks promising. SJSU's virtual campus is a fantastic way for professors and students to keep in touch. Are there any statistics yet on how that program is going?

Eventually, video conferencing might be a more practical option for distance ed...

Libraries in Second Life, according to the article, offer images and links to the web. Again, I wonder whether people will log in to Second Life in order to visit a virtual library with no books. Stephen Abram writes, "Second Life Library 2.0, which has been led by our client, the Alliance Library System, regularly attracts over 5,000 visitors in an evening," but how many of these visitors are library professionals, and how many are patrons looking for information?

I will have to visit "Info Island" and find out more.

Thing #7: MySpace

I made my page in MySpace, and I hope the Learning 2.0 Team will accept me as a friend.

I wonder whether students would be more inclined to visit the Library in MySpace, or would they just bookmark the Library's webpage? Maybe because I don't hang out in MySpace, it wouldn't be the first place I'd look to find services, but if that's where the young folks are, then that's where we can meet them.

This is a pretty boisterous Library page: Brooklyn College Library.

UPDATE (August 31): Just minutes after creating a MySpace account, "Michael" in Colorado sent me a message, asking whether I'd like to get better acquainted with him (his tattoo, I must admit, is impressive). Hmmm, time to change the privacy setting, I think. FaceBook seems less seedy; I may keep my profile there after this Library 2.0 project ends.

Thing #6: Social networks

"In short, they were born melancholiacs, such as make others happy and are themselves helplessly unhappy, creatures of playfulness, charm and salt tears, of fine fun and everlasting loneliness."

Social networking... hm... These sites would be useful for keeping in touch with far-away family and friends, but for casual browsing, I find them overwhelming. There are so many people in the world, and so many people online, looking for something, looking and looking... Do you share my interest? Message me!

Things 5a and 5b: Update!

"On a full-moon night of 1863 a dhow was on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar, following the coast about a mile out..."

Time passes... and I still check my bloglines each morning to catch up with the world. Only on Monday mornings do I hesitate to log in.... 155 new items! Perhaps I subscribe to too many feeds. :P

I wonder whether the Library could use RSS feeds to inform people about new books-- like the new books list, only narrowed by field of interest.