Week 9

Wikis! So I started editing Wikipedia some time this year and it is fun. Normally I edit entries about Broadway musicals because that's what I like, but occasionally I edit other things. My mom is also doing Project Play (her blog is Lakeview Review) and she set up a family wiki for us for her assignment this week. That was exciting both because I could piggy back on her assignment and because it's been fun to edit and update information about our Thanksgiving celebration. I love the concept of wikis and always rely on Wikipedia for all the latest pop culture news. If I ever have to know who got kicked off American Idol last night, Wikipedia is always the first place I check. I also like Stephen Colbert's Truthiness Encyclopedia titled Wikiality which he developed after a controversy in which he told his viewers to edit the Wikipedia entry on elephants to distort their population. He wasn't welcome at Wikipedia after that :) So yeah, wikis are fun and having a family wiki so far is really fun.

Week 8

Tagging is our topic du jour (du semaine, I guess). I've just tagged my blog posts for Project Play with the week number so far, I didn't really think about tagging them according to subject, but that's a good idea. I do tag things on my book review blog. My tags are pretty general and include novel, nonfiction, movie themed book, website and blog. I did start a del.icio.us account a while ago and maintain it still.

Ok, so I really like tagging and folksonomies and agree with the point made in the lecture that they're bridging the gap between librarians and users. I tried searching for Broadway and it's everything I would expect (and sadly no new amazing resource like I wanted to find). Anyway, I think that tag clouds are a great way to learn more about something or someone because you see what's used most or most important.

Week 7

LibraryThing is our topic of the week this week. I really like LibraryThing and appreciate that you can add reviews to book pages. I have a LibraryThing account for my book review blog that I use to get my reviews "out there" and invite more people visit my blog. You can see my library here. I also really like their Suggester feature, I've found a few good books from using it. When I examined the suggestions for The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley, a book I really enjoyed; one of the suggestions was Julie and Julia by Julie Powell, a book I definitely did not enjoy. At the same time, they are both memoirs of women who undertake an unusual project for one year and I can see why they would compliment each other.

My problem with any book suggester, like Amazon or LibraryThing is that it lumps books together by publisher in addition to other factors. For a while, both websites were suggesting that I would like a book called Why You're Still Single: Things Your Friends Would Tell You If You Promised Not To Get Mad. I figured that this was because I had Television Without Pity on my lists and they are from the same publisher. I must say that I was a bit insulted, if only briefly, since someone reminded me that an algorithm could not truly know what I wanted to read (or tell me why I'm still single). Google Books is starting a similar application where you can add titles to "My Library" and then search only within the full-text of your library. You can also export your library; Google will give you an XML file for your entire library. This sounds interesting but there's not much else you can do with your library besides search it and share it using code. Hopefully soon users will be able to share their books in other ways like you can with LibraryThing or any other applications.

Week 6

After a week off, Project Play is back and discussing Flickr and photo sharing online. Although I do have a Picasa account like Frenzied Librarian was discussing, I don't use it often. I got it to share photos of my friend's bridal shower with all the ladies who attended and it was easy since I already had a Google account and Picasa is owned by Google (because what isn't). The problem with sites like Flickr or Picasa is that none of my friends use them. The majority of my photos go on facebook since I can tag my friends in them and share my albums with friends where they are most likely to see them. If I didn't have facebook, I would definitely consider a Flickr account. I love being able to search by tags and the different sorting systems that Flickr uses, I also really like their page of the most interesting photos of the last 7 days which you can find here. That's a page I visit almost every day and use to get most of my desktop backgrounds for my computer. At the beginning of the post you'll notice some photos I took in New York City a few summers ago of two of my favorite things: libraries and musicals :)

Project Play Week 4

So feedback is the topic of the week this week. I've already gotten some great feedback on only two posts from this blog and I've always appreciated comments on the other blog that I write. I've been keeping up a book review blog for more than a year now and I've managed to get comments from readers all over and even some authors. In addition to comments from readers, I set up an email account for my blog and posted it on the page. I've gotten emails from authors and publishers and have had the opportunity to get a few free books out of the deal. It's exciting to me that in this web 2.0 world that we live in, anybody can make their opinions known and everybody can read them. Now I'm not suggesting that I have the most important things to say, but it's exciting that I can say them at all.

Please feel free to comment on either of my blogs; we all have a lot to say.

Project Play Week 3

Feedreaders have become my favorite thing about Web 2.0. I really enjoy getting to read about what I'm interested in all in one place. Most of my favorite RSS feeds were mentioned in the Project Play Bloglines account but I'll mention a few of my favorites.

Pop Goes the Library is a good one and has a lot of good information about having fun in libraries.

A lot of authors write good blogs and one of my favorites is SnarkSpot, chick-lit author Jennifer Weiner's blog.

T. Tallent writes lots of blogs but my favorite is Yes To Know which is about "thoughts, ideas, options & actions for going a little deeper in libraries & life".

In the non-library world of blogs, I really like A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago which is about all kinds of awesome stuff related to pop culture (my favorite subject). Also worth checking out is Daily Dose of Imagery which shows up beautifully in a feedreader, plus it's only one post a day which is nice.

Finally, Google Blog Search will set up an RSS feed for you and automatically do a search. I've found that this works best using people's names: athletes, celebrities, actors, etc. All blog posts containing a name will be sent to your feed reader without you having to continually search for the star you like. It's handy and saves time. If you go to the search page and do a search for a name, at the bottom of the results page will be the option to "Subscribe to a blog search feed for Anonymous in Google Reader". I think that it does only work with Google Reader but you if you have a Blogger account, you can use Google Reader with the same login information.

Project Play Week 2

Despite the fact that I've maintained a personal book review blog for over a year now, I learned some things this week that I didn't know about blogs. I had heard the terms trackback and post slug and had a vague idea of what they mean but I never really knew the real definition until today. Overall, this lesson was helpful and interesting and I'm glad it covered the basics of blogs as well as more indepth blog features.