YouTube

My TV viewing habits were drastically affected by the Writer's Guild of America strike and I realized after a few months that my TV viewing had become almost nonexistent while my YouTube viewing had increased exponentially. I first got really into YouTube thanks to John and Hank Green's awesome Brotherhood 2.0 project. They chose one day to be the Super Secret Project for Awesome during which the nerdfighters (fans of the Brotherhood) took over YouTube for the day to promote charities. It was amazing, it totally worked, and some people chose libraries and book related things as their charity projects. I found a lot of cool new YouTube channels to watch because of this project and then at the end of last year when Brotherhood 2.0 ended, some fans started spin-off projects, of which I watch two.

Some interesting videos that pertain to librarians include one of my favorites, A Vision of Students Today that's thought provoking when it comes to a new generation of library users. I think YouTube is a great way to reach out to library users and I love the idea of YouTube contests, that seems like a great way to make a library project with YouTube even more interactive between librarians/library staff and patrons.

Week 8, Screen Casts

I really like screen casts and I think that for people who are visual learners, this stuff is great. Last semester I had some experience using Jing with my practicum at College Library. I was able to play around and create a few little demonstrations. This semester I have had some experience using Adobe Captivate to create tutorials and that product, because it costs lots of money, is very cool and has lots of bells and whistles. I like the possibility for libraries with all of these tools and I think it would be awesome to have a tutorial on MPL's website showing the difference between the my list feature and placing things on hold. That seems to be a confusing part of our catalog and it would be cool to be able to show patrons the difference easily.

Podcasts

Ok, podcasts, rock and roll. Right now I don't subscribe to any library podcasts, although I probably should. To get my library news, I normally read library blogs instead. The podcasts I do subscribe to are mostly Broadway related since that's an interest of mine. Like with all other fairly new technologies, there is a backlash and Dan Savage took issue with his podcast being mentioned in a blog post titled Is Podcasting Dead? from Information Week.

I'm still unclear exactly what the difference is between video podcasts and video blogs or "vlogs". From what I can tell, there isn't really a difference. I liked the Boulder Teen Webcasts and thought they were a good idea. I think that it's cool that libraries reach out to younger users through a medium they're probably already using. Podcasts are also a good way to share news of what's happening at your library and that's never a bad idea. Vlogs seem to be the even more new thing and I must admit that since the TV Writer's Strike, I have been watching lots more vlogs, most of which are related to Brotherhood 2.0 - teen author John Green and his brother Hank's video blog that took place during 2007.

Social Networking

I'm getting to this post a little bit late, but here we go. I joined facebook in 2004 back when it was "the" facebook. It was just starting out and one of my friends told me that Wisconsin students had their own network and I should join and be her friend. I hadn't ever joined Friendster, but I was on MySpace for a while in 2003. Nobody else that I knew was on so I deactivated my account.

Now that facebook applications are a reality, I feel like the possibilities for libraries are endless. I've become a fan of the two campus libraries where I've done practicums and now I'm able to get news from them. Many academic librarians I know who have facebook pages have applications including WorldCat, JSTOR, their del.icio.us account, their flickr account, etc. I like the concept of finding library users where they are, and college students are on facebook. All the time. It's cool that public libraries have their own pages and you can become fans of them. I'm sure people would use facebook to look up the hours of the Appleton Public Library if they knew that they could. Although I've been mostly talking about facebook, MySpace also has possibilties and it seems like at this point more libraries are on MySpace because it's older. We'll see what happens as facebook continues to gain popularity and articles like this are published.

Also - I LOVE Scrabulous and play all the time. I've even got a game going right now with Liberty Place Librarian :)

Remember the Milk

Week 3 is about Jott and Remember the Milk, both excellent tools. I can see how Remember the Milk would be helpful for library staff and of course helpful in life in general. I love the idea of Jott and can't wait to try it. Stef's blog post using Jott worked just fine and it seems like a great idea for those times when you need a reminder about something; it's the second best thing after having Internet on your phone. I've been playing around with lots of cool web 2.0 stuff shadowing the ref desk at the CIMC and their website is totally 2.0 with bookmarks fed from del.icio.us tags and such, it's great. I also just added Forecastfox to my Mozilla Firefox browser and my weather forecast now shows up on the lower task bar which is very handy.

Google Docs

Google Docs are great, I've been applying for jobs since it's my last semester at school and I'm using a Google doc to keep track of where I've applied since I can edit it anywhere. I haven't done much sharing, mostly just keep lists for myself (books to read, CDs to get, etc) but I can see the potential for a lot of collaboration in libraries using this application. Gotta love all the things you can do with a Google account.

Chatting about Semester 2

This week's topic is IM. I've been IM'ing for a long time with friends, so long in fact that my friends and I often lament picking our screen names at age 13 and wishing we could change them now without having to inform everybody. Chatting lots definitely worked to my advantage last semester when doing a library school practicum performing chat reference for undergraduates. It's not uncommon to have multiple windows open when chatting and it seems like that's the toughest thing to get used to when people first start using IM. It was fun to be able to get experience with chat reference and I felt like it was a great service for the UW to be offering since lots of students used it. As for chatting in my own life, Gmail has a chat built right into it and they recently made it so you can sign in to AOL IM as well as Google Talk right in Gmail. That has made it so I hardly use AOL IM or meebo anymore since I can do it all in one site. Very handy.