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.

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.