Week 8 - Social Networking

I don't personally have a Facebook or Myspace, but plenty of my friends and bands I love do. So, I have a bit of experience with those. In fact, my freshman year of college was the first year Facebook showed up, so it was definitely part of my every day college life. So, now that I'm a "professional," I thought I'd give LinkIn a shot.

I know a few friends who have started using it. A couple of them have received recommendations that have turned into jobs. So, I think it certainly has awesome potential benefits. I think it can be a great tool. I am considering library school, and I can only imagine what advice and things people in the department (or elsewhere!) could offer me!

Week 7 - Web Widgets and Gadgets

I must admit, I had a little trouble posting the widget to my blog, but once I actually read through what I was supposed to do to attach it, it was super easy. And I really liked the variety of things that widgetbox offers. I picked food because I watch Food Network more than some people probably sleep! :)

But, I think these are very useful little tools to organize things and keep people up to date. On my home computer, I have a widget set so I get the time, weather, and headline news all on my desktop. It gets me caught up in the morning over my morning coffee, while I decide what to wear and then realize I'm running late! I think anything like that could be helpful to someone at work or at home. At work especially, if you subscribed to certain newspapers or things that could also help out with patron's inquiries.

Week 6 - Tags, Folksonomy, and Social Bookmarking

First, I think the videos that went along with this week were really cool. I liked the little girls running around and sticking tags on things. The other video also made the idea very personal to me because it gave a teacher as an example. I never thought how convenient it would be to have all those things available to so many people.

And obviously, this is a great tool for us in Library Land... I mean, it would be really great if all of us within the same department could bookmark our resources and share them with our own and other staffs.

I took a few minutes to look through some things others had tagged and just found some interesting sites. Plus, its so easy to use and to add bookmarks, plus, again like the video said, it is certainly more organized than trolling through all my existing bookmarks without any seeming order.

Week 5 - Multimedia

Well, I've seen and heard a lot of podcasts/vodcasts, and I'm known to my friends as the nerd who still uses disposable cameras, so I thought I'd take a look into picture sharing. I mean, I'm no stranger to the concept, and I do like people to see my pictures. The mini-video was right...no one looks through photo albums! I'm a photo-taker dinosaur!

I think it is really great to be able to tag photos and share them with friends and family and also have a back-up on the Internet in case of a computer crash. Last year, my beloved computer crashed and I almost lost all my documents, pictures (I do actually own a digital camera, however, rarely used), etc. The IT guys at my dad's work managed to save them for me, but it would have been nice to have other access to them just in case. Plus, I'm sure my friends would really love if they could just find my pictures anytime rather than having to listen to me say, "You'd love this picture... I just have to find it."

As with most things on the Internet, flickr seems pretty easy to use. And, it is an added bonus that I get to pick who can see my photos. Perhaps I'll make a break out of the Jurassic age and join the "real" world! ;)