Monday, March 23, 2009

Zoho and LAST.fm

Zho offers every kind of application one could need for accomplishing work at the office. It's pretty amazing that this is all free. I like that you can collaborate on docs in real time and that audience members can chat with the presenter Zoho Show. I tried LAST.fm and like it as a way to listen to all kinds of music, find information about musicians, network with others interested in your kind of music, and buy music (through Amazon). It's well-designed, easy to navigate, and fun to explore. I could sit here for days listening and learning and could easily get involved in networking. But alas I am too busy. Which is what I wonder about Web 2.0-where do people who are really into it find the time for all that networking and communicating? It is fun and worth doing, but there's so much going on in my life in the real world that demands attention.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Wiki research guides

At the academic library where I am interning I am investigating how technology can be used to create library research guides that are more relevant to students and faculty, so I was happy to find information on and examples of research guide wikis. Most of the research wikis I looked at are just personal wikis of the subject librarians and students can't edit them. I found oneat Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts-Boston where faculty and students can update the guides. This seems a good model for research guides because subject librarians often have a hard time finding time to update the guides. This seems an ideal instance when drawing on the "hive mind" is very useful. I also like wikis because they make web editing so much easier (no markup language to learn!) I am also supposed to edit the research guides for the modern languages and I would love to do so on a wiki rather than using Contribute which is a frustrating web editing software that this library uses. I liked the Princeton Public Library's Book Lover's Wiki of the wikis I looked at. I will be visiting it to discover new reads for my pleasure reading.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Delicious

Delicious is awesome! I am very happy with being about to access my bookmarks online. I can use it for responding to reference questions. I found their tour of delicious very informative. It is easy to use. I already started going crazy adding bookmarks.

I have started reading the Castro book on html and css. My head is swimming. It seems more like a technical manual that you can look things up in as you need to know rather than a book to read cover-to-cover.