Prior to this class, my experience with any types of social software had been very limited (I'd only briefly dabbled with IM and blogging before; never flickred or tagged or networked online in any way.) So my mind's been spinning a bit the past few weeks. When trying to find an even newer "new to me" application to discuss this week, I happened upon this useful list of some "award winning" Web 2.0 sites: http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/short
I checked a bunch of them out (and admit, was drawn in by some of the funny names...where do they come up with some of them?!?) One of the ones that I thought could be potentially quite useful (even for a not-yet-initiated-in-the-2.0-world user) was Yelp.
From its "About Us" page, Yelp is "word of mouth marketing---amplified". It's a place for people to write reviews about anything "from martinis to mechanics." While it's apparent that the yelping communities have a wider scope and voice in bigger cities (and especially in San Francisco, where it was founded), even smaller local neighborhoods have been "yelped".
I think Yelp would be most useful for someone looking for a hotel or restaurant recommendation in a city or town they've never visited before. This is part of the beauty of social software, how one can get friendly, "word of mouth" advice about a place where one doesn't even have any actual friends. I like how Yelp lets users limit what they're looking for with its very specific filters. A google map follows you up and down the screen too so you can see exactly where the recommended places are (but, if it makes you dizzy, you also have the option of telling the map to "stop following me".)
This is a type of Web 2.0 tool that I think would only get better with time as more people start to participate. More reviewers would provide more extensive coverage of each area as well as balance out some of the reviews. I'm excited to give it a try the next time we visit another city.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Thoughts on Feed & Anderson's idea of the future
M.T. Anderson's Feed was one of my favorite books from the YA Lit course I took last year and I'm glad to have the opportunity to read it again this semester (especially because I realize I had missed a lot of the little details the first time!)
I love speculative fiction that makes us think about where we are and where we're going. I think Anderson's portrayal of the future is so powerful and thought-provoking because it reflects what people are already demanding from technology today. We want what we want when we want it and would prefer to have it all while expending as little thought and energy as possible. The "dumbing down of society" idea sounds cliche, but Anderson's story makes it, frighteningly, all too believable. Titus and his friends looking up words they don't know on their feeds reminds me of how many of us simply google a word instead of taking the time to look it up in a dictionary. And the way they programmed their up-cars and relied on the feed to tell them where they were made me think about how our reliance on GPS devices today makes us think so much less about our journeys when we get in our own cars now.
Information is not knowledge, but, sadly, it seems that many teens today often think cutting and pasting info from the Web shows that they "know" something. Such an attitude mimics Titus' thoughts: "That's one of the great things about the feed--that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now" (p. 47).
We all desire instant access to information and the convenience of portable computing devices. I'm sure we are, in a way, moving towards a more "Feed-like" world as far as this convenience and "connectedness" goes. But I truly can't imagine humans ever reaching a point where we would allow computers to be connected to us internally.
I love speculative fiction that makes us think about where we are and where we're going. I think Anderson's portrayal of the future is so powerful and thought-provoking because it reflects what people are already demanding from technology today. We want what we want when we want it and would prefer to have it all while expending as little thought and energy as possible. The "dumbing down of society" idea sounds cliche, but Anderson's story makes it, frighteningly, all too believable. Titus and his friends looking up words they don't know on their feeds reminds me of how many of us simply google a word instead of taking the time to look it up in a dictionary. And the way they programmed their up-cars and relied on the feed to tell them where they were made me think about how our reliance on GPS devices today makes us think so much less about our journeys when we get in our own cars now.
Information is not knowledge, but, sadly, it seems that many teens today often think cutting and pasting info from the Web shows that they "know" something. Such an attitude mimics Titus' thoughts: "That's one of the great things about the feed--that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now" (p. 47).
We all desire instant access to information and the convenience of portable computing devices. I'm sure we are, in a way, moving towards a more "Feed-like" world as far as this convenience and "connectedness" goes. But I truly can't imagine humans ever reaching a point where we would allow computers to be connected to us internally.
Bloglines vs. Google Reader
Being very new to this whole "feed reader" scene, I tended to see more similarities than differences between Bloglines and Google Reader this past week. Both were very easy to set up and conveniently displayed all of the feeds I had subscribed to. I was disappointed that neither automatically showed the comments of each blog post. (I tried playing around with the different settings to see if this is an option in either service, but couldn't find it. Please, someone, alert me if I'm mistaken in this!)
The differences I did notice are as follows:
The differences I did notice are as follows:
- Bloglines has a bit of a "cleaner" interface.
- Google Reader has links to all your other Google services which makes for a more cluttered screen
- Blogger posts appear in one's Google Reader faster than in his or her Bloglines reader. (I just noticed this difference today, Sunday, 9/28, with Steve's latest announcement...it's already showing in Google Reader but has yet to be picked up by Bloglines.)
- Google Reader puts a date/time stamp at the top rt corner of each entry (and does the math for you, letting you know how long ago a post was written) while Bloglines dates each post under the entry. GR's method highlights newer posts.
- Bloglines allows readers either to display all posts from each feed or to show only those posted in the last hour, past 6 hours, past 12 hours, day, 2 or 3 days, week or month. This is convenient if one only wants to see the latest entries.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Blogger vs. LiveJournal
My fellow classmates, JH & JF:
Forgive me for taking until nearly the final hour to get this final post posted this week! I honestly had a bit of difficulty determining many differences between Blogger and LiveJournal (apart from the obvious, annoying & obnoxious overuse of ads in LJ!) Whenever I made note of some feature I thought was unique to one platform, I’d dig around a bit in the other to, lo and behold, find that it offered a similar feature as well.
Here’s a summary of the differences I was finally able to ascertain:
Blogger:
~Very easy to set up and use
~Clean interface
~Can also be posted to via txt messaging and email
~Comment notifications can be sent via email
~Can customize with HTML editor
~Ability to set up a “team blog” with multiple authors
~Automatic save feature
LiveJournal:
~Main emphasis seems to be on “creating communities”; lots of encouragement to find journals of those who have similar interests as yours
~Easy to set up and use (yet not, IMHO, as simple & straightforward as Blogger)
~3 levels of account types: Basic, Plus & Paid: http://www.livejournal.com/site/accounts.bml
~Plus account pages are littered with many distracting ads
~Can also be posted to via txt messaging, email AND voice (5/month on plus plan; 20/month on paid)
~Comment notifications can be sent via email, text message and IM
~Can customize layouts with CSS
~Lots of (also imho “gimmicky”) features: users can pick different “userpics” to display on each post, users can set their mood for (and get a LiveJournal-generated emoticon attached to) each post, posts can be marked as “memories” as well as others (such as, in the paid version, setting “background music” to one’s journal)
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Thoughts on Brown and Duguid
I think Brown and Duguid make an especially astute statement in their preface that really sums up the catch-22 most libraries find themselves in nowadays: “[w]here many old technologies inherently forced people together in factories, office buildings, schools, and libraries, new ones tempt them to stay apart, working for organizations without working in one, joining schools or libraries without going to one” (p. xix). This reminds me of part of the discussion we had back in week 1 and the idea of how people can utilize the library without ever physically stepping foot into it with all the remote and digital services offered. I believe this has been a major driving force behind all the changes we see in most public libraries today with their cafes, concerts, classes (like belly-dancing, art, yoga,) and myriad of other programs. Whereas people before went to the library for the most part when they NEEDED to, a growing number of the clientele today are there because they WANT to be there.
The “Home Alone” chapter also alludes to another reason for these changes. Brown and Duguid discuss the importance of office workers’ physical spaces and of the value-added “incidental learning” (p. 76) that occurs when one is in the proximity of others. Likewise, people often happen upon worthwhile materials serendipitously and also benefit from the human interaction they experience when they physically come into a library. This is why the concept of the “Library as 3rd Place” is such a big idea these days. As B&D illustrate, people are social beings who crave social interactions with others. Libraries are places where this can happen. But, as this course we’re taking also shows, social interactions are no longer limited to physical places. We can, as the subtitle of Farkas’ book stated, build “collaboration, communication, and community online.”
B&D also remind us that “technology alone cannot dictate its ultimate route” (p. x). Librarians, as others in any industry, need to remember that the people we serve always remain our first priority. Technology gives us the tools to better serve them. It is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
I had a great opportunity to attend NJLA’s Future Tech for Libraries symposium this summer (http://www.njla.org/njacrl/FutureTech08.html). The Brown and Duguid reading this week reminded me of many of the points its fabulous keynote speaker, Steven Bell, made in his opening presentation, “Why are we doing this? Designing future technology adoption into the business of libraries.” Dr. Bell’s focus is on library design and he strongly advocates the importance of keeping the user’s experience in mind whenever we design any program, tool or service for our library. He urges us to think about how our users will benefit from new technologies and warns us, like B&D, not to automatically adopt every new technological tool that comes around.
Finally, I really enjoyed B&D’s sharing of the story of how the telephone was introduced and finally accepted by society. I found it hysterical that people originally thought the telegraph was a superior means of communication since it was kept in the hands of “the experts” (pp. 87-89). As librarians, we need to be careful that we don’t fall into similar lines of reasoning today (especially when we are defending those more complicated systems of which WE are “the experts”: databases, opacs, dewey arrangements, etc.). We can make the best use of technology by making it work for us and the people we serve.
The “Home Alone” chapter also alludes to another reason for these changes. Brown and Duguid discuss the importance of office workers’ physical spaces and of the value-added “incidental learning” (p. 76) that occurs when one is in the proximity of others. Likewise, people often happen upon worthwhile materials serendipitously and also benefit from the human interaction they experience when they physically come into a library. This is why the concept of the “Library as 3rd Place” is such a big idea these days. As B&D illustrate, people are social beings who crave social interactions with others. Libraries are places where this can happen. But, as this course we’re taking also shows, social interactions are no longer limited to physical places. We can, as the subtitle of Farkas’ book stated, build “collaboration, communication, and community online.”
B&D also remind us that “technology alone cannot dictate its ultimate route” (p. x). Librarians, as others in any industry, need to remember that the people we serve always remain our first priority. Technology gives us the tools to better serve them. It is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
I had a great opportunity to attend NJLA’s Future Tech for Libraries symposium this summer (http://www.njla.org/njacrl/FutureTech08.html). The Brown and Duguid reading this week reminded me of many of the points its fabulous keynote speaker, Steven Bell, made in his opening presentation, “Why are we doing this? Designing future technology adoption into the business of libraries.” Dr. Bell’s focus is on library design and he strongly advocates the importance of keeping the user’s experience in mind whenever we design any program, tool or service for our library. He urges us to think about how our users will benefit from new technologies and warns us, like B&D, not to automatically adopt every new technological tool that comes around.
Finally, I really enjoyed B&D’s sharing of the story of how the telephone was introduced and finally accepted by society. I found it hysterical that people originally thought the telegraph was a superior means of communication since it was kept in the hands of “the experts” (pp. 87-89). As librarians, we need to be careful that we don’t fall into similar lines of reasoning today (especially when we are defending those more complicated systems of which WE are “the experts”: databases, opacs, dewey arrangements, etc.). We can make the best use of technology by making it work for us and the people we serve.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Nice model for a HS media center blog
Though it's missing a collaborative element (ie, readers are unable to comment on posts), I feel that Ward Melville High School's Information Center's blog is a great example of how school media centers can more effectively serve students (and teachers) by utilizing blogs:
http://wardmelvillelibrary.blogspot.com/
The blog highlights school library news and services, and is organized in a way that allows users to clearly see in one glance all the digital resources available to them (with pertinent links logically arranged in the sidebar.) Blog posts primarily consist of various assigned research projects and delineate not only the assignment guidelines, but also specific resources students would find most useful when doing their research.
I know many media specialists make research project pages like these for their students, but they are often hidden somewhere deep within the media center's website (where many students may be less likely to take the time to access them.) Posting research guides on a blog gives students an easier and more useful way to find what they need. It has the added benefit of allowing other teachers to see what their colleagues are doing and is easy to search to get ideas on what others have done in the past on different topics.
http://wardmelvillelibrary.blogspot.com/
The blog highlights school library news and services, and is organized in a way that allows users to clearly see in one glance all the digital resources available to them (with pertinent links logically arranged in the sidebar.) Blog posts primarily consist of various assigned research projects and delineate not only the assignment guidelines, but also specific resources students would find most useful when doing their research.
I know many media specialists make research project pages like these for their students, but they are often hidden somewhere deep within the media center's website (where many students may be less likely to take the time to access them.) Posting research guides on a blog gives students an easier and more useful way to find what they need. It has the added benefit of allowing other teachers to see what their colleagues are doing and is easy to search to get ideas on what others have done in the past on different topics.
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