Thing 7: Cellphones

Cellphones are wonderful but sometimes dominating technology. A friend tends to call me from her car on the way to a meeting and it's almost as though she's got a checklist of items to run down. My kids call me on cellphones fairly frequently, for which I'm grateful, yet it's awfully easy for them to ask me about stuff they could probably address on their own. And, yes, I tend to call at the drop of a hat; our plan allows us unlimited calls. I love that I have a cellphone when I'm driving or walking alone. This little device is both lifesaving and sometimes a nuisance when it goes off in the library. Now we have memory stored in it, tv, internet: we will never be disconnected or quiet again.

Thing 19: Web 2.0 award winners

I spent about an hour looking at various sites and was intrigued with some of the social networking sites, such as 43 things, where you list goals and get other people to cheer you on or share experiences. I also will boomark some of the health sites, like medstory, which seemed to have some recent research, and I especially enjoyed the listdump site, which referred me to great food websites such as epicurius.com. Great pictures and slides!

Thing 18: Word Processing on Zoho

This could be a great way to do collaborative editing of a document or to create a document you want posted to a blog or an email, especially with the many editing features of Zoho. Students or small business might find the templates handy as well as the accessibility of Zoho from any computer. Will I use it or suggest it to customers? Might be useful for a group of students doing a collaborative report or adding data to a spreadsheet on Zoho, and the result would be much more efficent than email attachments. I typed this up on Zoho and tried to post it to my blog...I may have missed a step, since it never appeared. I ended up just pasting it here.

Learning 2.0 Sandbox--Thing 17

I finally got my book review of Eden's Outcasts up on "favorites," on the Sandbox. It took me awhile to get the sequence of steps and to import a picture of the book. I'll have to go back and look at some of the other favorites someday. Ach, so much to read superficially and without more than a fleeting thought for any of it, yet so much more to read and write for the nanosecond, definitely not for the ages.

Wikis and Social Networks-- Thing 16

I can see the potential for wikis in a variety of projects and appreciate the instanteousness and spontaneity of such sites. The open-endedness of all these projects makes you think differently, more collaboratively. The wikis seem especially useful for lists, increments of information, or brief analyses (such as short book reviews). I liked the Princeton Library site and will visit it again, I think, for "late breaking" reviews! Wikis seem to advocate democratic participation which leads to a lot of mediocre or inaccurate and opinionated content, such as you hear on C-Span or find on Wikipedia. Many of the wikis do not seem so open-ended and democratic--they filter what they accept

Library 2.0: Brave New Library

I'm dubious whether I'll find myself swimming through the blogosphere with ease. Somewhere on the way to libraries of the future I find myself checking out the latest star gossip (what'sup with Lindsay in the last 5 minutes?), then suddenly gagging. The articles on Library 2.0, building on Web 2.0 , were fascinating, as they focused on the morphing of libraries into user-centered, more technically friendly gathering places. Yea, we will be both a place of information and a conduit for information. Meanwhile, we spend much time on recommending and acquiring books for bookclubs, talking about books, reading books and reviews of books, helping our favorite older customers find and enjoy books, setting up displays of books, placing dazzling books in the hands of our youngest customers, attending workshops about books, and shifting books around. I love thinking about technorati and de.licio.us and the brave new library of the future: information strategically organized by the techno-librarian for the "Starbucks"-caffeinated customer. Where'd I put my progressives?

Del.icio.us and moi

After several tries and much fumbling around, I finally got this bookmarking tool to work for me. I hope I will remember to add to it with a few tags: libraries, literature, books. I expect I'll diversify my tags (money, money, money, rich, wealthy, retirement...along those lines). What initially seems such a complicated process, suddenly becomes quite obvious and logical.