Well, Squeaking in at 3 minutes till midnight (Eastern time with daylight savings), my final project is on the wiki. 

I went through a lot of territory--using del.icio.us at the reference desk, giving our internal wiki or flagging reference blog a boost with all the new information I've learned here, creating a reference chat model with meebo...  But finally I realized that what I really would like to do is to share all of this social goodness with the other people in the library.  I was finally convinced last week when, during a strategic planning meeting someone said, "Slow down, we're talking about how important all these things are, and a lot of these terms I've never heard before today!"  It's very true--I'm all for pushing the limits of what we can do in libraries with social software, but for now, I'd be content with letting more people get a chance to play in the sandbox and learn about the fundamentals of the "2.0 revolution" that we all seem to agree is important to libraries and their users. So, using what we've got, I'm trying for a sort of emerging-technologies-group lite relying on a wiki to take up some of the strain of our small and hard-working staff.

I have to say, of everything we've covered, I have the most trouble figuring how we'd use Flickr at our library. I've seen other libraries do cool stuff, absolutely--but I haven't said "Oh, wow. That would be great at Colby!" We don't need hosting, our library news is there (tho not stellar, I agree), the points of social networking (how likely is a college student to friend the flickr library account) seem to apply. I see it working at other types of libraries, but not ours.

Oh, no. Did I just turn into a naysayer?

Help me out, here.

Weighing in late on the wiki subject, so a lot of people have made fantastic observations about wikis. I'll throw another one for us to play with out there: TiddlyWiki. This might be old news to some, but take a minute to play with a very portable wiki. it does a lot of the cool things that you expect wikis to do and (here's the fun bit) it saves as a single file, so you can have it wherever you like. Instead of creating new pages, you make smalelementscaled tiddlers, which can be tagged for all the 2.0ness you can handle.

Seriously, though. I have found this perfect for keeping track of my new liaising duties. It's like interactive, linking 3x5 cards (and who doesn't love those). I can create a tiddler for every faculty with their research intersets (and a link to their personal page), one for important resources (with links to the OPAC--or resource if it's not cataloged), one for projects I'm working on, and so on. Very easy, very flexible--like all the good software we've explored.

Check out Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog's wonderfully frank discussion of trying out Google reader for the first time and comparing it to Bloglines.  Looks like I've found a new feed as well...

I've been thinking about live bookmarks ever since upgrading to the new Firefox--but I'm wondering if they compare to what I'm getting from Bloglines (from what I've seen of Google reader, it's a googley-looking Bloglines).

Is anyone an avid live bookmark user? Or hater? I have my own list of reasons for going or staying, but I'd like to hear others.

Every time I started a post about blogs, I start thinking about feeds.  I can't seem to get the two to function seperately in my head.  Here's the best compromise that I've been able to come up with.

 It seems to me that your choice of which blog product to use is much more important to whoever is doing the actual blogging than it is to your users.  One of the articles (forgive me, I've forgotten which) stated that having a "blogspot.com" or "typepad.com" address on your blog in the near future would be like having a Geocities page today.  I can certainly see where that makes sense--I certainly can't see any of the professors at work, for example, taking a geocities address in a bibliography.  But then...I got distracted by the idea of feeds again.  In the case of the types of library blogs that we're all talking about, it seems to me that people will either find it through a trusted link (off the library site) or it will become available to them through a feed (either their own personal feed reader or else a feed tucked onto the library's main site).  

Hi, all.

I've come up against an interesting situation, which I wonder about as more and more people move from being "social" users to being "social" librarians (or professionals of any sort). I was reading through a blog entry about being where the users are and participating in 2.0 products, talking about how librarians should really participate in tools like facebook and the like. I agree with that, but here's the problem: I already HAD a facebook page from when I was in school. (As well as some of the other tools.) But it seems to me that my network of friends from college and my network of friends from work are very distinct and should be.

Hi, all. I'm writing from a snowy Waterville Maine. Not enough snow to do anything with, just enough to make the roads messy, unfortunately. Since Colby College is a residential campus, the students are here, whatever the weather, and so this is my weekend a month to come in and take on all challengers. (But, since it's early afternoon still, there's some free time for blog writing.)

As you probably inferred, we're a small campus with a small staff, so we all work hard to wear many hats. "Reference Librarian" is what it says on the nametag, but I imagine that we have all had to deal with the difficult task of explaining everything that a library job entails. This is a big part of why I am so excited about the 5 Weeks course--Not only is it a great way to get up to speed on a variety of technologies, but it forces me to make that a priority, rather than an "after I get x, y, and z done" sort of task.