Some thoughts on bookmarking..

Well here I am on reruns again...

I couldn't access the OPAL chatroom for today's webcast. I've sent out a cry for help and I'm certain that it will all be resolved before too long. Instead of being in the classroom I spent the time reading about social bookmarking and setting up my own blog on wordpress. There's nothing in the blog yet, so I won't hand out the address until I come up with something profound to say.

I must admit to being slightly skeptical about the use of some of these tools for work purposes. But I have been won over! Prior to my librarian days, I was in Purchasing and spent many the night waiting til it got late enough to call Wendy at the IPO in Hong Kong (sorry - international purchasing office). And I clearly remember the number of meetings that had to be rescheduled because the required information didn't arrive on time (stuck in the mail or customs). I can think of dozens of ways that the social tools we're talking about would have made for a lot fewer late nights as well.

I could have put a face to Wendy's voice through the use of Flickr, we could also have used it to forward pictures of the facilities where product was being made, viewed colour changes online, discussed a broken widget. Blogs could have been used to have online discussions about new product development - and with each department able to access the current status (no attachments that didn't come thru the firewall or were sent in an unknown format) we'd have had a lot fewer wasted meetings too! Although I haven't checked it out, I imagine that a lot of the vendors I used to use have lots of information on their websites about new technology and new product updates that would have been invaluable to my engineers exactly when they designing the next iteration (instead of coming to me with specifications that had to be matched, then waiting for 2 or 3 suppliers catalogues to arrive, etc). And del.ici.ous what a great way to get a group working all together. No one would be waiting for the next meeting to bring up an important website, blog, etc. And, if manufacturer's are a smart bunch (and some are) they have all their new product and new revisions on an RSS feed. Talk about Just-In-Time delivery! Wow....

I know this course is about 5 weeks to a social Library (but sometimes you have to go with what you know best)!