Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Social Networking Sites

I'm a fan of social networking, and hoping to stay that way - without becoming obsessed. I used to have a bebo account, but currently have a facebook account for friends etc, and a MySpace account to follow bands/music.
I like the remote contact aspect the social networking allows; you can keep in contact with people who live 5km or 5000km away. I also like the 'post & reply' (or not) operation, rather than being in a real-time chat room (although I have used the chat facility on facebook myself). It's a good way to keep up with people and stay as close/distant as you like, without the personal 'closed' aspect of email. It's good to be able to use other tools - such as linking a picture or video to your profile - and say more than could have been expressed in text. Social networking sites also a good way to gauge what's happening in the world via the online community - just imagine if 9/11 had happened in this age of intense social networking.
As much as I like social networking, I do think there is a danger of liking them a little too much. One of my friends on facebook posts 5+ links etc EVERY DAY. I prefer quality, not quantity...
I also dislike the vapidity that can pervade these sites - I don't really need to know what so-and-so had for breakfast.
And one more thing I don't like lately is that some of the functions seem to change every time I login. A lot of the operations of the photo albums/comments, and how much access external private enterprise have to your account seem to change fairly regularly.

On the other hand, it's all free, so as long as you understand the privacy risks you shouldn't complain!

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Embedded Video

This one has been 'doing the rounds' lately, so you may have seen it already.
It's a neat little snapshot of the good, the bad and a lot of other stuff in 2010.
And as someone said, it's good for librarians to know what the information needs of the people are!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Local and social bookmarking

Local bookmarking

Local bookmarks are those that are stored on a local pc, under a login id recognised by the network. Commonly, these are organised in the 'favourites' menu and can be divided into folders.
It's an advantage to bookmark this way because of the ease in accessing it. It doesn't matter which page you are currently on, you just open the 'favourites' tab in your browser and follow the folder path. If you are the only user of that browser, or are extremely familiar with it, this works ok.

If many people use the browser, confusion can arise. You might know a site is bookmarked in favourites, but not exactly where - a mad folder hunt can ensue. If many people need to bookmark many things, the favourites and its folders can get quite messy. Another disadvantage of local bookmarking is that you can only access the bookmarks using the local id; from an external network you cannot access your bookmarks through favourites.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarks are those that are stored in the cloud, using a tool such as Delicious. With a Delicious login, you can access all your bookmarks from anywhere that is connected to the internet. Instead of using folders, delicious organises the bookmarks with 'tags' - words used to describe the bookmark. A single bookmark can have many tags. By dispensing with folders, Delicious makes the task of organising many bookmarks easier. Instead of trawling through folders, users can search using the tags they think would have been used with the bookmark.

In a library environment, Delicious can be useful as often many different staff serve customers using the same workstation at different times. Use of a favourites menu could be an efficient task for a few, and a laborious trial-and-error process for everyone else. With a Delicous account, users need only search using tags and hopefully reach what they are looking for. For example, access to the official site of the NZ Government may be required, but the user can't find it in favourites...is it in the 'Government' folder? Or the 'Law and Legislation' folder?
With Delicious, one could search for tags such as 'government' and 'parliament' and bring up a list of bookmarks, one of which is the desired one http://www.beehive.govt.nz/
Also specific to libraries could be the efficient tagging of the many, many reader's advisory sites.
The Delicious account makes it easy for all staff to access and add to bookmarks from any pc that is connected to the internet.

A disadvantage for me personally is that Delicious is yet another program to have open and running all the time, whereas the fovourites are just there in the menu bar of whatever window you are viewing.