A Flickr experience

What I learned about Flickr. Basic accounts are free. It is easy to upload photos and one can put them in sets or collections (organize them). Then you can make cool stuff with your photos. Flickr is all about sharing photos. In the last minute 5454 photos were up loaded.

Tagging you photos in Flickr is easy. Tags help you find your photos but do they help others find your photos? The “Flickr tour” said one could assign up to 75 tags. I just cannot imagine needing 75 tags for one picture (that is a lot of keywords).

Explore and play

What fun! I chose from the short list of winners and found lots of interesting things. First was Pandora the music site. It is a way cool, aural fake book. The site was a little weak in the classical music area; but I enjoyed playing with it. It is kind of like a reader’s advisory program for music. I wonder how their categories and tags are set up. Too bad we cannot listen to web radio at work.

Next I checked out PEERtrainer. It has a lot of good information so I shared this one with a few friends. Finally, I looked at Lulu and was not too impressed. I'd like to spend more time with these Web 2.0 award winners.

Technorati

Technorati is an overwhelming blog heaven. I got way too many hits and too much information, kind of like the internet itself. It may be fun for people with tons of time on their hands but I want to learn how to refine my searches to take full advantage of this tool. I plan to study this tool again.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is way cool. I really like this one! It was easy to set up an account and start book marking and tagging. Every student should use this tool.

MySpace

MySpace is easy to set up; it seems intuitive and easy to “fill in all the blanks”. I set up an account long ago and with the help of Diane have learned to customize it. My problem is I really don’t want all that information about me out there. So my account looks boring. I think most people love to talk about themselves and be “out there”; but I don’t happen to be one of them.

VBPL and Social Networking sites

I think VBPL should use social networking sites to connect with teens. MySpace and Facebook are where the teen are, then libraries need to be there too. However, it will need constant monitoring and updating. Some one will need to be responsible for the site and make sure the VBPL always looks good.

Adding to a wiki

Adding and entry to a wiki was very easy. The difficult part is having something worthwhile to say. Wikis are perfect for sharing opinions.

This was a good exercise for us since everyone has an opinion on the books they read. I can see a lot of uses for wikis in library business; they are great for collaboration and librarian like to share and collaborate.