A Sticki Wiki

Wow. There are lots of ways we could all use wikis in our real and work lives - make that "personal" and work lives :). The trick would be getting your family/colleagues to contribute, though PP even spoke to that sticking point. Professionally, I can see using a wiki for organizing library staff large group projects and parties or other gatherings. And personally: who's bringing what to Thanksgiving again, and who's staying where? The trick would be using a wiki when everyone has a lot to contribute and where the topic generates a lot of interest. My favorite of the wikis linked on this week's lesson, bar Wikipedia of course, was the one for the city of Davis, CA. What a great community builder!

Okay, I actually did set up a family wiki this week. Nothing helps you learn an application like actually noodling around with it. I started with Thanksgiving assignments and then added a Family Calendar with pbwiki's cool plugins option. As seems to be typical with my family, so far members have added a lot of smart aleck remarks, so it's been fun. You gotta love 'em-at least I do.

del.icio.us

This one's fun to play around with. Clicking on different parts of any entry leads you serendipitously to other things you already are interested in. Clicking on the "saved by xxx people" link (in this case using the broad term "recipes"), yields not only the taggers' description of the site they've saved, but also the ability to click on 'them' to see other sites they've tagged.
You Project Play mavens asked whether we as librarians are unsettled by the uncontrolled vocabulary aspect of del.icio.us. Veddy interesting to consider... I suspect that to a certain extent this may be more unsettling to the older generation of the library world. (Oh wait, that's me!)
Most librarians tend to think that a side benefit of our profession is that we are better internet searchers. We think in keywords, and have a certain hierarchical organization of information hard-wired into our brains. One consequence of tagging which I personally like is that it encourages the rest of the world to also think in keywords. We should applaud that somewhat unconscious organizing of information by the non-library world and find it informative. For example, the tag cloud on the teen site listed in Week 8's lesson in itself provides a graphic illustration of interests of teens today.

One use of the social bookmarking aspect we at Lakeview are just starting to explore is using del.icio.us to organize some of our often-used bookmarks, thanks to Andrew in Automation for adding the buttons to our toolbar. Almost any worksite can benefit by aspects of the 2.0 world and this one has us excited. Ya gotta love Project Play. (shameless pandering alert, but true)

This Is So Last Week...

Ok, I'm still LibraryThing-ing over here. I like the concept a lot and have played with it in the past very briefly, not making my own Library until now. The Reader's Advisory aspect interests me most, though of course when I put a single title into the BookSuggester or UnSuggester, I find the titles listed less on the mark than when using the LibrarySuggester, but then programs using this kind of algorithm are always a crapshoot. I like perusing the Zeitgeist page, with its features like top 25 books by star rating, 50 top-rated authors, and always fun, 50 lowest-rated authors.

All in all, I just find it encouraging that the Web 2.0 demographic includes so many readers!