Wikis

It was fun adding things to the 10 Things wiki.

My thoughts on "radical trust:" First of all, the phrase itself is a little pretentious to my mind. It's referring to the way people have lived in communities since always. So why the "radical"? To live with others -- and do we have a choice? -- is to trust that most of the time "participation will work." Not a new idea.

I do use Wikipedia and I like it, but it also makes me nervous. It's a quick way to get information but how to know the accuracy? I tend to trust it if the article is well written, but that's really no guarantee. When answering a reference question, I may use Wikipedia to get me started, but I would not use it as my only source. It sure is fun and easy though.

I would think patrons would enjoy editing a Library wiki, as we did -- adding info about movies they enjoy or places they have visited. In a more professional way, a departmental wiki could provide a forum for sharing, adding to and building on information needed by staff.

Podcasting

Tonight I listened to two podcasts and have subscribed to one other I did not have time to listen to, but I promise I will. With the help of Richard, Julie Marks, and her husband -- who happened to drop by the desk and knew how I could adjust the volume on my earphones -- I listened to President Bush musing about the White House laundry chute on The Onion and part of the Shoemaker and the Elves being read by a librarian at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library. The latter is the library in Western Springs, where I grew up.

As to applications for libraries, I think the idea of librarians reading stories to children is a nice one. There were also podcasts of children reading their own stories. I would imagine that this feature would be popular. For SPL, a possible marketing feature would be to have a staff person, with a very nice voice, talking about upcoming programs at the Library or one of us giving a preview of new books or talking about "books you might have missed."

Social Networking

I was more than unusually stupid in my experience with social networking. First, instead of simply clicking on the Common Craft video, I went into Common Craft and watched the video on zombies at Halloween. I kept looking for an analogy between zombies and bookmarking but none was apparent. Jennifer enlightened me about my initial mistake. Then, in trying to login to del.icio.us, I read the SPL login as "theskeleton" rather than "theskokieten." Obviously influenced by the Halloween video. After that, everything has gone smoothly.

Tags I believe would be useful for the Library are 'reference," "reader," "books" and how about "spooky"?

Flickr

Puerto Rican iguana by Christin
Originally uploaded by theskokieten

Today, with much help from Richard, I conquered Flickr. (ha!)

This is a photo taken by my daughter-in-law Christin, while celebrating her first wedding anniversary. With my son. The photo is not my son.

This experience was fun and easy, but I hardly did it myself.

Social Networking

I now have a presence on Facebook. Not an exciting presence but ..... I found out, in a search for possible "friends" from my high school and college graduating classes, that someone from my college is a Facebooker. However, I don't really want to connect with him. But it's interesting he's there, nonetheless.

On to Thing 5.