MySpace and Facebook

Libraries in MySpace are doing great things.

Steele Creek Library uses MySpace to provide quick links for help, promote it’s recent events with lots of photos, to try to be cool – you expect a library to pick it’s favourite book? – and to chat with library users (and potentials) – there’s over 90 posts

Denver Public Library on MySpace is a lot more wordy – and homework oriented. Even so, it has over 600 friends and 120 posts, so it’s reaching some of its users OK.

New York Public Library – Bloomingdale Branch – has a far more stylish profile – tho’ red text on black takes some reading — but the quality images used are unusual and I”m sure would appeal to teenagers – maybe girls more than boys, but certainly teenage audiences. This one eeks cool, though is not very informative.

Headings that would be useful in MySpace are – contact details, latest blog entries, blurbs, friends space, friends comments, and book/resource covers.

Facebook has some great features. The prompts for things that you can include are just that – prompts — you choose to complete the info, or not…. And it was good to discover that I couldn’t join the Swinburne network, not having a valid Swinburne email address. Means there’s elements of ‘house rules’ but these are far from onerous.

Social Bookmarking

Reading the latest sites on Digg is almost as bad as trawling through the millions and zillions of hits that the early search engines used to create — an awful lot of things that you can very happily live without knowing. The idea of Digg sounded a good one– but dipping into it today – I’d probably only click on one of the first 30 sites in the list.

Re news in future – nope, I wouldn’t choose this as the way to get it!

BlogLines-RSS feeds

I’ve used Sage – an RSS aggregator – for about a year, ever since Colin Bates told me about it. I haven’t been a big user so far, but as blogs become a key comm channel, I can see the value of Bloglines – being able to so quickly add podcasts as well as website/blog updates/alerts.

It’s great the way that things evolve – a new idea (eg RSS) is great when fresh and new, but as a service grows and gets more popular, the choices get overwhelming and someone then needs to create a way to handle the lilypond effect

I found the ‘popular’ list of feeds in Bloglines very useful as a starting point. It’s interesting to see some ‘library’ ones amongst the top 20 Let’s go for it!

LibraryThing

I’ve heard lots about LibraryThing but was yet to check it out. This is actually a good thing – every book that I searched for had already been added by another user – so adding to my YourLibrary was a breeze — I liked checking out the ’social’ link and seeing what people had thought. Also really interesting to see other recommended titles. If researching at the ‘book’ level, this could be a very useful tool for undergrads. Great that Deakin Uni Library catalogue is one of the optional catalogues to search

I didn’t ‘get’ the UnSuggestions – just seemed a *clever thing that was done ‘because they could’ If anyone disagrees – let me know what you think… seemed more like a list to choose from if you wanted to give a dust-collector present

I’ve added a handful of books so far.

Image Generators

These nifty image generators sure make it easy if you can find a template that’s OK for the job. I found ImageChef extremely easy to use – for making this very simple image …

Flickr Groups

Skies the limit here! I joined a group ‘cos I liked the idea of checking out their photos – Bushwalking Huts of Aus and NZ, but discovered that my Flickr photos of trees were immediately available to this Huts group!! I then did a lot of hunting to find out how to “leave the Group”. In case you need to know, it’s at: http://www.flickr.com/help/groups/#80

As well as sharing photos, this is a way of checking places that you might want to travel – images through the eyes of independent travellers, rather than just the official tourist agency images of much-travelled routes and much-seen attractions…

Flickr

This is so easy! I just uploaded some shots I had on my laptop – the one thing I learned was to check file size – one was BIG – over 1 Mb, so took a long time to upload. Other than that, a piece of cake. I’m getting used to tagging – it’s great that so many applications are using it — it makes more sense all the time, and choosing tags is sure getting easier!

I’m really impressed by the blogs – every one I’ve looked at has been a different design.

If you’re into animation movies, I’d recommend Ratatouille – I’ve just seen it – it’s great fun! Pity PIXAR has been purchased by Walt Disney productions, but what a coup for Australia! I waited out the VERY long list of credits – this film was made in California. Does anyone know if Pixar is still using the Fox Studios in Sydney?

ciao, Sue

The Launching Post

Well, that was easy to do – what took me so long???? I see that many have passed this way before … wordpress stats say 1,467,398 blogs with 39,267 new posts today (12/9/07) and dozens of those blogs are ours!!! Really makes you feel part of a bigger world… and we thought 5 campuses was a lot!

I’m really impressed with the 23 Things blogs that people have done so far – some have such style! I’m now going hunting for those dots and colour options — must be here, somewhere….

Oh, btw Terry, I’m one less person on your ‘noticeable exception’ list now, and raring to go with the new ‘weeks’ that Kat’s posted. Thanks to you both, and to the campus champs, and to anyone who’s helped anyone with learning 2.0000000000.

Ciao, S