Summary: wow!

This was a very useful project. I learned a lot. I felt that I gained only a superficial understanding of the things we learned about, mostly because of the time constraints, but taking the first few steps are vitally important in making them less threatening and exposing myself to their usefulness and appeal. I thought all the subjects covered were interesting and useful. I would definitely take another course like this in the future.

I found that I needed to spend more than 1 1/2 hours each week to complete the exercises. Maybe the project should be spread over a longer time period.

Some of the instructions were cryptic. Adding a sentence or two might have helped. For example, the overview on podcasts did not emphasize that they are non-visual (or can they be?)

Overdrive audiobooks and Sirsi?

Whatever exercise we are doing, I always learn something useful. For instance, for this exercise I learned that Overdrive's collection includes language learning audiobooks. My overall impression of Overdrive is that their interface is well-designed and user friendly, such as marking titles that are permitted to be burned to CD and offering categories like newly arrived or recently returned.

Unfortunately, they don't seem to use Library of Congress subject headings, relying on keywords. They limit the search field "subject" to less than 50 subjects. This probably means we won't be able to add our audiobook collection to Sirsi -- or, if we actually can add them to our catalog, that when you do a subject search, audiobooks will not be included in the hit list. Things get ever more complicated.

Podcasted

I listened to an interview with David Sedaris which was sponsored and podcasted (can it be used as a verb?) by the Kankakee Public Library. (How does such an obscure sounding place get such a high-powered speaker?) Then using Podcast Alley I found an interesting subscription podcast called "The Unnamed Path," which promotes New Age spiritualism.

It was interesting that the Sedaris podcast did not require a podcast receiver. But, to listen to one of the 55 or so lectures on the Unnamed Path, I had to first download a receiver (I chose Juice) and then download the particular lecture I wanted to hear. So some podcasts are by subscription, and others are just parts of websites to be clicked on. I added the Unnamed Path to my bloglines account. Some of the 10 feeds from them turned out to be new podcasts, and some were just news and information and were not podcasts. As is typical of the Internet, nothing is neat and tidy and easily categorizable. Everything is mixed together and the whole is greater than the parts.

YouTube and slam poetry

There's quite a bit of slam poetry on YouTube. YouTube is a perfect medium for slam poetry -- performances just waiting to be filmed for their in-your-face attitude, the visuals, and the appreciative responses of the audiences. One I saw today is "Liking Me" by Sonya Renee, a runner up in the nationals. It's about having safe sex in a hip-hop culture that frowns upon it.

Some interesting features: YouTube allows you to save favorite videos in folders, which is convenient. The comment area is always interesting. The quality varies a lot -- but hey not everything has to be perfect to be appreciated.

Since sound is such an integral part to movies, we wouldn't want to put a video on the library's homepage. But I can imagine the library might create videos to be seen on YouTube, such as videos of our programs or special promotions. I don't think this is a very effective promotional avenue because YouTube reaches a national audience and is not limited to the local community. On the other hand, our video for the summer reading program has been viewed 409 times as of today -- not a bad number, considering. But I still think it would function better as a video archive.

Web 2.0 tools: www.revolutionhealth.com and its ambitious scope

This website was started by AOL founder Steve Case. I like it's thoughtfully worded, pro-activist mission statement. It talks about interceding in areas of American life that are dysfunctional, that are in "need of a better way." I am beginning to see that people use Web 2.0 to empower themselves, to fix things, and to make a difference.

This website incorporates Web 1.0 aspects as well -- things like information about medical conditions and drugs, or advice about buying health insurance. The Web 2.0 aspects are interwoven into the website. For instance you can search through a database of dentists (Web 1.0), and some of the records have comments posted by patients (Web 2.0). Other Web 2.0 features are: blogs about health conditions that you can search, or comment on, or add your own; a place to post your personal story of illness to share with others and where you can seek the support of others who have gone through the same recovery; and you can start your own health portfolio (which I did not try, since it required registration.)

All this is time consuming and requires a level of commitment that I personally would be reluctant to make -- unless I had a very strong interest in a subject. As I moved around this site, I noticed a lot of empty spaces that nobody has taken advantage of, such as there were no comments added to the dentists I randomly selected in their database. Searching blogs for a medical condition relating to "retinal tears" brought up only the most general information readily available elsewhere. The promise of this website is yet to be realized. It strives to be all things to all people as regards health issues, as probably do other similar Web 2.0 websites. Web 2.0 may turn out to be very repetitive.

Zoho Writer and getting smarter

What good news! My computer at home doesn't have Word, so I desperately need this web-based word processing. I didn't know about it before today!

I went ahead and tried the sharing feature, which worked good. The website successfully emailed my document to my other email account within a short time. I was able to read the document. But, to be able to edit it, I would have to open a new account with Zoho Writer using my other email address (I am assuming.) So this collaboration capability works pretty well. It's similar to a private wiki.

Keeping straight all these capabilities of the various new technologies must be good brain exercise. These websites may be making us smarter, I'm afraid.

Pbwiki as a virtual ongoing staff meeting

This seems like it could be very useful to help a team to work together. You can brainstorm in the Comments area and come up with a final document that would be placed under the main tab. We're talking right now about doing this among our reference staff. For this type of in-house use, it's good that you can keep the wiki private and accessible by only certain people. Everyone should agree on a protocol for identifying who is saying what in the comments area because the sandbox at least doesn't automatically identify the contributors.