#20 YouTube

George and I had some fun looking at YouTube - clips of favourite singers, stuff from TV (Black Books)and this terrific trawl across time - Pachelbel as you've never heard it before. Some sobering stuff too - I tried searches like "Burma" and "uprising", "John Howard", "Kevin Rudd". Found much more than I expected to, but I realise now I shouldn't have been surprised - uploading any kind of file now seems to be so easy. This site alone will provide masses of material for someone's sociology thesis.

And all good dogs digg, don't they?

Well, George was overcome to discover she could go Digg-ing . . . so we did and we added another top web 2.0 thing to our blog. We aren't sure what we'll do with it or if the Digg-ing will be worth it, but we thought . . . this is after all a sandbox, and there's stuff there in spades.

#19 . . . that's number one nine explore (encore encore encore)

Oh no, here we go exploring again! Now the Olympics of Web 2.0 - the top threes (gold, silver, bronze) of every conceivable web 2.0 category.

But wow, we bow . . . bookmarking category, top dog is ma.gnolia. George and I (remember George?) just have to give many wags of tail to any site that can direct us to this one. The essence of life's choices encapsulated in a flowchart. Simple uncomplicated chaps with simple uncomplicated needs . . . Maslow knew what was what. (And it's perfectly upfront in Dogboy's profile - food is good!)

Looked at the top of the pops in a few categories - Flickr again, Rollyo again, Facebook etc. Looked at the Ning thing (another place for creating groups?) , the Xing thing (have no need to discover deals, employees, colleagues using a six degrees of separation principle, though I guess if I wanted to find someone I used to work in New York with . . .? but I guess that's the point?) and a thing called Swivel, which seemed to be a site where bits of data were brought together. For example, I could see in graph form how many people had died on Mt Everest in the last 50 or so years. Not sure when you would want that but from a library perspective, you never know, there could be useful stuff here. . .

But why is Biblio Web 2.0? Where's the mixing/mashing, social networking, "being where the users are" bit? Isn't it just another webpage or is there something fundamental I still don't get here?

#18 word processing and so on

A quick look at the Zoho options suggests that it has potential - created a short document in Zoho Writer, then pasted it back into Word to see if formatting was retained well. It seemed to have many of the useful options for working with a document that you find in Word so I can see how useful it would be in a library (like ours) that doesn't offer proprietary office software. Hopefully assist with managing user disbelief eg "You mean you don't offer Word!!??" The multiple templates could be of use to some I guess - certainly there've been over 1000 downloads of something (can't recall which - maybe the resume) though in the end for the entire English-speaking, web-accessing population, I guess that's probably not much?

I could see that I could use the Zoho productivity suite to create a spreadsheet, a presentation, to get organised, create a wiki, manage a project, build a database. A taste of Bill Gates plus the wiki option - and given that there are plugins for Word and Excel, you have to like it - a flexible, convenient, interoperable kinda package.

#16 Learning about wikis & #17 Sandbox

I remember about 18 months ago when attitudes to the original Mr Wiki (Jimmy W and his Wikipedia) were quite negative because every ordinary Tom, Dick or Harry could add and edit. Well, obviously people out there voted with their feet or fingers or whatever - it is now one of the top 20 most-visited sites and I think most of us recognise it is really useful as a first stop. Jimmy Wales's original vision of everyone on the planet being able to get access to the sum of the world's knowledge was actually the essence of Web 2.0's inclusivity (is that a word?), participation and collaboration and I think it is a great vision. One of the good things I found in my explorations was this Online Community report which has a short list of good tips on when the wisdom of the collective might work best.

I did find another one that was briefly fun for a quick squizz - lots of "How To" articles. How to : pick a lock, fix a scratched CD, get a job with the UN, , kiss (!), be a gothic Lolita, call in sick when you just want a day off !!! (And there's another 25, 034 after these - but it does have a search engine attached). And the best advice of all was a spot of dog wisdom. . . (Yes, Saturday was slow)

I had also previously come across the Library Success wiki and found it very useful - at the time, it was great to check out what was happening in digital reference. And we have a training wiki now here at SLV, thanks to Mark = great application.

The sandbox thing? I dutifully checked it out but freaked when I saw that I had to give yet another username and password so I haven't added my blog to the list. I could see that I could, but it didn't mean I needed to - and I'm absolutely sure it wouldn't add a single jot to anybody's meaningful experience of this learning exercise. As for the other toys in the sandbox, I'd rather talk to someone about their favourite film or their favourite music and I'd certainly rather have a face-to-face stoush about dogs being superior to cats (meerkats are fine), than to bother adding my comments online.

BTW I discovered a good site while checking wikis out - well-written, simple outline for newbies like me at Geekgirls.

#15 Library 2.0 and where 2.0?

Read all of these perspectives - yes, clearly it's about adaptability, being able to do that quickly, with some (but not endless) reflection. The whole Library 2.0, Web 2.0 thing reminds me very much of all that research way back which told us that, when seeking information, the first source for most people was a friend or someone they thought knowledgeable. Libraries weren't ever right up there at the top though we have always been able to rely on the "trusted" label when it comes to information. And as the social networking phenomenon and online communities of interest have the potential to bring people with knowledge about the same things together, maybe we do need to think about which of these new technologies really can help us adapt to where people are. Maybe we do have to stare this thing in the face. There are other information experts out there - members of the public who are very knowledgeable about their area of interest - and they can potentially answer each others' questions if they are connected in an online community . . . can't they???

As for the OCLC experts, I found myself being a bit irritated by the guy who kept referring to himself as "this librarian" and wondered what was wrong with the first person pronoun? So for me, the style thing got in the way of what were otherwise fair enough points.

Wendy Schulz's short analysis of web history - interesting. The Library in its 4.0 incarnation as knowledge spa? The idea of an augmented reality where the physical and the virtual merge and we can bathe (basically) in it - am not sure that I will want to.

So . . . am I just an old dog? do I apply for a departure package? do I just blog on . . .

#14 Technorati

Checked out Learning 2.0 as exercise requested and . . .

In blog posts 3, 199 hits
In tags, no number, just a message that said "everything in the known universe about Learning 2.0". Did I do something wrong or is that just a very big number?
In the Blog Directory, 569 blogs about Learning 2.0.

Looked at Popular ones and don't get it. Especially why this one is rated #10. And also why cats get so much air-time. And also why it has the name it has. I won't give up on getting it yet - I'll explore more tomorrow when I am more awake.