Week 4 in Learn 2.0

I REALLY liked the video for this week, it's been mentioned on many sites and even got a recommendation in the most recent Wired magazine. As far as Web 2.0 goes, I've always been interested in finding new exciting things that are happening on the internet. I've told my friends about Yahoo Pipes and Grokker, and though I'm not sure how much I would necessarily recommend either one, they are examples of the direction that the internet is going, and I think that it's a great direction to head in. This course is a good way to be introduced to developing trends and sites, while having the added advantage of a built-in group of users also experiencing the same things and being able to talk about them.

I appreciate that OCLS is staying ahead of the curve. The Teen Myspace has a lot of loyal readers, teens who are genuinely interested in the activities that the library can provide. These teens are more likely to become library volunteers and help plan future events, as well as participating. In the future, they are more likely to recommend the library to their friends, and to use it for research and pleasure reading. Of course, it also helps that we cater so well to their reading choices, offering manga and graphic novels. As they say, you've got to hook 'em young! The OCLS YouTubes are a little more adult, aimed more towards showing patrons what we do here (Music in the Library, parade presence, art, gaming, and conventions). People who can see what the values of OCLS are and the cultural standpoint of our system will be encouraged to bring their children and themselves to experience it in person. We have so much to offer here, it's great that we're trying to get the message out. So many more people would become regular patrons if they knew just how much they could do.

SEOmoz was fascinating. I checked out award winners in the Book category and was definitely not disappointed. LibraryThing is like Shelfari, but loads faster and seems like a lot more fun. I LOVED their UnSuggester! CoverPop was also very cool; interested users create collages of covers in a certain theme (vintage pulp fiction, cookbooks, cereal boxes, etc), which you can hover over to get specific details and click on to be linked to the Amazon or Flickr page, whatever works with the subject matter. The items range from being collections of candy to recent pictures of color fields posted to Flickr, and are often even grouped artistically (into color bars or similar shapes, the one with cat toys even makes the face of Felix the Cat in the center!). I also checked out Liveplasma in the Mashups category. It seems a little difficult to understand, but useful in finding new artists or movies based on ones you already like. Out of the sites that I looked at, I still liked Coverpop the best for the sheer interest factor, but Librarything for usability.

I did the Adventure activity, and I'm glad that it was edited since yesterday! Yesterday I created 2 entries in ToEat for restaurants near the Main library, then realized that I had forgotten to tag them with OCLS. Since you can't look at entries for 24 hours while they are verified and put on the site, I made 2 new entries for 2 different restaurants, but couldn't figure out how to tag them with anything other than food categories. In the end, I simply wrote that they were "popular lunch destinations for OCLS staff" in the text box and just hoped that it would count. ToEat didn't seem very useful to me. Admittedly, being able to see restaurants on different streets and break them down by food category and whatnot was interesting, but barely any of the restaurants were reviewed, and there are snarky messages in the map view about errors viewing it in Windows. Something to the effect of "this would work fine if you were using a standards-compliant browser like Linux or Firefox..." All of my computer programming friends know that no matter which platform you prefer, it's always important to cross-test and make sure it will work for everyone. As another nitpicky aside, there is an option before posting a new restaurant to "go back and make changes" to the entry you created, but when you follow the link, none of your previous information is there. It's more of a "go back and write everything all over again." But if it were more easily viewed (all those little pictures of chefs with trays overlap and make it difficult to see which is which) and more user-friendly, it would be a great website.