Thing 23

Thing 23

Huzzah! I have reached the end and ahead of schedule.

I am glad that I have made the effort to complete all the things, though it has been far more time-consuming than I ever imagined and I know that I have barely scratched the surface with many of the applications I've been introduced to. I know that I would have to engage more with Twitter and LinkedIn to get the full benefit of them, but I really can't see what use to put them too. I know with the latter it is mainly a case of needing a critical mass of people I know to use it, but I have other, more useful, ways of contacting them.

• The form in Google Docs is really useful and I had only been on the receiving end of them before.
  
• We seem to be getting a lot of hits on our facebook page, so I need to have a real think about how to make it better and work out how to add gadgets to it (I notice other Libraries have boxes for Copac and WorldCat searches on their Facebook pages - how does one do that?)
• Ideally, I would probably connect my Google Reader page through to iGoogle if they were set up for feeds I want in perpetuity, rather than just for 23 Things. I'd also want fewer gadgets - less clutter if I were using iGoogle every day. At the same time, I'd want to centre my web focus in one place, so I guess it would be a case of working out what I would actually use - something you can't know until you try. I worry with linking all the applications about privacy though, knowing that Googlemail reads what you write and targets the sidebar advertising in relation to it. One could end up putting pretty much all one's life out into the public domain without realising that way.
  
• I guess that means that realising how easy it can be to add gadgets to connect pages together has been the most useful lesson and the one I wish to investigate more in the workplace.

Thank you to the organisers of 23 Things for giving us this opportunity to explore with direction through the mass of web 2.0 technologies. But can anyone tell me how to use Twitter for the Library, PLEASE?

Thing 19

Thing 19

It's such a relief to be up to date with this! Also that this week's tasks are not too time-consuming.

Google docs seem pretty straightforward. From a simple play, I find the lack of complex options actually helpful, but I suspect that if I was trying to produce something impressive and extensive for a real purpose, it's limitations would begin to frustrate me. I enjoyed being able to ask other participants the question that remains unanswered for me from 23 Things so far (i.e. What use is Twitter for libraries?) and sharing one of the poems from an anthology of one of our Old Members' poems. I made myself a presentation with three of the short poems in it. I was annoyed that centring both horizontally and vertically doesn't actually move the text to the centre of the slide, so I did it manually.

I have actually used the form function as a respondent many times and can see the use for sharing documents outside an organisation with a shared drive and for several people being able to edit the same document - prevents too many versions in circulation.

NB Why is Blogger being SO slow today?