It's hard to believe we're just about done with the program! It's also hard to believe that it's practically November. Although it looks deceptively like Fall out due to the tropical storm moving through the area, a quick step into the 80-degree weather brings one back to reality!

Even though I already use many of the tools we explore, I still learned some things, and enjoyed seeing the many "aha!" moments. Plus, it was a wonderful opportunity to think more about the whole Web 2.0/Library 2.0 phenomenon and record some of my thoughts here.

It was interesting seeing the program for both the planning and participant side. One thing is definitely for sure: even though I use some of these tools every day, it still took me longer than 15 minutes to write up my thoughts on them. I can't imagine how much more time-consuming the process may have been when also exploring the tools for the first time. So I definitely agree with Tallmanicus that more time for all the activities would be a good thing. More opportunities for working together and collaboration is another good point. I'd already been pondering how the program would have been different if we had all posted our thoughts about the 23 things on a group blog--a shared homebase.

Easily the most fun I had during the course of the program was teaching two workshops about Second Life (one of our bonus things) to library staff yesterday. I used a different approach from the first Second Life workshop I taught at the end of August, and I was happy with the outcome. I will blog more later about what we did in the workshops, and what I've learned about teaching Second Life.

What will be the new big thing next year at this time? I can't wait to find out!

Image generated at the Web 2.0V2Logo Creatr.

Note: I'm going to be a little lazy for this thing and the Twitter bonus thing, and simply re-post an abridged and slightly edited version of what I wrote a couple weeks ago to Teknoids, the techie legal education listserv, in response to a question about social networking.

Here's what I've been doing for myself and our library:

LinkedIn: If someone has given me their business card, they're either now in my network, or have received an invitation to join. I have a profile there based closely on my resume, and I look at other people's profiles when we connect. That's the extent of my use of it, because there isn't much more you can do, though it could be useful for job hunters. I like having a professional option that goes beyond basic contact information without getting into the "fluff" of favorite movies and cheese hating.

MySpace: I'm not a fan, but I occasionally use it and have reconnected with a couple old friends through it, so I can't completely hate it. Mainly, I dislike that most users' custom designs make it a shrine to bad web design. I also dislike that I have to regularly visit my friends' (often hard to read) pages to see what's new with them. I freely admit I'm too lazy for that. Which brings me to...

Facebook: my social network of choice, checked at least three times a day. Mostly, I keep up with the friends who are there, as well as my high school- and college-aged cousins. (I'd love to inform the latter group that when I was their age, if you wanted a personal web presence you had to hack out the HTML by hand...in the snow...uphill... both ways, but I digress.) I have professional contacts there too, but they're librarians I'm friendly with, and/or librarians I know online, often fellow bloggers with similar interests. I wouldn't indiscriminately add business contacts in FB, but like Jim, I assume if someone I know is already there or if we've talked about technology/2.0 "stuff", they might be interested in connecting there.

What I love about Facebook is that it gives you a news feed of your friends' activities, so you don't have to surf around to see what's new in their profiles/lives. Unfortunately, you can't subscribe to this, but you can subscribe to their short status statements via RSS. My biggest social networking wish is that Facebook would develop multiple, customizable contact levels for family, friends, and professional contacts so there's more control over what people see beyond the full/limited profile choices. I don't use the popular photo sharing feature of FB beyond a few select vacation photos--the resolution is too limited, and that's what Flickr is for.

Ning: I'm in a couple networks at ning, but I honestly check them so rarely it might as well be never. I love the concept, but it arrived after my networking/2.0/info overload point. In at least one of the networks, people seemed to be friend requesting every single person in the network, which seemed redundant. Like MySpace and Facebook groups, the Ning networks could benefit from RSS feeds.

Twitter: I was surprised to find myself a fan, but lately I've only been using it intermittently. It's basically an instant message/chat feed of the same group of librarians I know through Facebook, Second Life, and the biblioblogosphere, plus a few tech guru types.

As for institutional uses, the NSU Law Library has a MySpace page and a Facebook group. For both of them, I've basically set up a welcome message and list of quick links to our website for library hours, databases, recommended websites, etc. Then I repost items from our regular blog, Novalawcity, as MySpace blog entries and Facebook group posted links. My thinking is if the students are hanging around in one of those sites or use them as their browser homepage, it's one more place they could happen across the library and remember we're there when they need us. We did an internal announcement and have 8 MySpace friends and close to 30 Facebook group members. Neither is as many as I hoped for (we have at least 200 students listed on each site), but it's a start. None of the MySpace users subscribe to our MySpace blog, but it's getting a fair number of views.

The hurdle with truly communicating with students in Facebook is that the Facebook terms of service won't allow institutional profiles nor multiple individual accounts, and group updates never appear in news feeds, nor can they be subscribed to internally or externally. To really reach out to students, I'd have to be willing to friend them all so my updates show up in their Facebook news feeds, which I'm not willing to do with my personal profile. Some of the articles in the September Computers in Libraries covered this conundrum and other Facebook issues quite well.

I confess: I don't listen to podcasts very often, because I like to be able to concentrate on them while I do. So if I'm doing work that involves reading or writing, which is most of the time, they're out. I mainly listen if I'm doing things like literally cutting and pasting for displays, editing things in Photoshop, or cleaning at home.

I'm glad the suggestion was to subscribe to them in Bloglines. Personally, I'm far more likely to listen when they come up there; I never kept track of my subs in iTunes. Although I wasn't impressed with Podcast.net at first glance because there was no obvious category in which to find library podcasts, searching for library brought up a few interesting podcasts--the Pritzker Military Library and Lunar and Planetary Institute podcasts stood out. Unfortunately it only found five law library podcasts. There are more than five law library podcasts, and it left out some of the best known. I'm not sure if they seek out podcasts to list or rely on podcaster submissions.

Podcast Alley seemed to have a better directory at first glance, but then I discovered there is no subdirectory, i.e., no specific library section in the education section. And only even fewer results for a law library search. I didn't bother looking at Yahoo's listing.

For my professional interests, Justia's Blawgsearch is a much better resource. There are 67 entries under the podcasting category. While only a handful focus on or are produced by law librarians, there is also other interesting material dealing with law and technology. I already knew about this, but I think it's cool that the Seventh Circuit to podcast their oral arguments!

A brand new podcast that I've subscribed to that is recorded and produced by a law librarian but probably won't be listed in Justia is the Shadow and James Show by prolific podcaster Jim Milles and his girlfriend Kristina Lively, who is also a librarian. Shadow and James are their avatars in Second Life. In the first episode they talk about how they met, integrating their multi-feline real life households, and movies. It's a fun listen, and I found it frustrating not to be able to talk back to them about cats and some of the other topics. In episode two, they visit New Orleans and some Second Life friends in real life. It will be interesting to see where it goes. One thing their site needs: pictures of the very cool ice house-podcasting studio that Kristina built in Second Life!

We haven't tried podcasting in the NSU Law Library yet, but I attended a podcasting workshop at AALL this year that Jim put on along with Diane Murley, Lee Peoples, and Don Zhou. Our microphone is finally on its way, and I took lots of good notes, so one of these days we'll be there!

Although it has its issues--copyright, lots of junk, and the spam in the comments section--YouTube is a fantastic resource. It's been my main source for Novalawcity's Video of the Week feature--something I've had in hopes of luring students (and faculty) into the blog every week with something fun. I haven't got any feedback from students, but last Friday I heard from two faculty members, one of whom reported that she used this embarrassing Marcia Clark video in class. I've used it when teaching too, along with some other videos about legal research, like this one about stress toy abuse. They're a great way to illustrate a serious message or start off a teaching session with a laugh.

I also use YouTube personally, mainly because it's less hassle to upload a video to YouTube than to email it and have it fill up mailboxes and take forever to upload and download. I fully realize that pictures and movies of other people's pets are often like other people's vacation pictures, but the videos being out there for the world is just incidental. (Nevertheless, I find it bizarre that more than 2500 people have sat through this silly 7-second video of my Rufus emerging from a paper bag!) My sister lives in Las Vegas, so last year I uploaded a bunch of short videos of my cats and my parents' puppy. Comment about other people's pets aside, here's my personal favorite of the cats when they were five months old. A favorite mainly because the music I happened to be listening to synced up nicely with the action!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZiA1LLLUGI&rel=1]

Thing 19 suggests we check out a nominee or winner from the SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards.

(Aside: I think I tried to vote in the awards when they happened, but didn't finish voting, I think because there were a daunting number of categories and too many services that I hadn't seen, thus I couldn't cast an informed ballot.)

I just checked out Yelp, a site that provides information and reviews about local merchants, restaurants, events, and more. Unfortunately, like so many sites, it seems to be most effective for major metropolitan areas where there are lots of people reviewing and providing content. There's not much content here in the suburbs. There was only three Thai restaurant reviewed outside of Wilton Manors/Las Olas, for example. And when I searched for vintage, it brought up Old Navy. Old Navy?! I can wrap my brain around how that may have happened, but still. I may try one of the Thai restaurants my first search brought up, but for right now, Yelp isn't much help to me, and doesn't seem any more 2.0 or useful than Citysearch and similar sites I used when I was living in New York during the Web 1.0 bubble.

During one of the labs I started playing with Cocktail Builder. Now there's a useful app! In the future, I'd like a similar one for cooking containing (and real-time status monitoring of!) all the ingredients in my kitchen.

Test, test, test. What do I like about Zoho Writer? Let's see...it has my preferred default font of the moment (Georgia). Don't like? After I saved this document, the font reverted to the default, so I had to redo it. Hmm.

I like the customization of buttons. I hate the cartoon smiley options, though. I like that there are lots of options in the link creating function.

The digisign option is intriguing. I haven't heard of EchoSign.com, the site through which it works, but it sounds worth looking into.

I love that docs can be exported as a number of file types, including PDFs. Unfortunately I'm doing this catch up post at an open lab, and I'm prevented from using any right click functions on this computer, so I can't see how large the file is. (Sometimes PDFs created with programs other than Adobe Acrobat are huge).

Ooooo! Another feature I love: when I open a new document, it opens in an internal-to-Zoho tab. That's nice, especially when one is stuck in a non-tabbed browser like IE6.

The history option is nice too. I wonder if it still shows history after documents are closed and re-opened? Let's see.

Yes indeed. That's a feature that would be great to have on Word. (I haven't tried Word 2007 yet; it's possible it has it, but then again, I don't have great confidence in Microsoft!)

I didn't expect to like Zoho as much as I do so far, so I'll definitely continue to play with it. I'm curious for one thing how it will handle formatting of imported documents. One final thing I like about it is that it's not owned by Google. I use Google as much as the next librarian, but I like a little variety in who has access to my search history/emails/photo albums/etc., so I try to resist the Google hegemony when possible.

(edit) One more dislike: after publishing this to the blog, which was a simple process, I've had to come back in to edit out the double paragraph breaks--as well as add tags to it. That's okay--I can't see any reason to switch blog writing to Zoho anyhow.

I have a personal wiki account at pbwiki, though I haven't actually used it for anything yet. Playing in the NSU Libraries' pbwiki sandbox was mostly painless, though the default editor wanted to remove returns from bulleted lists whenever I made a link--this could confuse novice users.

I will leave figuring out which favorites I added as an exercise for the reader save two under the favorite books category. The Social Life of Information, which I read for a digital libraries course, was the single most influential book I read in library school. It's not overtly about library science, but the issue it covers--creating social space and context around information--is essential to our work.

I've already flogged Everything is Miscellaneous here, but I'll do it again in more detail: if you're a librarian and haven't read it yet, check it out. Once again, it's not targeted as a library science text, but it's an essential read (and as Carrie reminded me, it's dedicated to librarians!). The thesis is that we've moved from first order organization of knowledge, where books and other physical information containers could only be arranged in one spot at a time, to the second order of card catalogs and the like with multiple access points selected by experts, to the digital third order in which every single word in a work can be an access point--and the implications of this shift for our culture and the way we think. Also check out the Everything is Miscellaneous blog.

Everything is Miscellaneous should be required reading in every cataloging class. If I ever teach a library science course of any type, I plan to figure out a way to require reading of at least one of these books.

TLC2.0 week 7 is about wikis. I feel like I should like wikis more than I do. Maybe I would if I hadn't learned HTML first? The first wikis I encountered required learning of their own supposedly simple syntax, which I found more confusing than HTML. Now that more of them seem to be embracing the simple Word-style editor like Blogger uses, I'm liking them more. But I still often enough go into the HTML view to fix things that aren't displayed to my liking.

They can be useful, though. The law library has an internal wiki that we used to store shared passwords, locations of certain items like magnifying glasses, directories, and so forth. I don't think it gets used very often, but it has come in handy.

I love the idea of conference wikis and the possibility for sharing info, tips, and even one's own planned conference schedule as a means of hooking up with friends and colleagues you don't see very often. (And stalkers! I kid.) Unfortunately, none of the conferences I've been to yet has had a wiki. I see that the ALA 2006 wiki was hosted by Meredith Farkas on her personal domain, so maybe I'll have to look into taking some personal initiative.

Hala Jin Ashai, one of the TLC 2.0 librarian/bloggers just posted a great analogy I have to share:

Why do we need librarians when we have Google? Why do we need actors when we have reality t.v.?

She also noted something else I completely agree with, and something that gets to the heart of why we're spending time exploring these 2.0 tools:

Also, we need to get away from the model that the customer needs to come to us. There should be an aggressive campaign on what we can provide to the customer. That includes materials and services.

So true. We do ourselves and our patrons a disservice if we fail to explore all the possibilities for delivering services, sharing knowledge, and marketing ourselves. Not every single librarian needs to explore every single possibility, of course, but NO librarian should have his or her head in the sand, because "we've always done it this way" or "it works fine now" or a myriad of other excuses. 2.0 tools are just another way of growing tentacles to reach out to our patrons.

Since we explored Technorati, I thought I'd mention some of the other tools I've found indispensable with my blogging and blog readings:

• Feedburner. Have you ever noticed that when you subscribe to a blog in Bloglines, it offers you two, three, or more RSS feed URLS? Feedburner provides a tool to make sure all your readers are subscribed through the same feed address for an accurate count, and also provides an easy way to customize a subscribe button for your blog or offer an option for readers who haven't been bitten by the aggregator bug to subscribe by email.
• Statcounter. Want to know how many people are reading your blog, what operating system, browser, and resolution they're using, and how they're finding you? Sign up with Statcounter and use the HTML/java script page element option on the Blogger template to add the code to your blog. Like the Technorati authority and rank numbers, it's easy to get obsessed with checking your Statcounter stats. Sitemeter is another site that provides stats tracking.
• Clustrmaps. Clustrmaps creates that neat little widget in my sidebar that geographically displays where my blog visitors are from. Another tool that inspires a little obsession when you first install it.
• Co.mments. Blogger notifies when anyone comments on our blogs, but what about finding out if someone has responded to a comment you left on someone else's blog or staying updated on an interesting conversation another blogger has started? I keep a link to add a post to my Co.mments tracker on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar right next to my Bloglines subscribe link. Then I subscribed to the feed of comments that I'm tracking. Last year I tried another service called cocomment. I liked that it automatically tracked every comment I left, so I didn't have to remember to add them, but I stopped using it after it insisted on tracking comments on every last Flickr photo I commented on.

Like the other 2.0 tools we've been exploring, all of these services are free at the basic level. What other tools do you use? Any alternatives to the above that I should check out?