wiki wiki tembo no sa rembo chari bari ruchi pip peri pembo

now i know all about wikis. i like the concept. i'm not sure i quite understand how they manage to save all previous versions for reposting or reverting or whatever else might be necessary, but that's fine, it works for me. i'm often paralyzed bu doubt, leaving my blog entries in draft form for days and days because i don't want to publish them and then have to make a minor correction (which makes the whole thing reappear on bloglines) five minutes later.

i absolutely adore the possibility of intranet committee wikis, and policy manual wikis, for the reasons stated by meredith in her web junction article. sarah is absolutely right in the podcast, having twelve (or forty) emails on a topic that occurs on one's day off, and is resolved before one returns, would be completely unnecessary if there were system, cluster, department, specialty, and branch wikis.

and that doesn't even begin to address the potential for reader's advisory wikis, book club wikis, local information wikis, school wikis, and so on and so forth. the possibilities are endless (and overwhelming). it might be straightforward enough to start off with an answerfile wiki or a web links wiki and go from there. there could be areas for community submissions that were checked by a librarian before going live. but it would be unstoppable. are we going there?

the sjcpl subject guides wiki is good, it's not comprehensive but it isn't obvious about it. library success and ala midwinter 2007 look great, the familiar format is comforting.

the book lovers wiki is a bit of a disappointment, perhaps because it just got started? i mean really, there are only two romances on there! i was also disappointed by citizendium, which did not have an entry on cannibalism.

i have something i want to add to the library success wiki but i don't know what category it would fall under. i should probably be ashamed of this, as i am an information professional, but i'm mostly just afraid of doing it wrong. what if i put it under apples and someone comes along and moves it to oranges and i can't ever find it again? i'd better have a cup of tea.

stage fright

i got myself all signed up for librarything and then couldn't think of any books to add to it. what's worse is that going home and looking at my shelves won't help because i get rid of books i've read. the books in my house are insurance against house arrest or other disaster, as i've a terror of not having anything to read. but that's a path we don't want to go down today.

i concentrated hard and thought up a few books to add, tagged them, and thought some more about tags. i actually read the librarything blog entry comparing their tagging to amazon's and found it illuminating. i will continue to work on appreciating them, against my instincts.

i like seeing how many other people have the titles i've selected in their own listings, and will try to add titles with fewer advocates (to increase my chances of finding like-minded folks). stay tuned for the addition of a widget, meanwhile check me out.

you're it!

and on with tagging. i still don't like it. i went to technorati and claimed my two active blogs and even tagged them. it's interesting to know that other blogs link to my blogs. when i was doing the discovery exercise i was pleased to note that a search for kcls27things in blog posts garners me some links to porn. or items that have the appearance of porn. and as a side note, in my personal lexicon, "wtf" doesn't stand for "where's the fire." (neither does it involve tae kwon do.)

so in response to the questions in the discovery exercise, yes, the results are different when i choose different search parameters (revolutionary!). and thanks for the porn!

so cute

ordinarily i reserve my swoons for my cats alone, but this one just grabbed me.

tasty treat

ok so i'm learning all about del.icio.us. it strikes terror into my heart. my obsessive compulsive librarian mind will not allow me to be charmed by something so messy as a folksonomy. i have my books arranged by dewey classification at home, my personal files are structured by a strict controlled vocabulary, and i'm utterly paralyzed by the little box at the bottom of every blog entry inviting me to tag it. this might not be a problem if i had a copy of lcsh on my desk, but i don't so i can't.

that said, i'm supposed to be revising my worldview for the sake of all things 2.0, yes? ok then.

i would like for there to be a live and managed del.icio.us account (is that what it's even called now?) for librarians at a branch and in a system. a place to find the nearest notary public or public fax machine on the local level; a place to collect all those links we receive in informative emails from the government documents librarian on the organizational level. this would save us scrambling around asking the staff members who live nearby if they know, or deleting the pertinent message exactly two hours before a patron inquires about that specific item.

the key to the success of this is that it be maintained. delete dead links, find new ones, fix it when ins changes their name to cis. that sort of thing.

on a personal level, it will be nice to bookmark things from an email from a friend and be able to find it again whether i'm at work or at home. cat videos, online quizzes, articles about public toilets in europe.

whew. whenever i look at that blasted tag box i just want to type in "scooters, vacation, fall" like they suggest.

*whew*

can i just say how glad i am that this week's lessons were something i'd already done? thank the force for that. rather than starting from scratch, i updated my myspace profile for work appropriateness, added learning 2.0 as a friend, and i'm golden. yay!

oh. wait. i'm supposed to comment on the experience. hm. well, i got on myspace in march 2006. i think one of rick's teens badgered me into it. or one of my friends. i didn't really do much with it, just signed up and later put up a picture and later still added some more information. i guess i mostly wanted to be able to view the profiles of the boys another friend was dating.

since then a guy i went to high school with has messaged me, and i saw some frightening pictures of someone i have known since fifth grade. i'm not sure of the precise value of those experiences, but hey, it's better than calling around the country asking hapless librarians to page through city directories.

i'm glad that rick showed me how to pimp my profile, i was feeling very sad and boring and now i'm lilac and thrilling.

and again with the feeding, oy!

- Which method of finding feeds was easiest - going to your favorite sites or searching for them?

i found searching to be difficult, as the searches were keyworded and when i put in yoga i got any mention of yoga anywhere, same with cats and a few author names, so i kind of gave up on that tactic. i remembered a blog of an author i like and added that myself.

- Which Search tool was the easiest for you? Which was more confusing?

i used the bloglines search and the google blog search and feedster. they all seem easy enough to use, i'm just not that interested in their results list. i'm interested in news sites and "authoritative" sources rather than the random ramblings of the average joe. i'll follow blogs of my friends and other known quantities, but am not seeking the random serendipity of the blogosphere. (how many monkeys are out there typing now, anyway, and have they produced any new shakespeare plays?)

- What kind of unusual feeds did you find on your travels?

n/a

feed me!

good lord, i started reading this week's lesson on rss feeds and thought i was going to have a nervous breakdown. it took me a minute to stop freaking out and just read through the lesson and go along and do it. creating accounts all over the world is maddening, i'm glad sites finally started using folks' email addresses as the login, since i'm not likely to forget that. and i have a selection of three or four passwords that i use so i can rotate through those till i hit the right one for whatever i'm logging in to.

but i'm supposed to be writing about my experience registering for bloglines and subscribing to rss feeds. i liked that as soon as you confirm your bloglines account they offer you various choices to get you started. so you don't have to panic and think you're uncool because you don't know what to subscribe to. i picked a couple of word of the day things, a joke of the day from comedy central (will be cancelling that posthaste), reuters top stories, that sort of thing. then i got back on track with the assignment and found that i'm required to sign up for several other things as well, so now i'm creepily stalking a couple of other kcls employees (sorry jed and anna and julia). and reading more news and unshelved, which i already did.

erm. i digress. it's cool, if a little daunting. usually i spend an hour or so a week messing about reading things, now i'm going to know exactly how vast the information i miss from week to week is, as the rss feeds will stay there until i read them (gark). i'm not sure how i feel about that. onwards and upwards, i suppose. there's another lesson looming and blinking at me as i type...

mish mash mish

ok this may not seem creative to you, but anyone who knows me well knows how important spelling is and so having a source with which to spell important things (and what, really, is more important than kcls?) touches my soul. cheers.

my friend flickr

ok i got signed up and uploaded a photo and tagged it kcls27things. all of this was spectacularly anxiety inducing for some reason. let's see if it works to stick it here.



well, that seems to have worked. let me view it to see.

anne rose's rose

this episode has been brought to you by learning 2.0 in an effort to help the world smell nicer.

the countdown

rick is just full of fun, today he shared:

public service announcement

the boss sent this out today, it's kind of amusing. gotta wonder if they actually ran it on television and if it brought folks into the library...

thrills, chills, magic, prizes!

it's so exciting to see folks getting all into blogging. i'm glad mine is pink. hee.