Thing 4: RSS and Newsreaders

I hope I don't lose my post again.. here it goes.
I set up an account with GoogleReader. As my last post for Thing 3 shows I was confused between a reader/aggregator and a Blog Search engine. Now I've got that figured out. I know that RSS is a way to bring the information to you. As the video explained like Netflix versus the video store. I didn't know any blogs so I just selected all of the staff picks. This was very fun to see what things I started to receive. Some of them I unsubscribed to but some I kept. Next I tried to remember as I visited sites more than once to select the RSS feed signal so that they would come to me instead. I did this with the legal news sites I visit. I also found some suggestions for RSS feeds from professional news journals that I receive. Some of the regular writers of the journals maintain blogs so now I can get those to come to me. It is great because otherwise I would forget. I just set up a feed from one of the 23 things blogs. It was very easy and now I can know if someone has made a new post without going all the way into the Neflin's 23 things list. Nice. Librarians could definitely identify relevant blogs and use RSS feeds to channel them so that they would be easily accessible to patrons. It could be used internally as well, say the reference department could have a collection of feeds that provides access to professional blogs like the professional journal we subscribe to in print.

Thing 3 continued: Technorati and Google Blog Search

Okay, I just got another error and lost this whole post as well. So sad for me to do everything twice. Oh well, it is floating somewhere in Cyberspace. (I just lost it all Again)

Here is another summary.
1. Google Blog Search is comparable to Technorati.
2. The "justicia" search on Google Blog Search got 1,690,040 hits. Yikes.
3. I prefer Technorati to Google Blog search. It offers more content and the organization is easier to understand.

Thing 3: Finally, Technorati and GoogleReader

Oh man I just lost my whole post!! :( (Does anyone know how to retrieve a lost post? I got an error message and went back and the title was there but the content was gone) Here is an abbreviated answer, the first one was much more comprehensive, sorry.
1. I explored Technorati and GoogleReader
2. I searched for "justicia" and got over 35,000 hits on Technorati. It gave me the first 10 hits with a brief summary and also links to the top 4 videos all on the first page. It gave me options to page forward through the hits. All of the first 10 hits were foreign language links. Googlereader gave me 5 hits. That's it. I tried to expand the search using "expand" and "list" but these were for other functions that related to the five hits. It seems weird that there were only five hits. They were also foreign language with summaries and links, the links were in english I believe.
3. Technorati features: Very professional looking. Has different pages for different subjects. When you go into a subject it gives you a whole page of links with short summaries. It breaks the subject into top blogs by attention and top news stories by attention. Although it manages to put an enormous amount of content on the page, they organize so that it is easy to use. GoogleReader looks more like a socialnetworking site. It has ways to organize "your stuff" under a link by that name. You can share your blogs with friends and search your blogs my categories that you set up. Even though the content onthe page is small it is harder to figure out the organization and less user friendly.

Thing 2: What is Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is not the future, it is the present. In a way we need to stop thinking of Web 2.0 as something we need to analyze to see if the benefits are worth choosing to implement. We don't have a choice. Especially librarians and libraries, this is the world that we live in. This is the web now. To provide services that are relevant to our patrons now we need to embrace Web 2.0 technology and it needs to become our world now. The biggest example of the way Web 2.0 is totally integrated in our world today is the Obama campaign and election and how the way his staff used Web 2.0 technology to communicate with and grow his movement for change. User created content, connections on a daily basis, transparent communication and collective intelligence.

Trust and Library 2.0

I just finished reading the "The Ongoing Web Revolution" aricle and I watched the "The Machine is Us/ing Us" youtube video and two things stuck in my mind.
First, "trust drives change" where you "communicate the mission, the vision, and purpose of the library's social participation and then trust the staff to go forth and blog, build wikis..." and
Second, "welll-trained staff is key to utilizing social technologies".

So what I got out of it is, to be successful in using Library 2.0 technologies, Library management must trust their staff and their users really and they must train their staff. As we all know change is scary and relinquishing control is even scarier. Two big obstacles to implementing Library 2.0 technologies. But participation in Neflin's 23 things is a big start!

Wow, great blogs

I just want to say that there are some great blogs posted and I am frantically trying to learn from you all! I started to try to put together a profile. I see that some of you actually have a photo and even music on your blog. That is definitely advanced. Thanks for sharing.

Tumblelog

I just told my son that I created a blog this morning and he sent me this link explaining a new trend in blogs. I thought I would share. Apparently this type of blog favors less conversation and more media type posts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblelog