Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Thing 6 - Social Bookmarking

Howdy,

Today’s thing (#6) is Social Bookmarking.

Social Bookmarking is a great way to save all your bookmarks or favorites to one website. That way you can access them from any online computer in the world. Imagine you’re at your local library and you find a cool new website. Rather than writing down the address and possibly forgetting it, you could use del.ico.us to bookmark it and never be without.

Another plus is that you can group your addresses into categories via tags, for easier identification. Give all your banking sites one tag and all the game sites another. This is especially helpful when you have a lot of bookmarks.

Lastly, there is the social part. You can browse other people’s bookmarks and let others browse yours. If a lot of people have a website bookmarked, it may be worth checking out.

My favorite bookmarking site is Stumbleupon.com. There is a great toolbar that you can download for Firefox that allows you, with the click of a button, to discover great new sites. If you like the site, give it a thumbs up, if not, a thumbs down. Stumblupon finds more sites that you might like based on those ratings. It is addicting.

Till next time,

Cheers!



Thursday, October 11, 2007

Thing 5 - Flickr and Photo Sharing

Hello Again,

We've made it to Thing 5. We're half way home! Hooray!

I'm really excited about Thing 5 - Photo Sharing. I love pictures. They can tell so much. Flickr makes it so easy to upload and share them that I jumped right in.

I have been playing around with Flickr for the last few months (ever since I sat in on a class taught by JPB in the computer lab, which I highly recommend). This website is great. There are some amazing photos here. I like that you can upload a ton of photos and then just e-mail the link to whomever you want to see them. It saves having to attach file after file to an e-mail and with most e-mail accounts you can only do a few files at a time. That is time consuming and a pain in the...you get the idea. With flickr, you can send someone a whole album of photos with one simple web address. It's great!

I highly recommend this site to anyone who likes to take and share pictures. Cheers!

P.S. Here is the link to my photos, enjoy!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimwesten/

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Thing 4 - Social Networking

Ok, so here we are at 'Thing 4'. In this installment we're going to talk about social networking.

Social networking websites are designed to connect people. This is done by posting a profile for others to see and then searching through others profiles. Then you can make connections based on whatever types of things you are interested in. If your looking for a job? Try Linkedin.com. I found that it wasn't as good as Careerbuilder.com for job postings, but if your trying to make connections with people rather than businesses, it works. Looking for a long lost friend? Make a page on Facebook.com. I've only been on this site for three days and already I have reunited with five friends that I went to school with. Amazing!

I was never a fan of myspace or facebook but now that I live farther away from where I grew up, it is coming in handy. I can keep tabs on people that I don't get to see much anymore and the same goes for them. So far my experiences have been good. Till next time.

Cheers!

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Thing 3 - Instant Messaging

Alrighty than! Thing 3! Instant Messaging!

Instant messaging is a way for people to communicate to each other in real time over a network like the internet. There are several programs that one could use to do IM-ing. AIM, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and Google Talk are just a few.

Instant messaging is not a new concept to me. IM-ing has been around for a long time in one form or another, whether it be Google Talk or text messaging or chat rooms, I’m old hat. Now a days I occasionally chat with a friend in Gmail but I generally prefer plain 'ol e-mail. If you lump text messaging in, I, like so many others, am totally addicted.

Texting is a great way to communicate via cell phone when it’s impractical or impolite to have a real conversation (we in the library don’t know anything about improper cell phone use, do we?). Still, in the library world, texting doesn’t seem to have a lot of uses. On the other hand, there is a great way for library’s to benefit from the IM craze, chat rooms.

I find more and more businesses doing online support via a chat room. Just the other day I used Comcast's online support and it could not have been easier. I logged in, waited for their professional to log in and after a few brief questions he was able to walk me through my problem. I have seen library’s do very similar things with reference. It can really cut down on the flaws of verbal communication, namely not being able to understand what a person is saying.

I like the idea of instant messaging; I just don't get enough from it to use it with any kind of consistency (except for texting). Good concept, but bad in practice for me.

Till thing 4 comes along. Cheers!

Monday, October 1, 2007

Thing 2 - RSS and Feed Readers

'ello Again,

So I just finished up with 'Thing 2 - RSS and Feed Readers'. RSS and feed readers enable you to check the new headlines and news of your favorite websites by visiting a single site. This saves time as you only have to check one site rather than several of them. In theory this is a great idea but I find that in practice I prefer checking each individual site. With high speed internet what it is, I don't find that RSS saves me that much time. Also, the sites that I look at are updated, at the very least, daily and most are updated several times a day. This means that if you were to check your RSS once a day, you would still get a whole list of new headlines.


Where I find that RSS and feed readers to be the biggest help is in the mobile market and on computers with slower connections. Smart Phones are great but lets face it they aren't built for high speed internet surfing (yet). It really does save a ton of time, only checking one site, when your connection is slow. Some phones today even come with feed readers built into the firmware to make it easier.

For me, I'll stick to checking my favorite websites the old fashion way (yes I put websites and old fashion in the same sentence, ha).

On to 'Thing 3'

Cheers!