Thing #15 Online Games and Libraries

Online Games and Libraries

I decided to take a look at Second Life, and watched the YouTube video of Info Island. Second Life looks like a fun way to wander around in a virtual environment. I liked the tour of Info Island, especially the Mystery section. I thought it was a creative use of the 3D area with the pumpkins, and other creepy looking decorations.

Is there a role for Second Life in libraries?

I could see people using Second Life in libraries, however I usually find more often than not kids are playing games like Runescape and other fantasy adventure type games.

It's also interesting while visiting the many libraries that I do what the local policies are towards gaming. Some are very pro-gaming, and others are somewhat oblivious and some are very anti-gaming. So depending on which library you belong to or patronize, the local policies are all very different, (Your results may vary.)

Thing #14 LibraryThing

How can you use LibraryThing for your library?

Well I'm not a library staff person, but if I were I could see entering favorite books from my collection into LibraryThing and sharing them so others could see what my titles are.

How else do you share booklists, etc. with library patrons? Would LibraryThing offer an alternative?

Once again I'm not a library person, so I don't really have an answer about sharing booklists. Would it offer an alternative, sure.

I would find LibraryThing much more useful if it wasn't books only. I would consider using something like this personally if I could use it to catalog not only my books, but my CD music and DVD collections.

Thing #13 Online Productivity Tools

I've used both Google and Yahoo's homepages, and both are quite useful. I like being able to edit what content shows up on my homepage. I use Yahoo more often, so I picked Yahoo! as my favorite. I doubt I'll make it my permanant homepage, however as useful as it is, I may reconsider in the future. Currently I use my work's website as it is also a portal to useful information that I need. Personally I like Google's applications suite more than Yahoo's more limited tools. Basically you get e-mail a full office suite, online storage of your documents and a lot of other things too numerous for the scope of this blog entry.

The Calendar tool in Google I find works a lot better. It's more sharing friendly and allows you to have multiple calendars overlayed on top of each other at once, (a very cool feature considering this is free web based calendaring software.)

Thing #12 Do You Digg?

Ok so I'm checking out Digg and Mixx for the first time. They're both content sharing and rating systems. Digg appears to be a much better organized site than Mixx. What they really remind me of is a clearing house for all the useless bits on the internet that people liked and thought they should vote on. I find myself spending entirely too much time trying to find something on them that I'm looking for because I have to Digg through the rest of the junk to find a nugget of useful information. If you're looking for random idiotic bits of popular information give them a try. I could easily spend hours sifting through both of those sites to find something I really cared about. I have to say these sites are definately productivity detractors.

Thing #11 Tagging and Del.icio.us

Tagging is an interesting concept. I liked Del.icio.us and it would be useful to keep my bookmarks and favorites in a central location so that no matter which computer I'm using I have access to them. I decided not to create a user account with Del.icio.us at this time, because I've already got too many userid's and passwords to remember.

Thing #10 Wikis

I like Wikis, I've used them in the past and continue to do so. However I personally use them for looking up information, and rarely if ever have any reason to add, edit or change information in them.

Regarding teachers banning Wikis as a source of information, I personally thing that is a bad practice on their part. Wikis have valid information, and IMHO are usually much more up to date than most other reference sources in print.

I edited the 23 things wiki, because I didn't find I had anything worthwhile to add to another wiki.

Thing #9 Online Collaboration Tools

So I'm most familiar with Google Docs, so I decided to just use the one I was familiar with. Zoho Writer looks interesting but it's just one more thing to have to deal with and I like all the other Google tools in addition to Google Docs. I see huge potential for using tools like this in a library environment. Sharing book and movie lists instantly springs to mind.

Regarding what I think the founding fathers would think of tools like this, I think they would be very excited about them, once they figured out how to use a computer that is. ;o)

Thing #8 Share Your Creations

Thing #8 Share your creations - introduces several new web tools: humbstacks, Zoho Show, Slideshare, Picture Trail, Flicks and eFolio Minnesota among others. I rather liked the interface in Thumbstacks and it seems fairly easy to use. Zoho Show is also quite good, however it has a slightly clunky interface that I didn't care for.

Flicks I thought was pretty cool. You add your photos to it, and it jazzes them up with special "flicks" effects when it switches between the various photos in your slide show.

While all of these tools are quite interesting, I'm not really big on being creative and sharing things for others to see. I don't think I'll be using many of these tools other than just to learn about them for 23 things.

Thing #7 Web 2.0 Communication Tools

Web 2.0 Communication tools, well that's quite a mouthful of jargon. It's interesting to see how all the communications tools that have been developed over the last few years are all being grouped into Web 2.0. In Thing #7, they talked about E-mail, Instant Messaging, Text (SMS) Messaging, Web Conferencing and Blog Prompts. Thing #7 could nearly be it's own 23 things, and should have been broken up into several "Things" of their own. That being said, I will slog through this massive topic in one blog entry.

Let's start with E-mail... 23 Things list for thing 7 mentions Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail. I find it tremendously funny that I have one or more accounts with each of these free e-mail providers, plus a separate e-mail account with my internet service provider. I guess you could say I'm a bit of an e-mail addict. Some of these e-mail accounts are no longer in use, and I have stopped using a few of them because they were originally created so I could access other internet services including social internet tools, and to allow me to subscribe to various internet games. So while I currently have 5 personal e-mail accounts, I used to have twice as many. Can you say userid + password nightmare???

Ok, the next topic is Instant Messaging (IM). Being a PC Geek I've tried and used many various instant messaging tools. Yahoo!, Microsoft Messenger, Trillian (which I use to connect to both Yahoo and MSN Messenger), and an older one that I no longer use, Mirabilis ICQ (currently it's www.icq.com). Instant Messaging can be a very useful tool especially if you are communicating with people across town or across the country. It's more interactive than e-mail, but less so than using a telephone.

Text Messaging (SMS--Short Message Service). If you've got a cell phone, chances are you've heard of this or done this before yourself. I've sent a few text messages, and I just can't see what the appeal is. Entering text from a telephone keypad is annoying. However being able to send and receive messages from anywhere I'm sure has it's appeal to some. To each their own I suppose.

Web Conferencing, now here's something I've only lightly used in the past, however since we started using WebEx here at the office, I've been able to use it for training and user support issues. I would imagine this would be more useful for larger group training sessions on various topics.

Anyways to sum up, there are many Web 2.0 communication tools out there, I've used many of them, and for the most part they are all very handy. Just watch out or they'll eat up all your spare time!

Thing #6 Online Image Generators

Moving right along to Thing 6, we're still working with online images. The first suggestion they have is to go to Big Huge Labs and created a trading card.




I also checked out some image generating tools like this one on ImageChef:




It's amazing all the different image creation tools that are out there to either create something from scratch or to manipulate photos that you already have. I'm looking forward to trying these out some more when I get more time.

Thing #5 More Flickr Fun

Up to Thing #5, now: More Flickr Fun. I decided to see what "Spell with Flickr" makes my blog handle look like:



They make sharing these things in my blog very easy. Once you design what you want, it's a copy/paste of the HTML and presto, it's in my blog.

As far as sharing photos online, I think it's an interesting idea, and if I took more photos, I would certainly be inclined to share them after tinkering with Flickr.

Thing #4 - Flickr

So I've been taking a good look around the Flickr site, doing various searches on "Minnesota Library", and I found this really cool photo of the Downtown Minneapolis Library. This photo was uploaded to Flickr by chrisdeba2004. It also appears to be copyrighted by: MinneapolisDailyPhotoBlogspot.Com


I've never been to this library, but now that I've seen this scenic photo of it, I find myself interested in looking it up next time I take a trip to the twin cities.