Thing #24, Tracking What Users Say About Your Library

Using a Bloglines Citation Search, and Google Alerts, (I used Twitter Search as well, but didn't find anything of interest), I found some interesting things: A postcard of the Lincoln City Library in 1909, a pat on the back for our library for buying a book a patron asked for, a county in Montana that links to one of our library book lists that mentions that the cargo of the Steamboat Bertrand was bound for Montana, some critical reviews of the design of our library's web site (example) and some other stuff. If I had had more time and used more ingenuity, I might have found more.

Thing #23: Is this really the end?

Well, its the end of 23 things, which I found to be a really useful roadmap to exploration. If the library commission started another such exercise, I would likely participate. Among the discoveries or explorations I found most useful were Delicious, Bloglines, and everything having to do with wikis. I'll probably even keep the blog, though I might take a couple of weeks break from blogging for now.

Thing #22: Podcasts

I looked at podcasts in several directories and tried a search on Google too. There is a lot of stuff out there. I probably will not keep podcasts on my RSS feed, again, I have a cheap DSL connection at home, and bandwidth is still too much of an issue for me, so I would only use podcasts maybe for language learning or for some other special task. I listened to a bit of a comedy news podcast I got from the Internet Archive Podcast page.

Thing #21: YouTube

YouTube is so demanding of bandwidth that I rarely use it at home, and even in the library, it often just sputters along. But it does have some interesting effects. It is allowing a kind of journalism to develop that evades the prejudices and self-censorship of our local newspapers and of the American television networks. We can see things the way the rest of the world sees them, and sometimes that is healthy. Here is a link to a long posting on the Israeli assault on the Gaza strip, replete with YouTube videos, on Juan Cole's Informed Commentary Blog, which I think, over time, has been one of the best news blogs on the Internet.

Thing #20 Discovering Web 2.0 tools.

The object of this exercise was to look at the Web 2.0 tools on the Web 2.0 awards site. I enjoyed looking at some of the sites, especially self publishing site Lulu.com, which has some interesting titles. I don't see what is so "Web 2.0" about say, Biblio.com, ABE books was already doing this in Web 1.0 if you want to call it that, but the list is still an interesting one. I expect that Google maps and the hosted Wikis will be among the most useful tools listed for libraries. Another interesting guide to Web 2.0, if you are interested, is the Progammable Web site.

Thing #19: Online Apps

I'm writing this in Zoho writer, which, IMHO, beats the pants off of Google documents, at least for personal use. I'm going to try to publish it to the blog, straight from Zoho, so if you see it, I've succeeded.
OK, it did work, though I am adding this as I had to edit the tag, which did not come out quite right.

Thing #18: PBwiki

I added some favorites to the Nebraska Learns 2.0 wiki. It is not hard to edit a wiki.