23 things – Final thoughts

Overall I thought the course was worthwhile . I was already familiar with a number of the tools so it might be good if you could just select the ones you aren’t familiar with. I certainly left a trail of accounts across the internet for tools which I probably won’t use again.  The course did take a while to complete and you needed to do some every week or you ended up spending a large block of time catching up.

Social Networking – Myspace and Facebook

I can see the appeal of both these tools and my daughter has a Myspace page and my son has a Facebook page so I am familiar with how useful they are for sharing photos and information.Both of my children have restricted access to their pages so they can share information with close friends. I set up a facebook page and  is certainly easy enough to do. I won’t do much with it at the moment as I would prefer  to use it for a specific purpose such as staying in contact when travelling overseas rather than day to day information.

Twitter

I set up a twitter account and already have complete strangers wanting to follow me on twitter. I have to say I am not a fan of twitter and am not surprised 40 percent of people who sign up for twitter  abandon it within a month. You can’t say anything really significant within word limit and knowing what someone had for lunch or just watched on TV doesn’t excite me and and i doubt there is anything salacious like  Malcolm Turnbull noting on twitter “just met with treasury mole for lunch”.

Podcasting

I already add podcasts from Radio national to my itouch and have added some of the Library ones as well via itunes so I am familiar with podcasts and there are some good ones available.

Youtube

Provides hours of entertainment. It is amazing what you find there. Intersting trend when my son was doing first year maths at Uni he would search Youtube for videos on certain aspects of calculus rather than search google to find texts on calculus so it is not only about entertainment but is educational as well. This video appeals and it will strike a chord anyone who has a conversation with a teenage boy.

Task – Google

I have looked at Google maps before and checked out my house. I do have reservations about the filming of private houses by Google as i do feel it is an invasion of privacy.Google Docs has some interesting templates and being able to share access to documents would probably be useful if you were working with someone outside of UQ. Finally iGoogle is very easy to set up customised page for yourself. I created one easily and added applications

Libnet – Task 16

I added my entry to Libnet a tool I am familiar with having set up SSAH Libnet page. Libnet doesn’t strike me as a real wiki as being Librarians we can’t resist trying to impose a heirarchical structure so it doesn’t seem to function seemlessly like wikipedia

Wikis

I have to confess wikipedia is one of my favourite websites for entertainment topics such as television series that are guilty pleasures such as Buffy the Vampire slayer and Dexter as the entries have been written by obsessive fans. In terms of medical topics or academic assignments wikipedia wouldn’t be on my list of websites but is very good for technology topics. I am all ways in awe of the amount of time people are prepared to commit to writing entries for wikipedia. Of course the issue of any one being able to edit entries allows for interesting interpretations of history and some good conspiracy theories as to who is editing and what the CIA is up to. Got a love a good conspiracy theory! The entry for Salvadore Allende has disclaimers throughout such as the following

“The relevance of particular information in (or previously in) this article or section is disputed.
The information may have been removed or included by an editor as a result.
Please see discussion on the talk page considering whether its inclusion is warranted.(June 2009)”

On the far less controversial topic of Library uses of Wikis one of the wikis I aspire to emulate is Biz Wiki . I have a dream that one day I will create my own liaison wiki.

Technorati & tagging

I looked at technorati when I did the blog exercise and it wasn’t my preferred tool for searching blogs as i prefer results from google blog search. I did the exercise searching for terms using quick search and also using a search of tag terms and got fewer results for tag searches but more focussed searches as you might expect. Tagging is a form of subject classification even if it does not have the hierarchical approach of traditional subject classification

Delicious

Good name for the website. I could see the advantages of sharing urls and being able to access your own urls from different computers. I chose not go through the exercise of signing up as I am unlikely to use delicious. One thing I did note from my searches is that some of the websites that are listed in your search results no longer exist which I guess is inevitable.