Blog Readers

Okay...okay. I skipped the Flickr sections, but I intend to work on those later. For some reason the whole Flickr thing seems to demand more concentration.

I've worked with blog subscriptions before in my Information Storage and Retrieval class in fall of 2008, but I haven't done too much with my subscriptions since the class ended. I wonder.... how do people keep up with their blog reading. I understand that the Reader is supposed to be a tool to facilitate management of blog reading, but I can't seem to check the Reader on a regular basis. Does everyone have that problem?

I learned some new things while working on the Reader Thing for NTRLS. This was my first time to use the folder option to organize my subscriptions. Nifty! No doubt if I do more exploring I will find other tools of interest.

I really do like Reader. I also think I should use it more often, but it does compete with my book reading time. Since books are in front of my face all day long and at home I never forget about their presence. Perhaps I should wear a rubber band around my arm to remind myself about my blog reader. It seems that when I do read my subscriptions I am in a hurry and often my attention is not focused. I guess that's the benefit of the blog format of short bursts of information.

If I think of this as similar to receiving a magazine subscription it becomes even more exciting. That's one of the appeals of 2.0.... information comes to me.

Library 2.0

The assignment: Write a post on your own blog about your thoughts about Library 2.0 or Web 2.0 and how they apply to you and your library.

Here was my first thought when I saw that our task was to read (or watch something) about Library 2.0.... I should check the library catalog to see if we have a book about that!

So, I checked out "Web 2.0 and Beyond." It appears to be a relatively dry text. It seems that books about computers and applications are far duller than actually working on a computer. I guess what I'm saying is this, actually playing with the 2.0 tools is more fun than reading about them. Hmm... that's strange. Usually reading about something is far more satisfying than actually doing that something, at least for me that's the case.

What does Web 2.0 mean for my library? That's difficult to say since I am so new here, but I think 2.0 is simply something every librarian and library assistant needs to be familiar with. Hopefully, as we take this journey together, we can become more than familiar with 2.0. I hope we will become fluent.

Whenever I want to focus on books and reading and forget about the place of computers in the contemporary public library I think about Star Trek, and computers don't seem quite so dull. Sorry to be on such a Star Trek kick, but doesn't something fictional like the world of Star Trek sometimes make something like the world of computers more exciting? You see, for me it's all about the story, and if I need to pretend that I'm on a starship and learning about 2.0 to make it exciting, that is what I will do.

I really didn't want this post to go off into tangents and become personal since this 2.0 experiment is related to work, but I think this tendency towards the personal simply speaks to the nature of the blog. Therefore the contemporary cult of the individual personality will continue, and it looks like I will be a part of it. :)

Finally

I'm finally going to participate in a 23 Things program. I heard about this at a NTRLS presentation on technology, and I also learned about it in library school.

I'm a fairly busy person with library school and work. Hopefully I can keep up with everyone.