Del.icio.us ... but pavlova is better ....

But Del.icio.us has been OK too. I managed to set up the account OK, make a bookmark and migrate it to Twitter. With minimal tags bundling was not an option but I did find the relevant section of Del.icio.us. I even clicked on Linkrolls and Tagrolls but wasn't game to actually try and activate one of them. I subscribed to "Iceland + travel" thinking that would be reasonably esoteric but came up with 21,142 bookmarks so cancelled that one post haste. Either the spaces were a problem or else that just sums up how unwieldy Delicious bookmarks can become. Subscribing to "nswlearning2.1" brought up a much more manageable 18 bookmarks. Searching Del.icio.us under a general tag like "libraries" is a waste of time - the more specific one got (e.g. using the maximum four tags) the more useful it might be but limiting the search to a specific user pool would be more efficient.
I don't use Delicious at all, but if I did and was part of a Twitter group sharing the bookmarks to Twitter would be very useful (personally and professionally), and bundling tags would be essential. Bookmarking combined with Twitter alerts would be particularly useful to specialist librarians and researchers.
In the Web 2.0 course I made the following comments about Delicious and in the absence of additional insights repeat them here .... "I think social bookmarking such as Del.icio.us offers could be a great resource for libraries and their clients. Adding to a Favourites list soon makes that so large as to be unusable whereas the grouping/bundling of tags is a logical and easy way of managing links to multiple sites.
"The fact that the bookmarks are public means that a del.icio.us account becomes an online virtual-world equivalent to the old subject card catalogue. Library members can access a range of sites which come with the library's implicit recommendation as a reliable site sorted according to broad subject labels.
"In a regional/joint library situation different libraries/individuals could be assigned to different subject areas so that the burden of setting up what is akin to a subject index was shared. Or maybe something like the old Subject Specialisation Scheme but instead of collecting and managing books in a subject area libraries collect and 'manage' sites in a subject area, making access to them available through social bookmarking. I guess even now smaller libraries can 'piggyback' on the published tags of larger libraries, e.g. the Sutherland Shire Libraries tag cloud.
"A Library Journal article on the advantages of social bookmarking and tagging pointed to advantages for both patrons and staff. For patrons there was a greater accessibility to resources. Using the tags as links one can do all one's research from one's own home computer. As well having publicly-defined tags means that local terminology can be incorporated, terms that have been used in locallly-set assignments, also terms from other languages. The inherent risk of substandard as opposed to nonstandard tag terms could be overcome by having tags that broadly conform with the Library of Congress subject headings and would be entered by the library, tags that are judged by the library staff to be of local relevance and tags generated by users. Library staff could use Del.icio.us to add links to items of particular local relevance and resources for local students' assignment topics.
"For staff social bookmarking makes creating subject guides easier. Looking at what other people have bookmarked facilitates the task. No-one can find even a percentage of the useful sites in a subject area but sharing discoveries is of benefit to all, library staff as well as users. Bookmarking and 'bundling' also provides reference staff with a set of useful sites they can turn to immediately just as they would have looked to the index of an encyclopedia set in an earlier age. Once some librarians had card indexes of good sites but with the number of sites ballooning exponentially this is no longer a viable option. It is likely that users will also advise of sites they have found useful and they can be incoporated after checking to the benefit of all."
I am most unlikely to ever use Del.icio.us outside of this course but I can remember being quite struck by its potential when I first encountered it in the Web 2.0 course.

Just Twittering on ......

I have opened a Twitter account but have protected it. (I assume the process is the important part of the exercise.) I included my blog address and I've published one Tweet. I've set up Mylee and Ellen as people to follow (sorry, ladies but who else ...)
My Twitter name is .. itnitwit of course.
I'm not fussed on micro-blogging - it would appear very time-consuming and the compressed language would be off-putting to older clients. However the flexibility of being able to tweet using a mobile phone as well as a computer is attractive and I gather Twitter provides updates in real time while Facebook only provides alerts to updates. (What a comment on our 'thirty second society' that Twitter has such tremensdous popularity ...)
In the library context ... Twitter is being used and obviously successfully. Professionals use it as an alerting service, e.g. Mylee - a bit like a human RSS feed with the advantages of a professional judgement of relevance and contact with all those serendipitous discoveries in sources no-one else has located to set up a feed from. And libraries use it to communicate with their client base, the aforementioned Sunshine Coast Library Service being a good example. They follow 36 names and have 142 followers and 141 tweets published, so the medium is being used.
Twitter could also be useful for quick contacts between professionals working on the same project at diferent sites. Direct messaging is an efficient approach.
Libraries need to choose just one social networking system. I don't feel I know enough about them to choose between Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and .... And they must accept that any of them carry considerable potential for abuse if only from individuals overly-focussed on checking for their next message

Twitter - it's for the birds!

I began by browsing Twitter using 'libraries' and 'librarians' as search terms . It seemed to me on the basis of the Tweets I looked at that the Tweets fell into four main categories: i) personal, which contained the search term but no information of significance outside of a defined friendship or work group, e.g. "Acquisition tasks are a lot trickier than I thought they would be . Oh, the challenge :)". Sorry, but to me that was pretty much a waste of time. ii) advertisements, which may well be useful but I thought there might be more efficient ways of communicating to potential users, e.g. "8 great #MooTools libraries for web designs" with a link to a company web page. iii) alerts to much longer articles on the web, which might be of use but perhaps there would be a more effective alert service such as an RSS feed. iv) (semi?)professional comments such as "I wonder if any libraries make donations to Wikipedia part of their collection budget .. going to suggest that where I work". But a Tweet like that seemed to me to belong more in a wiki or other profession-based network. More effective was "Forthcoming events @Boroondara Librarties for children and parents" plus a link to the library website.

I experimented with "diabetes" and "Central Asia travel" as optional topics. With respect to "diabetes" the first Tweet provided a website and "i think i died" - how useful a Tweet is that?? The second, "Pregnancy problems gestational diabetes", provided a link to a web site but wasn't much more than an ad for a brand of test strips. You'd do better with a subject search in a reputable medical database. The third was a reply to someone else's Tweet saying "My wife has type 1 diabetes" - on par with the first.

"Central Asia travel" produced four identical "I travel often far and near (list of continents/regions)" and one other Tweet ,"Tien-Shan Travel - your local expert in Central Asia - blog" and a link to a tour itinerary, which at least is useful (it looked a good tour actually ...) but you would get the same result with "Central Asia tours trek*" in a search engine.

By this stage I was ready to dismiss Twitter as a great potential time-waster for limited results but .... I looked at the Twitter entries of the Sunshine Coast Libraries and was much more impressed. That library uses Twitter as an alert service for patrons. It's most recent Tweet was "Last chance to purchase ticket for an evening with Judy Nunn tomorrow night" and there were also notices for other author talks, invitations to book launches and a link to the library's eNewsletter.

Tweeting takes up a lot of time and a library would need to consider very seriously why they are setting it up and what they want/can get out of it before making the investment. The Sunshine Coast Libraries have a clearly defined purpose and scope in Tweeting and that makes it work.

Like Phoenix rising ....

ITnitwit resurfaces from technological inertia to tackle Web 2.1 ......
She would like to claim persistence in using a variety of Web 2.0 tools since completing last year's course but that would be a lie. She hasn't blogged at all but did go into a few other 2.0 course member blogs and leave comments.
There are of course a myriad of blogs she could have looked at, both professional and recreational, but she hasn't. What does she like about blogging? Well, apparently not enough to bestir her into participating in them, but she does appreciate their simplicity to use and the variety of elements that can be included. She still thinks that blogs work best for information dispersal ('vertical') and that wikis are better for communication between professionals - where sharing information is the prelude to creating new information ('horizontal').
She tried very hard to update her blog using a couple of templates from two of the third party sites, but without success (she did inadvertently end up with one design as her desktop wallpaper which was a bit unfortunate - she managed to get rid of it in the end ...). The colibri floral design was particularly appealing. However she was a bit comforted by reading in the comments below that template on the site that about half of those trying to download it failed and they got the same error message that she did ....
So she just changed to a new blogspot template, and added a couple of facts and a picture downloaded from Clip Art to her profile.