rss

This is my favourite web 2.0 tool. I have experimented with the alerts through it and they are now a critical part of the information I scan. I am not really interested in filtering my rss, as I already sort by folders - some I always look at, others scan more occasionally and others mostly delete without even looking at.

Slideshows and video

This is an area which I already use heavily. It is a great way to find out what other libraries are doing, and for other information sharing as well

nings

I have been a member of the library 2.0 ning for a few months. I also am a member of other nings as well. I am still not sure about them, but they are helpful in bringing a range of tools together. I think that I have not invested enough time in them yet, and that will be a priority for me over the next months, as they need an active community to really thrive.

Evaluation

I am already using all the tools discussed in this week's learning 2.1 update. I use them because it is important to understand how other people are interacting with your data. I even have the occasional look at the statistics on my Flickr account. I am not going to do anything to increase the use - but I am interested that the use is coming because of the tags I have added.

Tools like google analytics make evaluation much more fun, and much more accessible. It is great to to be able to share access to this data at an administration level, and for more people to be able to have in informed discussion about evaluation. Evaluation is not an add on - it is core business. If we do something in our library we should have worked out the evaluation as part of the planning stage. We should want to tell people how great our work is - in an informed manner.

delicious

Once I set up an account on delicious as part of learning 2.0 it took about six months for me to really see how I could use it, and now I don't know how I managed without it.

I really like the option to tweet about new links I have saved.

I also use it as a way of exploring new ideas as I can save links and organise them in the way that makes the most sense to me. I also use a tag called 'to read' to store professional reading that I want to read or watch or listen to.

I have added my most popular tags to my blog as a link.

Delicious is an excellent tool.

Twitter

Week 2 of learning 2.1 and it is all about twitter. I really liked learning about tweetreach. I used the course tag #nswlearning2.1 to test it out, and already people have been tweeting about the course, and I have added my tweet as well - using the tweet this option from Flickr.

Twitter has many applications for library work, and there are some great library and council examples - like the ones in the course. There are also other fun options like @NatHistoryWhale.

Twitter and libraries are a great combination - provided David Lee King's advice is taken into account.

I thought I should actually tweet about this rather than write a blog post so I will do that soon.

I was wrong...

In March last year I wrote that this was the final post on this blog, but I was wrong. I am just starting the learning 2.1 course, and have refreshed my blog. The colours are still a little scary - but I like things that are bright. I would never make a work blog the same colour as this - this a blog to experiment with rather than perfect. I have also linked in to some photographs I took on holidays.

Although I have not written on this blog, I have been writing on three collaborative blogs, not as actively as I should, but it is a start.

Blogging still has a key role for sharing information - since people can simply set up an rss feed and have the information 'pushed' to them. I have literally hundreds of blogs on my rss feeds, but I don't ever read all of them. It is okay - no one is checking on this. I have a short list (sorted by folders) for the blogs I always want to read, but for many of the others I just scan the list and delete. I comment on other blogs when it seems appropriate.

It is strange to come back to this blog after such a long time, but I suppose the blog was still here to come back to. I had not deleted it.