SL

I don't see how so many people have so much time to create a Second Life. I can't seem to find time to put away the clean laundry in my first one. Or maybe people are abandoning their in-shambles FL and enjoying a fresh start in their second. It looks like all the female residents have big boobs, long legs, and tiny waists, so I guess wish fulfillment is part of the game. Though with recent publicity about some broad "killing" her SL partner, it looks like things don't always work out so well in SL either. I didn't see any gray panthers in any of the slides--though I saw at least one sexy bald (prematurely?) dude. Usually I'm pretty good at thinking creatively, but I'm having trouble coming up with any uses that RPL could put SL to. I'll look forward to reading other AIT students blogs on this topic.

Podcasts

I was somewhat familiar with podcasts, having listened to a couple of NPR's This American Life shows that I had heard parts of on the radio (I'd recommend "Switched at Birth" if you want to hear an unusual story of two Wisconsin babies who were raised by the wrong families until age 40) and also a couple of author interviews on the Teaching Books (Badgerlink) database. I looked at what a couple of other libraries were doing with podcasts with mixed results. I found Denver PL children's stories really disappointing, partly because of the reader's voice but mostly because while the stories were being read, the screen was showing really annoying abstract frenetic graphics. Photos of the pages or no graphics at all would have been more appropriate. I tried to watch NYPL's video program with Lidia, the Italian cookbook author, but the download was extremely slow with about 40 seconds of frozen screen download time between each 4 second segment. I've had that problem at home too occasionally, once when I tried to show a friend a short video that I'd already watched. It played straight through for me the first time, but repeated plays were jerky beyond belief. I suppose I have to admit that I did not complete the assignment, because I really don't want to subscribe to any feeds at this time.

Knock knock

Finally found the list of AIT bloggers sent out in an early email. It took quite a while to find two that I could comment on, that is those who were still active and who had already enabled comments. I've enabled comments on my own blog now, but since mine wasn't listed on the emailed list I don't suppose I'll get any comments from other bloggers.

Feedback

Except in electronic situations, feedback is usually a good thing. However, having read some of the really vicious, vitriolic, or just plain redundant anonymous posts on local blogs, like the JT and RacinePost, I'm not so sure the information is always useful. We all know there are folks in the community who really appreciate and value the library. And while it is always nice to hear from them (Man, I loved that "Automatic Flatterer" even though I knew it was faux), adulation doesn't really help us improve. There are others who have an ax to grind. Perhaps they had to pay a fine or claim to have returned a book which never made its way back to us or found the library closed just when they needed us most. I'm not sure we want to give them a platform on which to chastise us. If we could structure our blogs or surveys to elicit helpful opinions--and not have to spend too much time moderating--I could see the usefulness of encouraging these sorts fo feedback. I could also see online comments responding to other people's questions--a sort of open party line for household or consumer questions or for reader guidance inquiries. I'm always open to comments from readers so comment away. Thanks.

Chasing cows

I'm running as fast as I can today, trying to catch up with my AIT homework. "Remember the milk" is probably not something I will ever use. I won't say definitely. But to me having to sign in to make a to do list--and then be signed in to get reminders just isn't very practical--when I'm rarely at a computer that isn't shared with the whole department. Perhaps if and when I ever get to the point where I have a portable device that is on all the time....
I did post a task, but had to have Mark help me out to find it on the list--were there really only four tasks on the list after all this time or was I missing some. At one point I thought I saw eight or more but then some went away. I was thinking there would be an actual list, but it looked like just a bunch of messages that you had to hover on or click on to see what the task was.

Tagging: You're It

While I've noticed tag clouds before, I've never really used them or even paid much attention. Chirag's inaugural address timeline tag cloud of inaugural speeches were really cool. (His cats, Giga and Tera, were pretty darn cute, too). I'm not a big bookmarker, but I can see the great advantage to a delicious account over bookmarking since I regularly use at least 5 different PCs. Our reference homepage, with its subject heading grouped links, serves a similar purpose for reference related activities, but it's pretty static and we can't add links to it by ourselves. Of course that does prevent an overload of links that might really mushroom if someone is aggressive at adding things to a collaborative account. The primary advantage that I see with tagging vs. LC subject headings is in currentness. Seems like the collective public arrives pretty quickly at terminology to describe a new phenomenon, activity, etc. LC moves ponderous along and eventually comes up with something close--or sticks to something only remotely accurate that they globbed on to early in the history of something. The situation in library catalogs improved significantly with the advent of keyword title searching, but we shouldn't have to keyword title search in order to find an appropriate book to check subject heading wording for additional titles--which are often assigned some equally obscure but different subject. However some of the patron assigned tags appear to mimic library subject headings (like fantasy or science fiction) so provide little advantage.
Delicious: While it's interesting to search for what other people have bookmarked on a topic--and to see how many people (and who) have tagged it through delicious--and to see that else they have tagged, the social aspect of it is a little scary too, having people able to see what you've bookmarked personally--though I realize they'd have to guess your identity if you don't use your real name. Of course with so many people sharing common names, someone else might to tagging, blogging, posting, whatever under your name.

I'M IMING

Since I've been using GoogleTalk, this week's assignment wasn't entirely new, but still there was a lot to be learned. I found the chat about Meebos in the catalog fascinating. Our catalog is so NOT user friendly that I think having a widget handy there would be a huge service to our patrons. I especially like Paul Pival's comment that there should be one on the results page as well as the error page, since I've found people often build a search that nets them tons of inappropriate hits and they have no idea how to narrow it down to what they really want. We'd need to enable some sort of audio indication that we've rec'd a message though since we're often doing something other than using our computers when we're at the desk. I looked at the IM pages of several of the libraries on the list and contact LaX public with a question about their Oktoberfest and got an almost instantaneous answer. Prosit!