Flickr

Here's a site that can occupy your time and imagination. I searched "Costa Rica" and got 420thousand hits. I've been to Costa Rica 5 times and taken a million pictures. They are on my personal computer under files labeled by date. It's a cumbersome filing system. I can see where tagging and grouping could come in handy. It would be fun to make a grouping of "the best of" my experiences in CR. I'm still just a lurker on Flickr, no account for me yet.

Pod Casts

Searching around for something interesting to watch on Podcast. Asked my son for some ideas, he recommended Digg.com. There's a tab to just view podcasts, many catagories. I checked out a few, but they're not what I'd call work related. http://digg.com/podcasts/Diggnation/579147 Here's a link if you wanna check out Digg.

RSS Thoughts

Wow, all this is info is overwhelming. I've never desired to be connected to strangers but it feels OK to lurk around, tagging people more interesting than myself. I've asked my 20-something son a few questions about 2.0 and he seems to already be living, breathing, existing on the web in all the nooks and crannies. Now the rss feeds are a new concept. I've always gotten up in morning and listened to the news, amazed that nothing went on all night long on the other side of the world. Not True! Now I can get the info I need. But will I log on while having my morning coffee? Iv'e gotten feeds to a few sites, (all the assigned sites) but I wonder if I will revisit them or how I might manage my time on the web.

del.icio.us

Have recently registered with del.icio.us. It looks like endless entertainment but I haven't thought of any KRL uses as of yet. I really like the idea of the "tags" to ease the legwork of exploring the net for my personal interests.

"The Other Librarian"

"Library 2.0", as a program for libraries to use for learning and embracing the new technologies, has been in the forefront for about a year now. This article empathizes its intended purpose. Not to change libraries but to change librarians.

The article espouses that libraries as institutions should not change with the rapid pace of technology but with the slower pace of society. I understood this statement to mean that libraries don't need to be on the "cutting edge" but should offer user-centered changes as needed or demanded by the public when necessary for information gathering.

The purported changes undergone by librarians are just more tools for information gathering and sharing. These alternate ways to reach out, share with others, and communicate with the public have increased with the disappearance of "library walls". Our librarians are no longer confined to their local space, but are out there, on the web! This is a good thing. But perhaps our public is not ready to totally abandon all traditional aspects of the library. Change is good, rapid change is disturbing.

wikipedia Library 2.0

I chose this article for my first blog because the whole concept of "Wikipedia" represents Library 2.0 to me. Wikipedia is not a stable, static source for information. It evolves, changes by public input, opinion, and constant editing, similar to Library 2.0.

There isn't anything constant about 2.0, the technology can change, mutate, and evolve daily. There isn't a structured organization as users are encouraged to participate, improve, and therefore constantly restructure the 2.0 tools. The challenge of 2.0 is to learn to relearn.

That's not to say that it's not a great idea to keep abreast of new technology, but it will be difficult to master it. Are we as Libraries trying to keep up with the public or are we forcing the public to keep up with us?