10th post- Twitter

Although Twitter has been available for some time, it is a site that I have not spent time viewing prior to this assisgnment. I found very little valuable information on the posts that I read. The posts that I viewed were of people unknown to me, which may have some influence on why I did not see the benefit of reading them. There may be times when this service provides a efficient means of broadcasting information quickly, however the posts that I read did not reflect this

9th post- LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a site that I have not used in the past. I found the Search tab helpful for finding titles and authors, although there are other sites that provide me with similar results. I would not often utilize the Talk or Group tabs so this aspect of the site did not interest me. In general terms I did find the site user friendly, but I am unlikely to visit this site regularily.

8th post-Online Productivity Tools

I chose to spend some time viewing and testing Google Documents. One of the benefits that I would comment on is the fact that you can share your documents with others, and allow them to collaborate in real time with what you are doing. It is also helpful that you can open and read documents remotely from any computer. Although I will likely continue to use MS Word, because that is where my comfort level is, I believe that over a period of time free online tools like those offered by Google will become more popular.

7th post-Flickr & YouTube

My opinion is that both of these sites provide loads of entertainment- to the point where hours of time can be lost. I haven't used Flickr for photo searching before, but will try it in the future. The quality of the photos that I viewed were wonderful, and I had no problem with finding a wide range of images. I have watched a number of videos on YouTube; it is a great source for viewing a wide range of videos. This product is very user friendly, although sometimes the quality of the videos is some what grainy. However, for keeping up to date on what the world is watching it is a great tool.

6th post- RSS

Signing up for RSS feeds through Bloglines was easy to do. I chose some of the favorites that were offered as well as adding some news feeds of my own. I have been trying to check the news feeds each day to see what is included, and find that it is a quick way to keep up to date with a variety of news stories.

5th post-Google

It is a google world! In the past I have mainly used google for web searches and mapping, but after spending some time viewing some of the other products I see how much more google can do for me. One service I wasn't familiar with was google books, which I will now use as a reference when helping customers. Being able to view jacket covers and contents for some publications could be quite useful. This could also be a good tool for those situations when an assignment is due the next day and all our classics are signed out!

4th post-Facebook

My opinions on facebook are mixed- I can see where it is useful to keep up to date with others, especially those that may live elsewhere, however it is also a vehicle to find information about people that you may not even know. It can easily become a time-waster if curiousity overtakes the users of the site.

3rd post-Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a handy resource for a broad source of information. I have noticed when I do internet searching the first link is often Wikipedia. I spent some time browsing topics to look for articles that had errors and found none, although I did some editing just to see how easy it is to change an article. Although I was not able to find articles that needed editing due to factual misinformation, because of the subjective nature of Wikipedia I may well have read information that was not entirely correct.

2nd post -Delicious

When CPL first migrated to Delicious I found it cumbersome and difficult to use. After going back into the site a few times this past week, I am becoming more comfortable with the look of the site and better understand its features. One of the advantages of storing/sharing of websites is the flexibility and versatility of allowing more than one person to view content, and being able to access the site from anywhere. Because of the volume of sites bookmarked, I consider this both an advantage and a disdvantage- lots to look at but somewhat overwhelming. I am glad that CPL keeps updating their favorites, so that all staff have one great resource to use.

1st post

If Julie (from Julie & Julia fame) can create a blog and find interesting topics to post , then I believe I can as well. Admittedly, I would not likely embark on this journey without gentle prodding from CPL, but now that the process has begun I look forward to learning more about all the different 2.0 topics. I hope that these exercises will give me a clearer understanding of the interactive technology out there, and give me greater confidence to use them, both at work and for personal use.