Silhouettes on Paris.-

Silhouettes on Paris.-
Originally uploaded by ancama_99

Really incredible photo here. The direction of the heads really leads one into the rest of the photo, and the contrast with the sky and the monochromatic cityscape works quite well. I have no idea how they could've taken this unless they're with the French government or something, but then I'm assuming this is Notre Dame, which is very difficult to get good photos of the gargoyles on. At least from this perspective. The caption doesn't provide a whole lot of insight. I'm curious how much this was adjusted, if at all in Photoshop.

LibraryThing

I think I may like LibraryThing more than Shelfari. It seems to be more geared towards librarians, whereas Shelfari is more for the general public. The search engine seems to be about the same--it searches amazon and the library of congress, both of which have fairly extensive collections. The only frustrating thing about both Shelfari, LibraryThing and the Visual Bookshelf they have on Facebook is how long it takes to put all the books in. But, that's the price you pay for reading a lot. I found some interesting topics in the "LibraryThing For Librarians" forum/group, including one about neoconservative/neoliberal biased books being passed off as academic.
Oh, also, my page on LibraryThing is: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/jackster

Technorazzi

I can't say I had very much success searching for "Learning 2.0" on the Technorati site, as per the instructions in the exercise. I also found the way the site was designed to be a little confusing and inconvenient. I did find a bunch of OTHER things that didn't particularly help me but were kind of interesting all the same, including an interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle about homeschooling. I'm curious as to why Billy Crystal is #2 among the top searches. Maybe he's been in some movie recently that I'm not aware of. Signing up to Technorati was easy enough though. I think I still need to go back and work on getting tags with my blog, probably through Delicious or something similar. That's about all she wrote.

Tags and Bookmarks--no clever title this time, sorry

I just loved this quote too much not to copy and paste it somewhere:
"A search engine listing sites deemed trustworthy by actual human librarians, not just a Googlebot"
--Comment on Librarians' Internet Index

Like Wikis, there's a lot of information on Tagging, Del.icio.us, social bookmarking, and the like; easily enough for me to be overwhelmed by and a fair amount that I confess I didn't understand. But in my browsing I have come across tagging and not really paid much attention to it or thought much about what it could be used for. For a library, in particular, it has a great deal of potential. I'm tempted to get an account with del.icio.us just so I can get a better handle on how to use tags, but I think I'll hold off at least until spring break, when I'll have a little more time to experiment. Sooooo much information, so little time.

Ispace YouSpace WeAllSpace for MySpace

Well, I've had a chance to check out and comment on the library's myspace page and check out some of the resources/blogs/comments on library's having myspace accounts and I don't find myself coming down on one side or another. I prefer facebook because #1 the only people that ever ask me (so far, at least) to add them as friends are people I ACTUALLY know, #2 I can do many more amusing and unique things with people on facebook besides leaving a comment on their page or messaging them. I'm not subscribed to anyone's blog and I've done less than a handful of blogs on myspace in 3 or so years that I've been on there. So, I don't use it very often, and the spam is very tiresome, enough said on that. The question of whether or not teens would feel like they're space is being threatened by adults, I can't really comment on. All of the people who I know to any degree on myspace are in the 20-30 range, agewise. So, the fact that myspace appealed more to teenagers and that facebook more to college-age users was news to me. I think the library myspace page could be a very fun and useful tool for the library, but it'll probably take a lot of time and effort on the part of the librarian maintaining it. Major kudos to whomever that individual happens to be.

In the Wiki wiki wiki wiki wiki room

Like many things about wikis that are both their strengths and their weakness, the vast amount of information in the wikis themselves and ABOUT wikis can be rather overwhelming. I found the actual wikis vs. the resources about wikis to be more interesting and less clunky. The Book Lover's Wiki seemed like a natural fit; the information in wikis are typically heavily biased--particularly if you're talking about more arcane knowledge--so why not have a database for book reviews which are purely subjective? If the City Library had such a resource I'm sure I'd take advantage of it. I don't have many friends who share my taste in books so it's difficult to find a second opinion on a lot of the books I read.

Blogging

Fortunately for me, I already have a livejournal account--which may or may not prove to be more complicated than blogger, so far they're fairly comparable--so I'm already comfortable woking in this format. The only frustrating thing that I've discovered from creating a blog and the actual blogging is that I'm not quite sure how to delete one of my accounts. Here's what happened: fool that I am, I didn't read the instructions on the SLCPL Learning Library site thoroughly enough or I would've made just the one account that's connected to my google account. So I have an account with my yahoo e-mail address and one with my gmail address. And I have yet to discover how to delete an account. I wouldn're really consider this a problem with Library 2.0 though. Thus far it's been very simple and straightforward, and quite user-friendly.