LIS 9763

Well this course certainly has flown by! I can't believe it's mid-April already.... Without further ado, here are my 7 answers...
  1. Has your view of social software changed since starting this course? If so, how?

When reading the article Death by Risk-Aversion, I was reminded of an article from the Harvard Business Review that my boss passed around the office this week, wanting us all to read. Essentially it addressed what causes projects to fail, and one of the biggest issues is a lack of transparency. Not only transparency with regards to the project plans, but also transparency in the terms of open communication, from both content owners and stakeholders.

When preparing our Media Sharing project last week, one of the biggest issues we encountered was control over the content, and this includes the advertising on free resources. And while a frequent user of the internet might not think much of the tons of advertising thrown our way, libraries have to be careful to cater to all demographics.

Perhaps I'm coming at this slightly biased, especially considering I've been deep in the thick of media sharing, but I think these types of tools have the potential to revolutionize librarian. I'm going to withhold mentioning my concerns about content quality as we address that in our project this week; but I do want to talk about how the tools themselves can be used.

I'm not a modern-day gamer. I don’t like how complicated video games have become, and how expensive they are too. I find Second Life frustrating, and RPGs aggravatingly slow. I’ve tried World of Warcraft, and I dabbled in Final Fantasy. It’s just not a world for me. Give me old-school Nintendo any day. And if it MUST be played on a recent system, I will accept Rock Band or Dance Dance Revolution. Maybe a bit of Sing Star. But that’s pretty much where my participation ends.

My first experience with Facebook was a few years ago. It was about 6 months prior to facebook being open to business and high school registrants, and then later to public registration. When I started using it, only my post-secondary education peers were able to access and create profiles. In the short time between then and now, Facebook has exploded into more than a gossip-, homework-, and image-sharing tool. It's become a resource for unofficial background checks, family reunions, and, yes, library reference.

If you find that I am type folkesonomies a lot, I apologize in advance -- it's tough when you're programmed from birth to add an extra letter into a word because it's your last name! I'll try to keep a grasp on it.

Hi All -- Due to a poorly-timed bout of sickness, I'll be taking a blogging holiday. See you all next week!

Holy alliteration!!
 

I love RSS feeds because now everyone has the ability to be completely up to date on whatever it is they are interested in! I'm inclined to agree when Amanda states that RSS feeds and content aggregators are the backbone of web 2.0 technology. Instead of the user having to go to each information source individually, the information now feeds itself to the users. Yes, users have to find the initial feeds and websites, but they can build what is essentially a personalized resource centre of content directly tailored to their user needs. We're streamlining access to information!