#17 - Summary

I found a few things I thought were valuable and many I thought were a waste of time. How much useless snippet information does a person need? If we spent half the time on our real relationships that we spend on Twitter and Facebook with pseudo-socialization, the world would be much sweeter to live in. We no longer know how to truly socialize, because everything is internet "social networking", which isn't really social at all. For me personally, I can't see me using any of it on a regular basis.
That's not to say that those resources don't have their place and that libraries should shy away from them. I'm sure in the context of my professional life that I will be using many of them and will probably enjoy it. We need to sell ourselves anyway we can and go where our patrons are. I just feel that the intenet has taken over and become larger than life. Anything in excess is not good. End of sermon. Go in peace.

#16 - Craigslist

This is visually overwhelming and boring. I don't think I'd ever use it. I looked up music things and found this recording studio in Patchogue.

http://longisland.craigslist.org/muc/1230885729.html

#15 - GoogleDocs
I like GoogleDocs. I can see how it could make life lots easier than all those emails and attachments. Going to one place rather than a million always cleans things up and simplifies life. Have a spiffy day! :-)

#14 Wiki --
Wiki's are very valuable for libraries. You can give so much info and most people are familiar with the Wiki concept (even me -- that's going some!!!!) I'm skeptical of Wikipedia, only because I think people still tend to think if they see something in print, it must be true. There is no guarentee that anything you read on Wikipedia is authoritive and people take it as gospel. For libraries tho, you can have a wiki and still maintain authority control, making the info on it trustworthy.

#13 Finding new feeds-
I must be an idiot, because I found nothing valuable for any of my searches on any source. I found feeds, but nothing that really fit what I was looking for.

#12 Discovering feeds

I went to the teen flickr stream to see what was new and subscribed to the feed. If we put feeds that the public may not ordinarily go to, it could be a valuable educational tool - history channel or animal planet kinds of things. Catch them when they don't know they're learning... by the time they figure it out, they're already hooked!

#11 - RSS feed readers
I see value in this, however, I only subscribed to one (NYC Opera: Pressroom), and the amount of info that arrived in a few seconds was already overwhelming. Our society has an overload of tidbits of information. One person can't possibly have the time to sift through all of it. It encourages people to spend every waking moment on their computer without interacting or taking part in real life. We sit and follow events rather than living our own events and enjoying life. To me it's a frightening comment on the direction in which we are headed - no interpersonal interaction or communing with nature - just me and my computer... altho - some days that may not be such a bad thing! :-)