Week 3 - Tagging

Ahhh, social bookmarking. You are delicious and wild.

Oh god, I didn't mean to make that pun. I'm sorry.

Anyway, social bookmarking has never been something I've been terribly into simply because, y'know, I have a bookmark folder in Firefox (and Safari, now. Whee, Mac!). But for KRL, social bookmarking could be a nifty tool.

In particular, I'm thinking of a service where patrons could tag a book in a database, and other users could search via tags for whatever interests them. It'd work better than subject searches, which can be a tad vague and and arbitrary in my experience.

You can view the sites I tagged for today at del.icio.us/barcodemissing (I should add that link to the blog, actually...), but to be honest all of them are just sites I visit semi-regularly, and my tastes are, well, a bit out of the ordinary. Sumo is just about the only sport I follow (I'd follow cricket if the dang TV would freakin' show it over here), I read science blogs like popcorn (now there's a metaphor that just doesn't fly), and I'm using PortableApps version of Firefox to post this very blog entry because I can't stand Internet Explorer.

But hey, someone might find it interesting. That's kinda the point, innit?

Oh hey Library stuff

Articles! Rahr! Stuff read for KRL 2.0.

I've been doing the whole 2.0 thing for quite some time. In fact, from before the whole name "web 2.0" got all popular. As a result I'm rather coming at this from a totally different angle, where I already intuitively understand most of the concepts without necessarily having words to put to them.

The Library 2.0 article seems to mostly fit in with what I'd figured 2.0 technology would bring to the library. In particular I am heartened by the statement against proprietary software (I have been a supporter of open source software for many years). There may be a point to the criticism about how the 2.0 ethic is not necessarily new to library operation, but the technology would certainly improve upon and streamline any nascent 2.0 tendancies already extant. (yay big words)

The surge in community involvement experienced by the Ann Arbor District Library through their use of 2.0 shows where these practices and services can take us. Greater access for and responsiveness to the public can only improve service. Of course, it's not a panacea, but interactivity seems to be in high demand, and libraries are no exception.


(I also think it would be super neato to have a KRL podcast or something.)

Blog GET

Alrighty, new blog set up. Now it's time to make it officially a blog, and as all of us on the internets know, it's not really a blog until there's a picture of a cat with a humorous caption posted on it.

So, without any further ado:



Ahhh. New blog smell.