Thing 35 - Books 2.0

I tried What Should I Read Next? I entered my all-time favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth, and got back pretty useless results like Dakota: a Spiritual Geography. The reason I like to try sites like this with The Phantom Tollbooth is that it doesn't fit into usual catagories and there are no other books that I know of that are like it. Still, these results aren't very satisfactory. When I try something obvious, like the Warriors series by Erin Hunter, I get great results. Still, for an easily classifiable series like that, I could have figured out what to read next by myself!

I looked at BookGlutton, Overbooked, and BookSprouts. I can see recommending these sites to book clubs.

Librivox is an intriguing idea. We are going to add downloadable audiobooks to our library in the near future. Downloadable seems to be the best format for these, because otherwise the technology constantly changes.

Swaptree is too much work. There's a Half Price Books two blocks from our house, while I would have to drive to mail something. No contest.

BookBrowse is the most intriguing site so far. I like the options, the ability to sort the results, and the results seem to present good choices.

The children's sites are well done. I wish some of these had been available when I had younger children.

I looked at the Facebook apps, but they are just not compelling. I read in the evenings for fun, and I mostly read historical fiction and bubblegum for the mind. Bad scifi, the latest book my kids are reading. I don't read "literature". So I don't really want my reading choices out on my Facebook page where my college president can see that I'm reading Ender's Game or the Ranger's Apprentice series because that's what we happened to borrow from our public library this week. With these social apps, you really have to remember who your audience is and be careful what you share.

These book apps are interesting, but nothing listed here beats LibraryThing. I'm hoping our catalog will become more interactive and more like LibraryThing, which actually makes good recommendations for books that are like the one you are currently reading through the use of tagging.

Thing 34 - Is this Our Competition? Online Answer Sites

Interestingly, I came across WikiAnswers earlier this week when I was trying to find something out for myself using Google. I can't remember what I was looking for, only that the answer on WikiAnswers was obviously wrong. I tried looking for the answer to "How do you remove melted crayons from clothing?" That's a question I have long experience with, my son having sent a blue sparkly crayon through the library. WikiAnswers came up with using wax paper and an iron to remove the crayon, but I know from experience that WD40 works much better. I looked at laundry as a subject and noted that most of their questions still need answers. Maybe this will be like Wikipedia if it takes off, but today I don't find it very helpful.

I had a similar experience with YahooAnswers. Wrong answers, like "You can't remove it". Too many answers to be useful. I think these sites can be helpful, but for this particular question, it's not working well.

People use these sites for the same reason I use them. They may know about other resources like the library, but the effort required to search for terms in an anonymous database is less than that required to ask a stranger for help. Unless you're an extreme extrovert, interacting with strangers requires an effort. As they evolve, these sites have the potential to become a good reference source, although they would need to clean up the wrong answers and redundencies.

I don't know that Slam the Boards is all that interesting. It makes a nice volunteer activity, but are we librarians who are getting paid to provide service or volunteers sharing expertise? Architects are another set of undervalued professionals, where everyone and his brother thinks that they can just use CAD software to draw plans. Should architects search out opportunities to give their services away on the weekends to show how valuable they are? The value comes in intangibles like the fact that living spaces designed by an architect can feel more comfortable and are more usable. Answers from a librarian are hopefully more likely to be correct and provided more efficiently. But that's intangible, too. I don't really know what I'm getting at here, but Slam the Boards just doesn't make sense to me.

Thing 33 - Travel 2.0

Travel 2.0 makes sense. The blogs aren't that interesting unless they are about a trip to a place you happen to be going. But the reviews from sites like TripAdvisor are invaluable. I particularly like that their reviews get into traveling group and age range, since I definitely have different travel needs now than I did when I was 20.

Sites like Vcarious seem aimed at trips that go overseas or to major destinations. Milwaukee or other midwestern destinations are just not very useful. Gotta have some money and time in order to need sites like this.

I looked at several of the mashups. Again, a bit of disappointment. Green Routes doesn't do much for most routes in terms of food, which would be my biggest area of interest. And the FastFoodmaps doesn't include Subway, Culvers, or Arbys. Bummer. We'll be taking a trip this summer out east, so I'll try TripTouch from the award winning mashups. But in general, things like this are not worth the time they take.

We have an AAA membership, and their site has really great maps and routing. I would heartily recommend a AAA membership to everyone, if only for their roadside assistance.

Some of these sites might be useful for our library patrons. I can see recommending TripAdvisor or other review sites.

Thing 32 Google Maps and Mashups

I created a map of my commuting route with start and end points, but it would not let me draw a line. It said, "Click to draw line", but when I clicked, I got the hand that moved the map. Was it Firefox? Was it because the moon is full? Do I need to reboot my computer? Like Aleph, the ways of Google apps are sometimes mysterious.

I'm trying desperately to think of a use for this at our library, but the only thing I can think of is to link photos to our location. Not particularly inspiring.

In general, I think the best mashups are those you can use when you travel, or that public agencies like the police can use to show where particular types of crime are happening. I've seen some cool mashups, but can't really think what need I would fulfill by creating one.

Thing 31 - More Twitter

I added myself and our library to the Tweeter Directory. The directions were not very helpful.
For the "Available tags" thing, you have to know HTML, which I do, but then you have to know what you write is going to be taken as HTML code or as written, and it doesn't tell you which. I hope it all displays properly, but at least today, nothing has shown up yet. Hmmm.

I used Twitterfeed to automatically post our library's blog postings to Twitter. Now this, I find an utter efficiency. More people seem to use Twitter than understand how to subscribe to RSS. So by making our blog posts go to Twitter, we only have to maintain our blog. So cool!

I added BeTwittered to my iGoogle page. That page is really getting crowded. I'll see how it goes. I also added a Twitter widget to display my Twitter posts on my blog. That should be interesting.

On the stages of Twitter, I guess the Twitterfeed means that professionally, I'm at the Dumping stage, although really I'm personally at the Presence stage. We'll see what develops.

I think Twitter is the next Facebook. For some families, it may replace weekly telephone calls. For some ex-college roommates, it may replace reunions. We'll see.

Thing 30 - More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

I've used Bloglines for a long time, but since I use Google calendar and have an iGoogle page, I thought it would be interesting to check out Google reader. I'm curious about the feature where you see just the most recent updates from all your subscriptions at once, and I think it would be interesting to run these through my iGoogle page. So I created an OPML file. Everything seems to be working.

I created a Twitter account for our library, then used RSS to Twitter to feed the library's Blogger RSS feed into our Twitter. It's too soon to tell if it's working, but if it does, it will be cool! Talk about efficiency: I'll be using our blog to update both Twitter and our web page news if everything works.

Using Delicious, I added some people to my network, but then I deleted them. The network thing just seems like total information overload to me. My Delicious bookmarks include things like my kids' school and our church. Why would I want those things from other people? Subscribing to tags seems a bit more reasonable. I subscribed to a couple of tags.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to add the code for the button or badge to this blog. I tried sticking it in the HTML in several places, but it did not accept it. It's not a widget that I can add, and it's not listed in any of the widgets for Blogger. What the heck? Ditto for the tagroll. I give up. It's just not worth my time.