Thing 12. Do You Digg?

I used to think this was an interesting idea until I looked at Digg, Mixx, Reddit, and Newsvine, and saw a lot of dog stories, a story about a bimbo, and an octopus escaping through a one inch hole. Not a lot of useful information. It's kind of like getting your information only from the Onion. I would far rather trust my local newspaper editors to decide the most important stories of the day than 10,000 random people with too much spare time.

What's more, important stories get ignored because few people "digg" them. A large company can skew the results of a product release by providing thousands of college students a free cup of Starbucks to "Digg" their product. It makes me think of the difference between a representative democracy and direct democracy. We live in a representative democracy for the most part, and we elect representatives to make informed decisions about laws. California indulges in direct democracy and ruined one of the best school systems in the country by passing Proposition 13. I'm glad Minnesota has not yet partaken of this experiment.

I suppose our library could use this type of social software to provide students the ability to "digg" items in our catalog. However, we might get better results if faculty were the "diggers". Otherwise, the only items that rose to the top would be the same items with large circulation numbers: UFOs, witchcraft, deformed humans, cults, marijuana, etc.

I joined Digg a while ago when a friend asked me to Digg something that was important to him. So I suppose I'm part of the problem. What information can you trust these days? While it's certainly interesting and entertaining to see what other people find interesting, I don't know that it's particularly useful.

Thing 11 - Tagging and Del.icio.us

I've had a family blog for a while, but had never added tags to it. I think I will use this feature a lot in the future. It's useful to find all of the posts about one kid or about Cub Scout activities, etc. I figured out how to add the labels as a page element in Blogger. Cool!

I've also been meaning to try Del.icio.us for a while, so it's useful to have the motivation of the 23 Things. I signed up for an account. I see a use for this at Century as a collaboration between the library and various other offices. I often come across web sites that offer resources for educators, like MERLOT and BEN. Our college needs a place to put these bookmarks so everyone in the institution can get at them. I think we can figure out how to do this using Del.icio.us. (I just wish it had an easier to type name!) I also plan to use this to keep my bookmarks so I don't accidentally bookmark something in IE, and then be unable to find it in Firefox. It will also be better than trying to keep my home and work bookmarks in synch.

Thing 10 - Wikis

I edited the 23 Things on a Stick wiki. What a conglomeration! That's the problem I see with wikis - you definitely need some guidelines or a stylesheet in order to end up with something useful like pathfinders. I'm working on creating a wiki for the SLA MN Chapter Board, but I have to admit that I have not been able to spend as much time on it as I would like. Their system, which is called Confluence, is terribly convoluted and not very user friendly. It comes with a manual that is HUGE. Not the best way to promote wiki usage.

Thing 9 - Online Collaboration Tools

I can see the utility of this. No more platform based problems with access or transfer of documents. I kind of hope this eventually means the end of Microsoft Word. I've written plenty of documents that had to be emailed back and forth for revisions until we forgot which one was the current version. Online word processing will be useful.

Thing 8 - Share your Creations

I can see that E-Folio could be useful for K-12 students making web pages for History Day projects. And if we don't gain control of our own library page soon, I could see using it for that purpose as well. The problem with E-Folio is the same as any other web site, that they go out of date so fast. Look at how many sites have not been updated recently.

Lazybase is intriguing, but I'm not sure how we would use it. Lots of these tools are cool, but I don't want to be using tools just because they are cool.

Thing 7 - Web 2.0 Communication Tools

While at the State Law Library and the Legislative Reference Library, we answered email reference questions constantly and the numbers of questions rose each year. Yet at Century, we receive barely one email per week. I plan to publicize the service starting next fall to see if that helps. I also want to implement IM reference. Some staff question the need, but I don't see how it can be a bad move. It's really no harder than answering the telephone. I do wonder if it will be used more than our email reference.