#20 YouTube

I think I already posted about keeping in touch with my little brother via YouTube (he posts lots of goofy videos with his friends). I use YouTube alot, probably too much.

A couple of months ago there was a gentleman at ML who wanted to get a CD in with a particular song on it. He knew the title of the song, but there were several different versions of it sung by various people, so we logged on to a software station and went through the YouTube vids of the songs so he could hear them until he found the right one. Luckily we had that artist's CD and he was so happy to have it come in a few days later, and not have to order them all just to find the song he wanted.

This is one of my all-time favorite vids:



Gah, that still makes me sniffle.

#19 Award-winning Web 2.0 sites

Most of the sites listed on the Web 2.0 awards page are great. One I haven't seen before is Fixya, a tech support site structured somewhat like Yahoo answers-- people post questions and then answers are given by both regular users and registered 'tech gurus'. I could see this being a useful resource for library customers having trouble with devices like mp3 players and digital cameras, or even their laptops. Fixya also features the manuals for hundreds of thousands of products. You can search for specific products or browse by manufacturer to see manuals and posted questions. I could see this being a good resource for when customers have questions about their devices beyond our knowledge.

#18 Web-based productivity applications

Another thing I use fairly frequently. I'll save stuff to my Google Docs account if I don't have a flash drive with me. I also have this laptop that's about a day older than the Dewey decimal system, and by not installing any programs on it and using purely web-based applications I can save tons of space.

I wonder sometimes about the safety of saving very personal info to one of these thingies-- I suppose they can be hacked just as easily as anything else.

I created a Zoho account and imported my (somewhat disorganized) storytime theme spreadsheet, if you want to see:

http://sheet.zoho.com/public/zeldapinwheel/storytime-themes

#16 Wikis

Wikis are great. I use Wikipedia all the time, with a healthy dose of skepticism, of course. In college my study group spent a year reading The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (supposedly the world's first novel, and definitely the world's longest and most difficult to understand novel!), and we made a wiki to keep track of the characters and plot elements. It was so incredibly useful.

At ML a teen customer was having trouble understanding the more complicated bits of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after it first came out, and we had fun going through The Harry Potter Wiki for the answers.

As for library-related wikis, the possibilities seem literally endless. A storytime wiki might be useful-- new books, songs, suggestions, etc. Princeton's BookLovers Wiki is a great example of a review wiki, which could be fun (obviously I like reviewing books; see the staff blog).

Plus it's just fun to say. Wiki. Wiki wiki wiki. :)

#15 Library 2.0

Everything that I've heard mentioned as being under the vague umbrella of Library 2.0 seems to me to be just modern business-- adapting and changing as necessary to stay relevant and competitive. I liked Michael Stephens' statement about straddling the line between embracing new technologies and utilizing them to maximum effect versus jumping on every trendy techno bandwagon that happens by no matter the cost (both pecuniary and temporal).

There is so much written on this subject that it's a bit overwhelming!

#14 Technorati

So I took a look at Technorati and I have to admit I'm not crazy about it. After reading some articles on it I see that it has a rather checkered past and somewhat of a bad reputation with many bloggers. Still, I can definitely see how it would be useful. Someone mentioned they used it to find cooking blogs, which I thought was a good idea. Also the 'popular' feature is interesting, seeing what lots of people are reading.

I don't think I would take Technorati too seriously as far as statistical purposes go. And I've opted not to register my blog, even though I know that by using Blogger it will show up in searches anyway.

#13-B Delicious

Delicious seems pretty cool; I can see how useful it would be to have your links in a place accessible from anywhere.

In a side note, I noticed that this, like Rollyo, is another site powered by Yahoo.