book twitter my face space...

I think there are definitely some great opportunities for library's to use social networking sites to communicate and engage with their community. It just makes sense, that if (nearly) everyone is using these types of sites to interact with one another, then we in library land should be doing the same. If we don't, then we're really missing a great opportunity.

At my library we do have aspirations to "social network" with our community. A teen oriented My Space page and a library blog are two things that we've been wanting to get up and running for a while now. Unfortunately we've been unable to get approval for either of these ventures so far from the powers that be, which has been frustrating. I think we probably had the idea of doing a My Space page way back before most people had even heard of Face Book, and I fear that by the time we eventually do get the go ahead to do it, My Space will be about as groovy as MS DOS and 5 & 1/4 inch floppy discs!

Hopefully though, we will get there, as I really do think that it's important that libraries try to use these opportunities. We all know that we're essentially competing for people's time with other businesses / organisations / pass times, which are already out there using this technology effectively. If we don't, then we seriously run the risk of getting left behind. I remember in the early days of the Internet, public libraries were at the forefront in many ways - we developed/hosted our council's first web pages, we used it in our daily work as a research tool to expand our reference collections and certainly at the library where I was working, we provided many people with their first and only access to the Internet before it became more affordable at home.

The examples linked from the NSW Public Libraries Learning page are great, and it's really inspiring that there are so many libraries out there doing this kind of thing already, and I really hope that the rest of us are able to join them soon.

I've already linked to TwittEarth in a previous blog, and while it is undoubtedly a bit of a time waster, it is interesting to leave it on your browser for a while just to see how much social networking is going on out there... plus the little "twitts" that pop up do look cute!

what's up docs?

I love the concept of free good quality applications on the net! I came across a free online Photo Shop alternative a while back. It worked a bit like Big Huge Labs in that you can upload an image and then manipulate it just about anyway you like, although it was much more technical like Photo Shop rather than quick and fun like Big Huge Labs. Unfortunately I didn't bother to bookmark it and I can't for the life of me remember what it was called (it had a strange quirky name as most of these things seem to do), so it's identity for now will remain a mystery... but I know it's out there somewhere, and I want to believe!!!

Google Docs is great. I knocked up a quick rant about one of my favourite Lee Perry albums as an excuse to have a play around with it. While the formatting options are obviously much more limited than with MS Word, I think it could be a great tool to use for collaborative documents such as grant applications, etc. I don't think you'd really be able to create the final document in Google Docs as the formatting is very limited, but once all the contributors were happy with the basic content you'd be able to cut and paste it into Word for the final layout.

I also had a look at Zoho and was very relieved to find that I could use my Google profile to login, as it's honestly getting to the point where I'm going to go insane if I have to come up with yet another user name and password! I had a bit of a play around with the word processing function and it does seem to have more formatting options than Google Docs. Zoho also has a whole heap of other cool stuff which I'd like to have a closer look at later on.

I think both Zoho and Google Docs are great for collaborative documents, or even for word processing on the run - when you need to do something portable and don't have your memory stick with you (don't you hate it when that happens!).

Mashin'

Wow, when I saw we were doing mash-ups this week I was going to get my dancing shoes ready for some serious booty shaking, but then I realised it wasn't music mash-ups that we were going to be looking at... (one of my personal favourites being the infamous Kylie / New Order mix).

But I digress... I guess I've used quite a few different websites with "mash-up" stuff happening on them, but I wasn't really familiar with the use of the term in that context. I guess those online library catalogues which have links to Amazon book reviews are a good example of library related mash-ups.

I found a good website which has a whole bunch of mash-up apps called Programmable Web. One that caught my eye was a blog value calculator. It works out the value of any blog in US$, by using, and I quote, "the Technorati API to compute and display what your blog is worth using the same link to dollar ratio as done in the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal". I have to confess that I don't fully understand exactly how it all works, but I do think the idea of calculating the dollar value of a blog is pretty cool, and it even provides you with some html code to display the value on your blog for all to see. I tried it out on this blog and it was valued at $0.00... so I guess that means I still have plenty of room for improvement!

It would be good to have something similar which could calculate the dollar value of a library website, as I think most of them would be worth quite a bit, but this particular app only seems to work with blogs.

I've never come across Big Huge Labs before, but boy could I easily waste a few hours here! I had heaps of fun transforming some of my photos into useful things like fake ID cards and movie posters. I ended up doing a "double mash-up" by transforming a picture of my dog into a Warhol print and then transforming that into a jigsaw. I like the look of the trading card maker as well. I think a range of super librarian trading cards would be really cool... could be a good idea for a Library & Information Week display!

Here's an interesting site that uses a mash-up approach... it's basically pretty useless, but it looks cute!