Week 4

This is great, RSS will give us all the opportunity to find out the latest doings of Brittany Spears as they're reported. How our lives will be enriched! Seriously though, I have signed up for BBC news feeds & Scientific American & so will be alerted to developments I might otherwise have to wait hours or days to find out. When I put it like that, it doesn't sound like it will make much difference to me though. Still, I can see that in a lot of contexts it would be very useful.
From a professional point of view, I will subscribe to some library related sites which will alert me to developments in service delivery and generally what's going on out there. The ABS for librarians is an excellent way of familiarising oneself with the latest news & info. of popular interest in this area.
Obviously, public libraries will be able to utilise RSS in various ways to provide better access to info. for their clients. We should encourage our clients to subscribe to our sites as this could be a great way to publicise upcoming events etc.

Not a mouse

Murray & I have had a disagreement. He wanted to post a picture of a mouse, but I had to remind him that he's supposed to be giving them up, so he's gone off for a snooze. Instead, I selected this picture (above left) from flikr of the Coliseum by Pat E. Nation.

I had a bit of trouble getting it onto the blog, so I ended up downloading it to my computer & from there to the blog. That's probably not the proper way to do it, but it's easy.

I think flikr offers a lot of opportunities for libraries to promote services & provide easy access to resources. However, in terms of personal use, I can't see myself using it much. This picture of the Coliseum is OK, but I've taken better ones (my picture of the Moreno Glacier, above right, is just as good quality). I suspect that if I want a professional quality picture, it would be quicker to go straight to the shelves & grab a book, rather than searching through masses of photos on flikr.

The only people who really want to see my own pictures (purely travel related) are the aged relatives, so I normally arrange a slide show on my computer, put it onto a disc, then show it to them on their tvs. It's a bit dangerous offering to show my holiday snaps to friends as they're liable to start pulling out an endless file of pics of their children growing up.

Still, it's early days & this kind of technology has a way of sneaking up on me until I suddenly start to wonder how I ever lived without it. Just so long as I can avoid other people's family photos.

First effort

At last I have made it this far. I spent so long trying to find a username I liked that wasn't already in use, I was about to give up. In the end I went for something really boring & obvious.

I'm looking forward to finding out all about web 2.0. I am a bit of a Luddite, but it sounds exciting. The main danger for me is the likelihood of addiction to youtube & flikr etc. when there are already too few hours in the day to cope with my busy schedule of watching the grass grow. I have gone through the units for weeks 1 & 2 & so far so good, not too daunting. The Stephen Fry interview really got me onside as I am a big admirer of him. It's encouraging to find out that I might be able to able to utilise web 2.0 without needing to gain much technical skill.

I am committed to the concept of Lifelong Learning though, but up until now my own pursuit of it has been through continuing ed. courses (I'm starting a semester on Ancient Rome at Mac. Uni. on Tuesday.) Online learning is a great opportunity for the future and has the most important advantage of often being free!

I haven't actually looked at anyone else's personal blogs yet, but they'll have to be a lot more interesting than this one to keep my attention. The library blogs look v. useful & I can imagine all sorts of ways blogging could enhance our service.

Blogging has enormous potential for the library, through facilitating creative dialogue in all sorts of ways. It probably also has a lot of potential in dealing with client groups eg., I run a Book Group at our library & I can see that this might be a great way of interacting & providing info. between meetings & with other groups.

That's got to be 150 words, it certainly feels like it.

I'm adding a picture of Murray (see above), who thinks this is all a complete waste of time & says I should get back to watching the grass grow.