Social networking

I was already a member of Facebook before I started web 2.o so this exercise was easy for me. However I am not on Bebo or Myspace (and do not ever plan to be) so I had a look around those sites. After this I have reconfirmed by belief that facebook is the best of these sites. Bebo and Myspace are more for younger people, but it is great if they can be used to encourage people to use the Library.

Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch and recently it has enabled me to reconnect with friends I hadn't seen for about 7 years. This personal side of Facebook is great and I am very curious to see how libraries will come to use these sites in the future.

ebooks

Ebooks are fantastic and I was very happy to read all the articles on how they are becoming more and more available. I use ebooks all the time for research at university and it is great as it lets everyone have a change to read it and not just the crazy people who start their essays two months early. With ebooks everyone gets a turn and there are no recall wars.

I searched for Jane Eyre on Project Gutenburg and I was impressed by their range. It's great that you can also download audio versions which I plan to try out for myself. Once you have actually chosen a book however, I found the print size and style very unappealing. It would be great if in the future they could become more readable.

Podcasts

Like with blogs I couldn't believe how many podcasts there were out there, people create them about everything. I found the Podcast Pickle the easiest site to navigate as it had good lists of categories and but I thought there should have been better summaries of what the Podcast was about, the site Podnova was very good in this respect. I found some good movie review ones, such as Kendall Weaver's Top five. Nice and succinct movie reviews.

One of My favorite authors Diana Gabaldon regularly realises podcasts of news and other information on her website that I listen to. I think they are a great tool as they are capible of so much variety, as you can listen to them anywhere. They are great for lazy people and have that added leval of personality which is nice.

YouTube

Web 2.0 Winners

All these sites are so fantastic and I had fun exploring a few of them as one was not enough. I was really pleased to see how many I already knew about from doing this program, really getting up to date with what is happening on the web.

I had a look a the books category as that is what I am most interested in and had a look at all the sites. I chose to focus on VuFind and I was very impressed by what I found. I love the social interaction of this site, how you can leave comments and tags and I think the link to Amazon reviews is a fantastic idea. I look at these all the time an they have been very helpful.

I think it is great that this is the direction that libraries are going in and it can't come soon enough.

I also really loved Onesentence, such a great idea and I spent over an hour reading the funny and poignant stories. I can see this becoming a great procrastinating tool in the future.

Zoho

Another great tool, yeah. This site is a great idea and I can see it being very useful. In the past I have always typed a document than sent it as an attachment in an email when I wanted to use it at another location or send it to someone. I can see this being a lot quicker and easier and I look forward to trying it out some more.

I found the site fun and easy to use, all the formats are similar to Microsoft Word so that made it simple. I had great fun playing around with the Zoho Show, great lot of templates and clip art and the Writer is a great tool.

Rollyo

This excercise was quite fun and I can see it being very helpful. When you type something in to Google you get millions of hits and often ones that are not usefull at all, so it is great to have a tool to organise your searchs. I had some fun searching the qoutes and photos pages had a good laugh over my favorite Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen qoutes. None of hte books I searched for appeared in the other two search engines, maybe I was beening to vague.

I decided to create a search engine that could be useful in my art history studies. I get most of my information out of books but I still use websites to get good colour representations of paintings and often short summaries of paintings to get me thinking. I put lots of the official art gallery sites as I knew they are trustworthy and fulled with interesting facts as well as links to scholarly journals and more amateur sites that I still like. Rollyo is a great tool that I think I will come back to again.

Link to my Search Roll