Kane's Bridge

This is a test post using the Flickr "Blog This" function.

#10 Flickr

Being only an occasional photographer and quite content to keep these on my own PC I have never been a big user of Flickr - though it's occasionally useful for work purposes, eg checking out the good, the bad and the ugly of library signage. Having just played around with it a bit though, the Blog This function is a really good example of web applications playing nicely with each other.

I love what the National Library is doing with Flickr as a way of sourcing new items for the pictures collection - though the flipside is that I'm never terribly impressed with getting a whole stack of Flickr results in a Pictures Australia search, would have thought that this would just be restricted to the photos acquired rather than the whole Flickr group. Also nice to see NLA getting some of their own photographic collections out into Flickr, though I wonder how many people use Flickr as a starting point for searching for images compared with, say, Google - would it give these items more exposure to load the metadata into Google and link back to Picture Australia or individual library sites? The problem with Flickr is that you've actually got to upload the pictures as well... So even though it's a great idea to get our digital collections 'in the flow' of most users' web environments I'm not sure that adding copies of digital images to Flickr is likely to be a very cost effective technique...

#9 - Technorati and LibraryThing

I find Technorati useful for the occasional search, but don't find much value in a lot of the extra features. There are quite a lot of blog or news sites (or even search engines like A9) that allow you to set up saved searches/watchlists and then subscribe to them as HTML feeds, which should be great in theory, except that I've always found it difficult to craft a search at the appropriately specific level - single term searches generally just deluge you with useless results, and the functionality just isn't there to craft lengthy but discriminating Boolean searches. In the past I've ended up setting up multiple saved searches around phrases, can't remember if Technorati is one that supports phrase searching - but in the end I abandoned them all - too much to monitor already without this kind of (relatively indiscrimate) vacuuming of the blogosphere...

Here's a tag, for what it's worth: watchlist

The "popular" section is interesting - just goes to show that despite the claims that blogging and RSS are now mainstream, well, getting there maybe - but the top 9 blogs are all for geeks - not that I'm trying to be insulting as I'm one eighth geek on my mother's side (and already subscribe to 2 of the top 10 rated blogs). As for claiming my blog, this function seems to be down at the moment, another day maybe. Bottom line, I can't really see myself using Technorati for anything more than the occasional search that I currently do.

LibraryThing is another matter, this is a great site that I look at regularly, however I have to confess that I am a LibraryThing parasite - I love using it for personal 'readers advisory' purposes, but catalogue my books on it? Who's got the time? I don't get it really, but I'm glad lots of other people do. At the end of the day I'd rather be reading books than cataloguing them...

#8 Tagging & Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is one of those sites I've used a lot but never set up an account for, having always been happy enough with browser based bookmarking systems and also probably in the past a bit nervous about putting all that valuable stuff up on a website that could just disappear one day without warning. But hey, PCs die too, I guess increasingly we're being asked to trust the network with our data - I just like to make sure anything I use like this has a good export function. Anyway, the import of bookmarks from Firefox was a doddle, I've fiddled around a bit but I'm still happy enough to keep using browser bookmarks, especially since I use the Google browser sync application to keep work and home bookmarks on the same page...

As for tagging, it has its place, which is basically when users can tag their own items (eg del.icio.us, Library Thing, Flickr), but I don't know of any particularly successful applications of the concept to get people to tag other stuff - not even Amazon, with its giant user base. So using Library Thing tags in the catalogue as YPRL has done is a nice touch (though Lynette - why are the tags under Item Information and the LCSH headings under Catalogue Record - is it not possible to combine all this info on one page?), but I am extremely sceptical about the value of just allowing users to tag library catalogue records, not because they'll write rude words but simply because they won't do it enough to really add much value, as like most Web 2.0 technologies, the value of tagging increases the more people do it.

#6 and #7 - RSS and Newsreaders

Have been using Bloglines for ages so thought I'd try to export my feeds to Google Reader, easy enough. I'll try it out for a bit but I am so used to Bloglines it all felt a bit weird, and I'm really not sure about the function that marks posts as read as you scroll down the page. Subscribed and unsubscribed, all works as expected. Set up Google Reader as a widget on my iGoogle page, which is pretty cute, though I do have concerns about putting all eggs in the Google basket as its omnipresence online is starting to feel a bit totalitarian - and speaking of RSS feeds, The Googlization of Everything is an interesting one to follow. As the web itself increasingly becomes the platform for applications rather than the PC, Google is already the next Microsoft and more. Thinking about platforms, it also occurred to me that there should be a good RSS feed reader in Facebook, since it transformed itself into an application environment as well as a social network, but surprisingly there's not, apart from the brave attempts of a lone high school student to create one...

But I digress. Time to wrap up, tried the EBSCO feed and seemed to work OK though I am a bit sceptical about how it will work on an ongoing basis from an authentication perspective. We shall see.

#4 and #5 - Wikis

Wikis are great for internal knowledge management stuff, especially when an intranet is difficult to publish to or locked down to a small number of content contributors. Even easier now that there are online wikis and you don't even have to have the tech smarts (and access privileges) to install MediaWiki or something similar. Will be interesting to see how publisher friendly the new SLV intranet will be and whether we'll use the portal platform, or whether the ease and flexibility of wiki publishing will see 'subterranean' knowledgebases developed outside the intranet orbit...

Re wikis as a Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 tool, less is more. Everyone wants to build their new wikis and create a community around them, there's only so much community to go around. Better perhaps to contribute to existing ones, eg contribute to Wikipedia's 'suburbs of Melbourne' category than build our own Wikitoria, ie get our resources 'in the flow' of the majority of online users rather than expecting them to come to us. The SLV marketing department have already made a few forays into editing Wikipedia entries. Not that we can guarantee that Wikipedia will still be around in 5 years of course, or that it won't have ossified into the plaything of a small number of administrators...

Hadn't tried PBWiki before but looks pretty good. Familiar with Zoho wiki, but made a couple of edits on Zoe's draft desk wiki. I can see the fun in having the desk roster in a wiki, couple of clicks and hey presto, that inconvenient evening shift has just been transferred to one of your colleagues. Mwuhahahaha...

Post in Haste

Is this on? Hardly ranks up there with the great first lines in literary history - it was the best of times, it was the worst of times - call me Ishmael - the sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel (bonus points for getting the last one). Anyway, will have to do.