Holy heck, this is like when you get to the end of the maze and find out the maze itself has been battling you the whole time.  Well guess what mother brain, I am not at the top of my game right now and I’m ready to tango.

I wrote the above attempting Thing 23 at the end of my marathon.  I didn’t make it any further that day, but I think it’s funny so I’m leaving it. 

Here are some concepts and hyphenated phrases that characterize web 2.0 for me:

• Two-way communication
• User-supplied content
• multimedia
• selectivity of content
• the hive mind
• programming that lets user do a wide variety of things using the same basic computer skills (browsing for an uploading a file, for instance)

I’m sure there’s more, but these are striking clearly for me.  Two of the suggested articles gave me completely divergent perspectives on how this will affect libraries.  To a temporary place in time… sort of climbs Maslow’s heirachy of needs but with libraries, although she compares it to a chain of increasing value.  She suggests that libraries will evolve from what we know into something that every part of can be accessed online where we will increasingly spend our time, and then eventually the whole building will be a self-actualized portal to the web because of other mobile devices and technologies (like holograms!).  On the other hand, Walt Crawford has the take that only the name “L 2.0″ is new, and the idea of collaboration and specialization has existed forever in the form of public meetings and Tell Us Slips, which are examples of “low tech 2.0″ services.  He also takes the practical approach that we ought to think of 2.0 as evolution rather than revolution meaning that the technologies will enhance what we do rather than rebuild the whole system.  These two ideas really bookend my thoughts as far as the principles of 2.0-ness is concerned.  I have two original thoughts to add.  First is that it’s important to view 2.0 as a social need and mode because not everyone is on the web, yet.  This isn’t really an excuse for people who can’t afford computers, nor is it meant to justify resisting learning something new.  I just think that for all it’s connective power, the internet keeps us separated by enabling us to communicate remotely.  Did you IM your college roommate from across the room?  I did.  It was hilarious at the time, but when online talk (and increasingly smaller and more bite sized talk) replaces conversation, something is missed.  Second, … I forget what it is….hmmm…. but you know what?  I will take advantage of this format by not finishing now, and update later when I remember.  Great!  Just now, this second, web 2.0 capabilities and expectations have increased my productivity and functionality, even as I type!  Word!

Mostly I get my podcasts from the istore which seems like not much of a web 2.0 place.  Podcasts are definitely 2.0, but some of them are just broadcasts of radioshows already going on.  The one I listen to the most is called The Soul Train, and then This American Life.  I was trying to follow one called I Read Comics – Comic Talk From A Live Girl.  She would go see comic movies and then talk about what she liked and didn’t like.  Good for her, but it was pretty boring so I stopped listening.  Podcasts are kind of analogous to blogs in my mind, but I have even less time for them and don’t listen to them.  Even while doing dishes.  In another way, they are analogous to YouTube in that you need equipment to produce them.  This is a barrier for web 2.0, but not an insurmountable one.

Ok, I think I figured part of it out.  I can use iMovie to record video and audio, but then when I have what I want, I can just share straight to iTunes and have an audio file.  Hmmm, I think there’s a lot more to it.  What I saved ended up being a movie, and I think I need to save it as an mp3 somehow.  After that, I need to contact ourmedia.org and do a few other things.  It seems straightforward enough, but for the scope of the project of 23 Things, I think it will suffice to say that it’s doable from my couch, so hooray for web 2.0.

I hope this post isn’t too lame to count for Thing 22; it seems like we are just supposed to be familiar with the idea of a podcast and how to find out that suits our interests.

What would the world be without YouTube?  There is no shortage of analysis on why what’s popular is popular, but it’s so clear that we can much more easily prove our sanity to our friends because instead of just saying yeah, there was a guy who balanced the whole piano on his nose! we can actually prove it by showing them the video.  You can see parts of TV shows, music, stunts, so much.  Posting videos is very very easy as well.  Check out my buddy Javier the Muscle Character!

I checked out Metacafe too.  I am seeing some very familiar things.  Tags, ratings, comments.  And some unfamiliar things.  Two firetrucks crashing into each other!  Whoa!

So how can this be used at the library?  We just had a photo contest, let’s take it a dimension further and make it a video contest.  And in fact, the library has already used YouTube to be the vehicle for the Harvey Pekar interviews about life on Coventry in the 60s.

I am kind of excited about this Thing.  I like little thingies that do a little specialized function, it reminds me of days when I would contrust small lego machines and send them out to accomplish whatever the capabilities and mission dictated.  When I got my mac, I was interested to learn about the feature called dashboard (I think…).  With one button push, the screen gets a little darker and several widgets of your choice and arrangement appear.  I have three I use a lot.  One is a miniature music player that tells me the song title and how far into the song it is.  Next is a calendar and clock, and lastly a dictionary.  I use it every Monday and Thursday, which is when Maureen Dowd’s column appears in the PD.  It also has a thesaurus.  I mean, I know these things exist online, but having them at one button’s press is tubular.  It’s like having a bat phone.

I also explored a little bit of widgets when I was constructing my iGoogle page.  I added a YouTube search box and widget that sends a text message to a phone.

As for YourMinis, damn do people care about the weather a heck of a lot.  I couldn’t find the Open Startpage feature, even after registering.  Maybe this is another place where looking at other blogs will be instructive.  And speaking of all these widgets, I wonder, idly, whether there is an RSS widget that would aggregate all the blogs that staff have made as part of 23 Things that would update to one page that all staff could look at.  I haven’t tagged a single one of my posts, but there are a few reasons to go back over each one.  I also need to think carefully about how these things are impacting me, Heights library and libraries in general.  I wonder how easy it is to make widgets.  I bet that if there was a way to add widgets to personal accounts they would get used.  I’m thinking along the lines of put in a title, get the author kind of thing, a very rudimentary set of terms from the catalogue because people are always forgetting the author.

I am getting very tired.

I picked www.mangolanguages.com because patrons are frequently in need of some foreign language learning materials, and my friends have asked me pretty frequently as well.  The first course in each of the eight languages is free, after that you have to ‘enroll’.  This isn’t unexpected, but it is expensive.  It costs $65.00 for a month, and there are discounts as you buy more months at one time with a whole year being $345.00.  They had eight languages, and the only other tool that would be really useful, I thought, would be the translator and those are defintely available for free lots of places already.  I also didn’t really get why this was a web 2.0 awardee.  It just seemed like a straight website to me; there wasn’t any conversation application or something like that.  I could see an international chat or discussion area being very helpful and falling squarely in the 2.0 arena.  There is a blog and some of it is in Portuguese, but it was from the development team annoucing that the Portuguese course is ready.  The blog hasn’t been updated since February which makes me think this service didn’t really catch on in the way that they’d hoped.  Oh, further back in the blog they mention the forum as being worked on, and as of October the forum is still a hard hat area.  I know there are internet phone services that are cheap or free, such as skype.  Maybe it would make sense to have a tutor system set up over skype complimented with some web chat applications to really make this a 2.0 endeavor.

I don’t tend to use personal calendars and I make my own to do lists so I’ve never explored this area of the web capability very closely.  I like writing to do lists more than keeping them digitally because balling them up and throwing them away is much more satisfying than deleting them.  But onto the assignment.  I’ve customized an iGoogle page, but the only thing I cared about enough to put on it was a few of the comic strips that don’t appear daily in the Plain Dealer, and a dictionary.

I don’t want to use the calendars, but I think I might have to start.  I will certainly be using Googel Docs more frequently because if Staff Desk goes away, I’ll have to rely on bringing my flash drive with me to the library every time I need a document which I think is unrealistic for me, especially because I work in multiple buildings.  So using the places online to store documents will help me access them from anywhere, including home.

The beans are done, now for the rest of the recipe.  Ok back.  That was fun to make!  It’s a vegetarian black bean chili, with jalepenos and citrus juices.  I put some cinnamon in it because I think the sweetness will offset the other tastes in a nice way.

The PDF converter looks very useful.  I’ve bookmarked it and added the bookmark to delicious as well.

Well how do you like that?!  I signed up for delicious, installed the buttons, and used the search box.  I put in children and reader and advisory because I can never find anything about reader’s advisory for children, and WOAH!  There it was, a site about exactly what I’d been looking for, children’s reader’s advisory.  And better than that, it’s a wiki!  So we will put my theory of the usefulness of wikis to the test, I guess.  I joined the wiki, too.

I also really like the fact that I can just continue bookmarking to my own computer and then import them into delicious.  I can see the usefulness of being able to access bookmarks from anywhere, but I also want the convenience of going directly to the site I want on my computer, as opposed to having to go through delicious to get to it.

I put the beans on, they have to simmer for a hour to soften up.

I’ve been looking forward to this thing for a week, which is when I joined Facebook.  I was surprised to see one day that a bunch of people had requested me as their facebook friend, but the thing was, I didn’t have an account.  I think I owe it all to Kris Hickey to invited me to facebook and I think somehow, others were able to see the invitation and also invite me.  I can’t be sure, but I think that how it happened.  Anyway, I’m on it now and it’s more fun that I thought.  My experience with MySpace was so clunky and hard to do what I wanted to do that I didn’t find it worth it to put something together.  I really only wanted a page because it was required before I could comment on other’s pages.  Facebook has been very different because there are fewer ways to customize the look of the page but more things to do on it.  I like that it’s easy to share pictures and videos (although this is really from You Tube’s end.  I’m not sure I’d know what to do if there wasn’t a facebook link underneath every you tube video).

I really loathe putting in profile information into websites like this.  It’s not fun to write down all my likes and dislikes, but it is fun to read, hear and see what other people have chosen to attend or comment on.  The applications really set facebook apart from myspace, too.  Most of all, facebook is able to bring together a lot of the web 2.0 services in a way that is not confusing or competitive.  There is a Pandora application, there is a chat function, an email function and photo sharing.  Some of the other applications give you some room for limited creativity so that the things you share with friends can be very personal, sort of like ecards but much more succinct.  Across the board brevity is the price you pay for keeping all these tasks separated and unconfusing.  Unless you use the email or note writing functions, there is rarely a comment or description that tops two sentences.  Generally this is no big deal, but it certainly constrains the ability to emote and communicate beyond a certain low level of informational exchange.

It seems like Ning is the expanded version of Facebook in that songs and calendars can be uploaded as opposed to snippets and single events.

Well, I think I found a few of the major drafts in my living room and plugged them with blankets. This is helping, but I would like to make some more coffee and get my chili started. Better press on though.

What I like about all this online tagging and bookmarking is that it contributes to the slow death of email.  There is no reason to rely on our few friends who send us hit or miss funny videos and no one needs anymore plain text files forwarded to them, no matter how hilarious.  Instead of that pot shot attempt and funny content, you can ride a wave of surfers to funny stuff of your choosing.  I am more at ease with this than I was with technorati, I suppose because it doesn’t make any sort of claim to authority.  Also, they seem to be completely used driven in that the only way something gets dugg or stumbled is if someone clicks on that icon, whereas technorati does a webcrawl to see what’s out there.

To compare these sites, I picked a term that I have some interest in, “rust belt”, to enter into each.  Digg had 1 result from almost four months ago about how fat rust belt citizens are.  Reddit had 1 in the last 4 months, and Newsvine was seven months outdated.  Mixx had an interesting article about population size from 2 months ago, which was probably the most satisfying result.  I don’t think rust belt is a particularly out there term to search for, so I sort of conclude that these sites are really for finding funny videos which a perfectly awesome reason to use the web.  Also, I don’t care about how popular things are, I just care that they are funny to me.  Ratings and number matter less here than on, for instance, gaming sites, where I would probably agree with some general criteria that factors into the fun or frustration of playing a certain game.

I made my own google map of all the Clevnet libraries a while ago.  I was thinking that when patrons are desperate for an item, the sometimes want to go to whichever library has it and get it themselves.  I even color coded it by system and denoted the main branches with the dotty paddles. The problem was that on the staff computers it took 44444444ever to load. Regardless, here it is:

View Larger Map

The other problem is that while I can search for an address (of a patron) while I am logged into MyGoogleMaps, I couldn’t figure out how to share the map with the rest of the staff, or even have it in a shared location so that others could use it and search for addresses on it. Let’s collaborate if possible.