Exercise #11 - wiki madness!

I can see how the wikis would be quite useful in a library, especially the SJCPL Subject Guides due to the fact that we are sharing knowledge accross the world. It could be useful in our library system as users could write information that they know about a particular item so then there would be more information available to our online library users.

excercise #10 - Library 2.0 perspectives

These articles were very interesting :) It's interesting to think about the future of a library in an increasingly technology base society. Some of the major concepts I thought I'd blog about were:
> Reliance on user education - Our library is already implementing some of the web 2.0 principles by having our catalogue available online. However a lot of the technology and specifically the my info pages are not intuitive and we rely a lot on people reading their brochures.
> Collect user intelligence
> The 6th principle of web 2.0 is 6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device. To my knowledge this relates to the use of iPods and such, not just PCs. Maybe NSL could soon be incorportating this technology into our current operations :P

I really enjoyed reading these articles

exercise #9 - technorati

This activity wasn't all that interesting imho. It would probably be more useful to me if I was interested in looking at something in particular. The searches I carried out brought back vague results and all sorts of blogs that contained those words. Web crawlers and such are pretty fascinating though :)

exercise #8 - delicious

Wow delicious is neat!

It's fun to look at everything that other people have tagged.
I feel that this technology would help a lot with research as sites that you find are easily retrievable at any location. I feel that the tags help alot.

exercise #7.2 - RSS searching

This exercise was interesting as it brought to light some alternate ways of searching for blogs.

The Bloglines tool was particularly helpful in finding rss feeds because it had a function which allowed the user to limit the search to rss feeds. I found it easy to search for feeds about my favourite band My Chemical Romance.

The next suggested tool I tried was Topix.net. While this was an useful tool for searching for blogs, not all of the blogs presented had rss feeds. Secondly, it was unable to bring up any useful feeds or blogs about my band :P. It would be useful if you were searching for a specific news feed or maybe for articles for an assignment.

Another suggested tool that I implemented in my quest to gain more feeds was Syndic8. Syndicate seemed more to be aimed at people's personal blogs and feeds from the few searches I carried out and didn't bring up any results for some search words.

Overall, I found the easiest and most effective way to search for feeds was through using bloglines, however it is not presented as nicely as Topix and you have to have a clear idea of what you are searching for because there aren't really ideas about what you are looking for on the bloglines page.

Exercise #7.1 - RSS

It was interesting to learn about the news reader. I have used RSS feeds before when learning how to make a web site. We used them to show the date and time on our cake website :) this was fun, i enjoyed learning more about feeds