Friday, April 24, 2009

My 13th 23 Thingy Experience

My spelling is getting so bad now, that I have given up trying to spell all the numbers of the Thingy's if that makes sense.

This week was all about wikis, I have to say it took me ages to get into this one. I did try to set up a Wiki using PBwiki, but that was before Claire's talk and initially I could not think of anything useful to use my Wiki for. I was thinking of putting design ideas for the library into a Wiki, not design on the building but design features we use electronically like the colours of the logos etc. However I am not really sure how useful this Wiki would be to anyone but myself but maybe I might come back to it someday. I found Claire's talk really good, it definitely made me understand Wiki's a bit more, and I think the cataloguing wiki is brilliant. Its a great idea to put a manual up electronically and the fact that is can be edited by others is really useful. I am also attending the LNSS training course on portals, anyone who is attending the course has to sign up to a wiki. Initially I couldn't see why but today the course trainer has asked us to update the wiki with feedback on what we would like to get out of the course. I would never have thought of using a wiki in this way, so it is all very interesting!

Friday, April 3, 2009

My twelfth 23 Thingy Experience

This was all about technorati, which I hated to be honest. The online help that comes with the site, is useless, not user friendly at all. It took me forwever to put a technorati tag under one of my posts (see post on my tenth experience) this is only optional, but it was killing me that I couldn't figure it out! It turned out that I had to join technorati and claim my blog in order for it to work. Technorati is a list of blogs essentially, but I can't really see any huge advantage to using it. If they made the site a bit more user friendly that might help. They do have a thing called a watchlist, which you could add your blog to, and they will contact you if your blog every gets mentions. I could see the advantage of that option, but this is the only positive I found about this site.

My eleventh 23 Thingy Experience

I just had a look at delicious, personally I am not sure I would use it day to day for my own bookmarks. However I can see how it could be used in a library environment, for example I tagged the library website and the library catalogue and I found it interesting to see who else had tagged these sites, not that many but a few had. If you encouraged users to use delicious it could help in terms of statistics and finding out how many people use your site. Also encouraging users to add tags to various library resources, would give you an insight into how users described these resources and the kind of keywords they would use, therefore giving you an insight into terminology that could be used on the library website. Definitely a useful resource but not sure yet if I would use it daily.