Moving on

I've decided - despite advising other people to do the opposite - to let this blog go, so that I can concentrate on other blogging projects. Thanks for reading!

Play good ... consumerism bad

This is already the philosophy at my house.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/opinion/20mon4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

We keep licensed character stuff to a minimum. When we can.

funny

http://producten.hema.nl/

Privacy and the internet

Some of the people who participated in Learning 2.0 have voiced (or blogged) serious reservations about letting their personalities, opinions, personal details, photos, etc. get out there on the internet, through all the 2.0 applications we've been working with. One colleague whose opinion I respect has started to rethink her entire approach to blogging about her kids, both because of privacy issues and because of how it might affect them later. I'd like to offer the following analogy, which applies to all these concerns.

Chances are, if you're reading this blog, you grew up with a telephone in your house. If you're 20 years older than me, it's less than certain, but still likely. If you're 20 years younger than me, you may have grown up with cell phones. But let's consider the landline that came into your house when you were in high school.

We all used it to some extent. Talking to friends was the big one in high school, but there was also talking to family, employers, parents' employers, telemarketers, prank callers (or doing the prank calling), and, if you were very unlucky, obscene callers. ... Huh. I'd never put that together until just now - the telephone had spammers and porn both. Anyway, if you think back to high school, you might remember getting a phone call from someone you knew only peripherally from school, or from a friend of a friend, either looking for the homework assignment, or wondering if you'd like to go see a movie, or whatever. And maybe you didn't mind, or maybe it was distasteful to whatever level for you.

In any case, you put up with the bad aspects so that you could have the advantages. You didn't reject the telephone out of hand the first time you had a bad or weird experience with it. (Well, most likely ... ) You adapted, perhaps. You became more cautious. But since you were young, you rolled with it. It's what you grew up with.

So now there's this newfangled internet. You don't want to repeat mistakes you made, or your friends made, so you apply the lens of caution borne of all the experiences you had with the telephone, and everything else in your life up until now. Perhaps you're less adaptable because you're not as young. Or maybe you are just as adaptable as you've ever been ... though in that case it's likely that you have already adapted to the internet. Or maybe caution has served you well, so you're just cautious.

My grandparents didn't grow up with a telephone in their house. It may have taken longer for them, but they came around eventually.

Kids today are growing up with the internet. It's what they will know, to the extent that we expose them to it. It won't suddenly become this horrible thing we did to them.

So embrace the internet and the 2.0 applications that interest you.

Cautiously.

Are YOU a twopointopian?

The Annoyed Librarian uses this term on her blog. Heck, she may have coined it. Despite being somewhat of a twopointopian, and despite the fact that the term is used mockingly, I still love it!

http://annoyedlibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/12/library-technologists-of-future.html

Yahoo "Answers" become headlines?

There's something very wrong about this. Yahoo is elevating some of its "Answers" to the status of headlines on its web portal. As you may or may not have already known, those "answers" are provided by users, and then the "best" answer is selected by the user who asked the question, sometimes seemingly without regard for any reasonable definition of "best" or even of "answer."

So how does Yahoo figure these "answers" should be headlines? Because it will help sell their product? It's difficult to think of a different answer. Maybe I'll ask on Yahoo "Answers."

UPDATE: I did ask on Yahoo Answers. Surprisingly, it wasn't removed immediately, which is what I expected to happen based on previous critical-of-the-whole-concept-of-Yahoo-Answers questions I've posted. But it was up for a couple of days before someone answered. Here's the answer (which I immediately chose as the best answer):

"Nope, I think you hit the nail right on the head. It's all blatant self-promotion."

I still expect it to be removed at any time.

New year, new blog

By now it's old news: the acplinfo.blogspot.com blog is being replaced with acplinfo.wordpress.com. We're looking for bloggers for it, especially to write about ACPL materials (though also about other stuff that the bloggers deem blogworthy). If you've taken to blogging during Learning 2.0, please consider writing a few sentences to a couple of paragraphs about a book, movie, or CD from time to time on the new blog.

If we had 20 people doing it once a month, we'd be in a really good place. And hey, what's once a month? If you're in a book discussion group, blog about that book. Mine the past - blog about a favorite book or movie you read that still stands up today. There will be a link to the blog right on the homepage, so we expect a lot more people to be reading it.

Finally, we're mainly trying to create connections between our materials and our patrons, so usually we'll want to stay away from posting harshly negative reviews. Focus on the positive.

Thing 15: Myspace

I think I've made my opinion about Myspace known. It's poorly designed, prone to spam, and generally annoying. But lots of people use it. So I know how to use it. Though I try not to.

Thing 13: del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a great idea. I used it well before Learning 2.0. I think of it as an RSS feed aggregator for web pages that don't publish feeds. Keeping track of stuff more easily than with bookmarks.

Thing 12: LibraryThing

"If the buzz page doesn't convince you, you cannot be convinced. Go away. "

Meh. I went away. It's a good idea for people who need to keep track of stuff like that. I used to buy books; now I check them out. Don't want to pay to tag the books I've read. (First 200 are free ... doesn't excite me.)

If we could get LibraryThing and our catalog together somehow ... that could be cool.

Thing 10: MP3 player

Okay, I can do that. It's not terribly interesting to me.