This was a useful exercise and I appreciate all the hard work that people put into it.  I hope that everyone will continue visiting each other’s blogs.  It’s especially important that we all comment on posts.  That’s how communities are created.

I signed up for Gather, mostly because of the mention of NPR. I’ve been looking for a forum online where intellegent, serious people can discuss politics. I don’t want something exclusively populated by people with the same viewpoint and I really don’t want something populated by stupid people mindlessly repeating the latest crap from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Al Franken, et. al. Looking at the political groups on Gather, I’m not sure this is it. But we’ll see.

Rereading that last paragraph, I see that it sounds a bit elitist. Oh well.

I joined the Ning group and left a message. This makes three social networking sites (four if you count LibraryThing) that I’m now in. There is no way I’m going to maintain myself in three different walled gardens; it’s just not realistic. The trick is to see which one keeps my interest.

The role of social networks in libraries is still a bit uncertain. Many worry that social networking sites expose their children to dangerous people. Some librarians fear that kids (it always seems to be the kids) using MySpace or Facebook make too much noise or use the computers too much. Some even worry that kids will expose too much about themselves online. Many libraries are trying to market themselves on social networking sites with mixed results. Rather than try to explore all these topics, I will point you to a great blog post from Meredith Farkas, who discusses them at length and provides a lot of good links for further discussion.

Frankly, I’m not worried about most of the concerns listed above. Realistically, a child is far more likely to be abused by someone they know in real life than a stranger they meet online. Having kids in the library is something to be celebrated, even if they are noisy and use the computers a lot. But one thing about social networks that actually does bother me is the way they are closed off to the rest of the internet. I can put photos, information about myself, etc. into Facebook for all my friends to see. As long as they have Facebook accounts. But what if they don’t? The internet is huge; why do I want to limit my potential pool of friends to the relative handful using Facebook? There’s even a name for this phenomena: Walled Gardens.

You can use blogs and other online tools, many of which are among the 23 Things, to replicate much of what you can do in Facebook. The missing component is a quick, easy way to designate relationships. In Facebook, I can make you my friend and, from then on, I’ll have quick access to your info and vice versa. It’s not so easy in the wild wild internet. Smart people are working on it with microformats and XML data standards that would allow regular old websites and blogs to “friend” each other. Now wouldn’t that be cool.

Bonus link: Replace Facebook Using Open Social Tools

I’m subscribed to a number of podcasts but usually can only find time to listen to a few that are the most valuable to me:

• This Week in Tech
• Windows Weekly
• Security Now
• Justice Talking
• We the People Stories
• McGuinn’s Folk Den

Another video site I’ve played around with is blur.tv.  I like them because they support higher resolution and frame sized than YouTube.  While you can watch video on the site, they focus more on giving you the tools to embed your video on your own page.  Here’s an earlier blog post with an embedded video from blur.tv.

I’ve been using the personal folder in EBSCO for awhile now but was not aware of the web page composer functionality.  I’m pretty impressed at how it allows you to create simple but effective websites to provide access to search results and serve as a portal for further searching.  I think the Help information needs to be beefed up a little to explain to non-techies what you can do with your page since there is no web-hosting.  Better yet, EBSCO should provide some basic webhosting so that users can save their pages directly “to the web”.  That would be very cool.

I learned something new about ELM!

I’m firmly convinced that gaming programs can bring patrons into the library just as other programs can.  Patrons interested in gaming are not likely to be interested in more traditional programs and that in and of itself makes gaming warrant our interest.

I’m less convinced that games can serve as a way to make other library functions more interesting.  On the last day of Computers in Libraries, the keynote by Elizabeth Lawley of the Rochester Institute of Technology explored this topic at length.  I didn’t blog it because it didn’t really speak to me but it’s an interesting idea.  I think it’s a neat theory but my gut says no.  Maybe I’m just an old fogey getting left behind. 

You can only have 200 books in your library with the free membership.  I found this out the hard way, which is a testament to how easy it is to add books.  A simple keyword search almost always brought up the correct item.  For older books that have been out of print for years, I sometimes had to put in both some title keywords and an author name.

I haven’t explored the forums much yet but they look like a great place to connect with others who share your interest as a reader.  You can create your own forums, so they would also make it possible to create quick and dirty online book clubs.

The people behind LibraryThing have begun marketing LibraryThing for Libraries as an OPAC add-on.  Subscribers can embed LibraryThing data right in the catalog making reader reviews, recommendations, etc. available.

My user name at LibraryThing is Ecgric.  Come look me up!