Thursday, 4 March 2010
Think it's too late to pitch a tent?
I'm feeling a strange wariness towards LinkedIn. It could be that the name of it reminds me of an episode of Stargate, where a community of people are living in an ever shrinking biodome on a toxic planet, and are permanently connected via a direct neural interface to something called the link which, as well as providing them with access to information, also revises their memories so that they never know that it's gradually sending people off outside to their deaths. So it was with some completely unwarranted trepidation that I signed up to the site and started poking around. I'd heard of LinkedIn before, and knew it to be a professional networking site - the non-social version of Facebook, if you like, but had never explored it myself. I can entirely see the point of the site - I like to keep my personal and professional identities largely separate so to have a place where you can get the benefit of social networking but also be sure that your holiday snaps and party photos are well out of the way (not to mention all the insight into your life outside of work) is a great idea. However I'm not certain I'm entirely comfortable with the public-ness of LinkedIn. It really does seem very geared towards networking in terms of finding professional opportunities, and pushes you to almost advertise yourself on the web, which is not really what I want to do. The edit profile tab just scares me away with all the big green and blue 'add this information here!' exhortations, far more in your face than Facebook (from what I remember, anyway). I talked about privacy settings in my post about Facebook, and how I think it's really important to have control over what information you put out on the web, so the first place I went was the 'edit my public profile' and unticked most of the options, just the same as how on Facebook I've closed everything down to friends-only. To be honest, I haven't put much information on LinkedIn anyway, and what is there is what I'd consider to be public information - my name, work email and where I work. Perhaps I'm oddly inconsistent where the web is concerned, as I've merrily put all sorts of information about myself all over the place, but I like to do so on my own terms and for a reason, rather than just in a 'look at me' way. It's one of the reasons I deeply disliked Myspace (which I was on, for a while), and I think sites that have this approach do turn people off. I've heard many complaints from people about web 2.0 in general that it's all about broadcasting or advertising yourself, which I don't actually think is right, and it's certainly not what attracts me to it personally. For my library, sure, I want to put us out there and broadcast and advertise as widely as possible, but I want to market my library! I don't want to market myself - I just want to keep in touch with people and share things and find information and contribute to the global conversation, almost, and I love how there are so many sites that make that possible and easy now. Admittedly, having only just signed up, I haven't explored LinkedIn fully, but I think if it sold itself more on that aspect (as it does have groups, for example) rather than on 'look at me, here's what I can do, give me a job' aspect I'd find it more appealing.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Textbook enigmatic
Like many people, I've been on Facebook for several years now and use it a lot. I love the way it enables me to keep in contact with so many different people so easily - I have a lot of friends living elsewhere around the world and Facebook means that when friends move away it's much easier to keep in touch. I'm also in touch a lot more with extended family than I ever used to be through it - even my Nan is on there and she loves keeping up-to-date with all her grandchildren and nieces and nephews (and great-nieces and nephews!) through it. I particularly like that it enables you to see a lot of the more mundane things - the kind of things that you might not bother to explicitly write about it in an email or tell someone over the phone - and so you feel closer to people as a result. The flipside of this of course is that there's an awful lot of people who you end up knowing far more about than you might necessarily want them to, by virtue of being friends with them - and of course the definition of a friend on Facebook is not necessarily the same as a friend in the real world! Facebook comes in for a lot of criticism, at times, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, but in many ways its problems and benefits really reflect its users - it all depends on how people use the site. One of the most important things I think for anyone on there is to remember that you control your information - it's the usual rule for the internet multiplied. Don't put things on Facebook that you aren't comfortable with having people see, and make sure that you adjust your privacy settings. I'm always quite cautious about what is publicly available, and have set all my privacy settings to friends-only so that only people I approve can see things. I also take care of the problem of the 'friend' who's really only an acquaintance (or the old school friends getting back in touch out of curiosity) by using the lists feature and customising what different categories of friends can and can't see. Facebook is a fantastic tool, but like everything, it should be used with thought and care!
Libraries and Facebook
Facebook was the first web 2.0 tool I tried out for the VHL, and at the time I set us up, the page function had yet to be introduced. I therefore made a group for the library, thinking how great it would be to be able to get readers to communicate with us through the site, and with each other too and discuss library things. A few people joined, but nothing ever came of it. This was my first lesson in how the participatory ideal of web 2.0 just doesn't necessarily work in practice - expecting users to contribute just leads to disappointment when they don't! However, soon after that Facebook introduced the pages feature, and so I moved the VHL over to that (although the group does still exist, just unused). I think the pages feature has had the effect of changing people's expectations of what is on Facebook and what it's for. It was quite a big concern a few years ago that organisations going onto Facebook were somehow intruding on a personal space, and I think that was pretty valid with the original set-up of the site. However pages have created a space for the corporate within the site - there used to be a link right on the homepage saying 'create a page for your business or organisation' (or something along those lines - it's not there any more!). And as more organisations have set up pages I think people have stopped viewing them as an intrusion onto a personal space and have started expecting, almost, that they'll be there. I think there's an increasing expectation that everyone and everything is on Facebook now, and if nothing else I think this is why it is important for libraries to be there too.
Looking around at library Facebook pages, the most common approach is to basically replicate what's on your website or elsewhere, and this is really all that I've done with the VHL page. I view it as another place to push out our news and updates (our blog feed imports directly to the page) and to have our basic information listed - contact details, opening hours etc. I know that people who sign up to be fans get our news through the site, in the same way as anyone subscribing to our blog feed or following us on Twitter does. We also have a SOLO search box on there - as adapted by Jen at the EFL (the code is on the web 2.0 wiki if anyone wants to use it for their library page), which again is just giving people another place to access the library. It's therefore low-maintenance and an easy way to expand your web 'reach' without too much effort. Looking around at other library pages, this approach seems quite common, and I think it's perfectly fine! There are some really impressive Facebook pages around for libraries, with a lot of extras - Manchester Library & Information Service is a particularly great example, but for all the customisation they've put in, they still seem to be using it in much the same way as we are ours.
Libraries and Facebook
Facebook was the first web 2.0 tool I tried out for the VHL, and at the time I set us up, the page function had yet to be introduced. I therefore made a group for the library, thinking how great it would be to be able to get readers to communicate with us through the site, and with each other too and discuss library things. A few people joined, but nothing ever came of it. This was my first lesson in how the participatory ideal of web 2.0 just doesn't necessarily work in practice - expecting users to contribute just leads to disappointment when they don't! However, soon after that Facebook introduced the pages feature, and so I moved the VHL over to that (although the group does still exist, just unused). I think the pages feature has had the effect of changing people's expectations of what is on Facebook and what it's for. It was quite a big concern a few years ago that organisations going onto Facebook were somehow intruding on a personal space, and I think that was pretty valid with the original set-up of the site. However pages have created a space for the corporate within the site - there used to be a link right on the homepage saying 'create a page for your business or organisation' (or something along those lines - it's not there any more!). And as more organisations have set up pages I think people have stopped viewing them as an intrusion onto a personal space and have started expecting, almost, that they'll be there. I think there's an increasing expectation that everyone and everything is on Facebook now, and if nothing else I think this is why it is important for libraries to be there too.
Looking around at library Facebook pages, the most common approach is to basically replicate what's on your website or elsewhere, and this is really all that I've done with the VHL page. I view it as another place to push out our news and updates (our blog feed imports directly to the page) and to have our basic information listed - contact details, opening hours etc. I know that people who sign up to be fans get our news through the site, in the same way as anyone subscribing to our blog feed or following us on Twitter does. We also have a SOLO search box on there - as adapted by Jen at the EFL (the code is on the web 2.0 wiki if anyone wants to use it for their library page), which again is just giving people another place to access the library. It's therefore low-maintenance and an easy way to expand your web 'reach' without too much effort. Looking around at other library pages, this approach seems quite common, and I think it's perfectly fine! There are some really impressive Facebook pages around for libraries, with a lot of extras - Manchester Library & Information Service is a particularly great example, but for all the customisation they've put in, they still seem to be using it in much the same way as we are ours.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Giant worms. Huge.
I think YouTube is fantastic - one of the things on the web that has really changed how we do things. I know copyright infringement is rife (and an ongoing source of controversy), but how amazing is it that you can find clips of almost anything and everything that's ever been on screen? Technology like the BBC iPlayer and its like mean that you never actually need to miss anything on the TV if you're otherwise occupied, but it's YouTube that fills all those odd little niches and provides instant satisfaction. And this is how I mostly use YouTube, to see things that I missed first time round, that I wouldn't otherwise have seen, or that I did see and want to see again. I'm a strongly passive YouTube user - I didn't have an account myself until just before Christmas and never comment (YouTube comments are generally some of the worst on the internet, to be honest), and I also use it almost exclusively to view stuff that technically shouldn't be there in terms of copyright.
Copyright on the web is a hugely complex and controversial area, and YouTube is right on the front lines. I'm not going to go into detail about the ins and outs of it here (and I'm not an expert by any means!), but where YouTube is concerned it's been interesting to see the two approaches being played out in changes to the site. On the one hand you have the copyright holders that are cracking down hard on any infringement (or perceived infringement) - there was a huge fuss last year when YouTube went through and removed the audio from thousands of fan videos, essentially rendering them pointless. Now when you upload videos it will run automatic checks on the audio and may block the video if it discovers copyright infringement, depending on whether the copyright holder demands this. (Of course the usual response by the person who made the video is to try another, less restrictive, site, like Photobucket or Bam Vid Vault, or will just share via a filesharing site like Sendspace or Mediafire, so it doesn't actually stop the videos from being made and distributed!) But not everyone is taking this approach - many such videos now have pop-up adverts along the bottom which tell you the song that is used and link you to iTunes to buy a copy - thus using the illegitimate use to generate sales. The other way in which copyright holders are working with YouTube is to put content up themselves, figuring that if they make things (or parts of things) freely available it might reduce the amount of stuff put up by other people (and YouTube allows some corporate users to put up longer clips than the standard 10 minute limit). The Monty Python channel is a great example of this - they explicitly say so (and check out the trailer for the Not the Messiah film if you're there - my Dad's in it!).
Anyway, having said I wasn't going to say much about YouTube and copyright I seem to have done so! If anyone wants to read more about copyright and the web though I can recommend the writings of Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig in particular - their two recent books are both in the Staff Library and also available as free PDF downloads, so take a look.
OK. Enough about copyright. Back to the original point of this Thing.
Much like the rest of the web, YouTube has enormous potential for libraries and educational institutions, as well as students and researchers, as long as you are able to apply those critical faculties and sort through the haystack in order to find the needles you want. YouTubeEDU is YouTube's equivalent of iTunesU for podcasts, and just like iTunesU there's some really amazing stuff there when you browse through. However I want to highlight an excellent library-specific example, again from the Library of Congress. They use their YouTube channel not only to put up information about the library and videos of their events, but also for video footage from their archives, making these clips more widely available in just the same way as they do photgraphs via the Flickr Commons. Again they also put up a lot of this kind of material on their own site, but YouTube makes them more visible on the web and more easily findable by people that might not otherwise go to their site, as well as presenting material in a more accessible and user-friendly way.
Before I go, a quick note about subscribing to YouTube channels. At first glance, YouTube only seems to let you do this via your log-in to the site, but you can do so via RSS - fellow 23er CybrarianBeta has blogged about how to do this if anyone is like me and would prefer to subscribe in Google Reader.
Copyright on the web is a hugely complex and controversial area, and YouTube is right on the front lines. I'm not going to go into detail about the ins and outs of it here (and I'm not an expert by any means!), but where YouTube is concerned it's been interesting to see the two approaches being played out in changes to the site. On the one hand you have the copyright holders that are cracking down hard on any infringement (or perceived infringement) - there was a huge fuss last year when YouTube went through and removed the audio from thousands of fan videos, essentially rendering them pointless. Now when you upload videos it will run automatic checks on the audio and may block the video if it discovers copyright infringement, depending on whether the copyright holder demands this. (Of course the usual response by the person who made the video is to try another, less restrictive, site, like Photobucket or Bam Vid Vault, or will just share via a filesharing site like Sendspace or Mediafire, so it doesn't actually stop the videos from being made and distributed!) But not everyone is taking this approach - many such videos now have pop-up adverts along the bottom which tell you the song that is used and link you to iTunes to buy a copy - thus using the illegitimate use to generate sales. The other way in which copyright holders are working with YouTube is to put content up themselves, figuring that if they make things (or parts of things) freely available it might reduce the amount of stuff put up by other people (and YouTube allows some corporate users to put up longer clips than the standard 10 minute limit). The Monty Python channel is a great example of this - they explicitly say so (and check out the trailer for the Not the Messiah film if you're there - my Dad's in it!).
Anyway, having said I wasn't going to say much about YouTube and copyright I seem to have done so! If anyone wants to read more about copyright and the web though I can recommend the writings of Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig in particular - their two recent books are both in the Staff Library and also available as free PDF downloads, so take a look.
OK. Enough about copyright. Back to the original point of this Thing.
Much like the rest of the web, YouTube has enormous potential for libraries and educational institutions, as well as students and researchers, as long as you are able to apply those critical faculties and sort through the haystack in order to find the needles you want. YouTubeEDU is YouTube's equivalent of iTunesU for podcasts, and just like iTunesU there's some really amazing stuff there when you browse through. However I want to highlight an excellent library-specific example, again from the Library of Congress. They use their YouTube channel not only to put up information about the library and videos of their events, but also for video footage from their archives, making these clips more widely available in just the same way as they do photgraphs via the Flickr Commons. Again they also put up a lot of this kind of material on their own site, but YouTube makes them more visible on the web and more easily findable by people that might not otherwise go to their site, as well as presenting material in a more accessible and user-friendly way.
Before I go, a quick note about subscribing to YouTube channels. At first glance, YouTube only seems to let you do this via your log-in to the site, but you can do so via RSS - fellow 23er CybrarianBeta has blogged about how to do this if anyone is like me and would prefer to subscribe in Google Reader.
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Kree!
Podcasts are one of those things that I like the idea of very much but never seem to get around to using! I think it's mainly because I've never got on well with things I just have to listen to (other than music) - I don't like spoken radio, don't like audiobooks, and therefore also struggle with podcasts. I find my attention wanders and I start doing other things and then miss half of what is said so I never usually bother. Which is a shame because there's some fantastic stuff out there to listen to, but I guess it's just not my medium.
Anyway, personal foibles aside, podcasting is a great way to get audio content out, and as with all these web 2.0 tools there are so many different ways you can make use of the technology. From a library point of view I think they are great for user education, obviously, but also for things like audio tours - I heard a good talk at the OULS Exchange of Experience day in 2008 about the podcasted induction tour for Oxford Brookes library, for example. But where I think podcasts are really great is for more interesting things like talks and lectures - at the Rothermere American Institute we've been starting to record some of the talks and seminars that take place in order to reach a wider audience (our podcast of Professor Robin Kelley's Harmsworth Lecture in November was in the popular downloads section for a while), and this is of course where Oxford's venture into iTunesU is so fantastic. I was also particularly excited to discover that Oxford is now releasing a lot of podcasts with creative commons licences, which I think is brilliant and highly commendable.
Being a non-audio-fan-type-person I haven't ever really subscribed to podcasts much, but for this Thing I've made myself overcome my reticence and looked some out. I subscribed to the RAI's podcasts via iTunes and my Google Reader, and mooched about some of the other material on iTunesU - some really fantastic stuff and, if you're so minded, you can follow entire courses and lecture series from many universities. It's an awesome resource - I really should try and get over my dislike of just listening someday!
Anyway, personal foibles aside, podcasting is a great way to get audio content out, and as with all these web 2.0 tools there are so many different ways you can make use of the technology. From a library point of view I think they are great for user education, obviously, but also for things like audio tours - I heard a good talk at the OULS Exchange of Experience day in 2008 about the podcasted induction tour for Oxford Brookes library, for example. But where I think podcasts are really great is for more interesting things like talks and lectures - at the Rothermere American Institute we've been starting to record some of the talks and seminars that take place in order to reach a wider audience (our podcast of Professor Robin Kelley's Harmsworth Lecture in November was in the popular downloads section for a while), and this is of course where Oxford's venture into iTunesU is so fantastic. I was also particularly excited to discover that Oxford is now releasing a lot of podcasts with creative commons licences, which I think is brilliant and highly commendable.
Being a non-audio-fan-type-person I haven't ever really subscribed to podcasts much, but for this Thing I've made myself overcome my reticence and looked some out. I subscribed to the RAI's podcasts via iTunes and my Google Reader, and mooched about some of the other material on iTunesU - some really fantastic stuff and, if you're so minded, you can follow entire courses and lecture series from many universities. It's an awesome resource - I really should try and get over my dislike of just listening someday!
Thursday, 18 February 2010
The secret masters of the Universe
I'm surprised, reading this week's blogs, to find such a lukewarm reception to delicious - I think we as the 23 Things team were expecting this one to be a hit, as we're all big fans of it and also it seems to speak right to librarians' hearts (collect things! classify them! show them to everyone else!). But I'm getting the impression that a lot of people are a bit unsure about it, and that perhaps not everyone is realising quite what it offers, or why people are so keen on it.
The first thing I'm noticing people asking is why use delicious instead of saving bookmarks in your browser? My answer to this is that it's not 'instead of' - I still have favourites saved for the sites I go to most frequently, and in many cases don't have these saved on delicious at all. Delicious, for me, is more like my web library - all the things I've read on the internet that I want to save for future reference, or just in case, or because I don't have time to read them just yet but want to come back to, or just because I thought they were good/interesting/entertaining etc, as well as all the sites that I don't visit that often (and so don't want to have cluttering up my browser bookmarks), but do want to be able to find quickly and easily on occasion. It's therefore full of individual articles and pages rather than whole sites - links to specific things like YouTube videos, short stories, reviews, comic strips, articles, blog posts, picture galleries, fics, forum posts... you get the picture. It's also, as I talked about in my previous post, a really useful discovery tool, but for this kind of thing - not whole sites, but for what is being talked about and produced on the web. I suppose, to continue the library analogy, it's like my browser bookmarks are my quick reference section, whereas my delicious page is my whole collection.
The idea of delicious as a discovery tool has also perplexed some people, with complaints about volume/quality of information etc. To be honest, my initial answer to this is 'in what way is this different or worse than Google?', but fellow 23er Laura has addressed this concern excellently in her blog, so I will say no more and refer you to her!
Finally, this week's things have really introduced the idea of tagging on a mass scale, and the concept of folksonomies. I found this excellent article by Clay Shirky saved by someone with the ox23 tag (via my Google Reader - see what I mean about delicious tags as a resource discovery method?), which explains why classifying the web in a traditional sense doesn't work, but tagging does. And secondly I'm going to embed a really good presentation here by Tim Spalding (founder of LibraryThing - another site that uses tagging heavily) wherein he explains the benefits that tagging offers as compared to library classification schemes like LCSH. It's a really thought-provoking talk, and while I'm not going to be a complete traitor to my profession and advocate throwing out LCSH completely, I do think that tagging has a lot to offer library catalogues as an additional feature. Of course, we have tagging functionality in SOLO, but as both Shirky and Spalding point out, tagging only works if a critical mass can be achieved, and SOLO is nowhere near there yet!
The first thing I'm noticing people asking is why use delicious instead of saving bookmarks in your browser? My answer to this is that it's not 'instead of' - I still have favourites saved for the sites I go to most frequently, and in many cases don't have these saved on delicious at all. Delicious, for me, is more like my web library - all the things I've read on the internet that I want to save for future reference, or just in case, or because I don't have time to read them just yet but want to come back to, or just because I thought they were good/interesting/entertaining etc, as well as all the sites that I don't visit that often (and so don't want to have cluttering up my browser bookmarks), but do want to be able to find quickly and easily on occasion. It's therefore full of individual articles and pages rather than whole sites - links to specific things like YouTube videos, short stories, reviews, comic strips, articles, blog posts, picture galleries, fics, forum posts... you get the picture. It's also, as I talked about in my previous post, a really useful discovery tool, but for this kind of thing - not whole sites, but for what is being talked about and produced on the web. I suppose, to continue the library analogy, it's like my browser bookmarks are my quick reference section, whereas my delicious page is my whole collection.
The idea of delicious as a discovery tool has also perplexed some people, with complaints about volume/quality of information etc. To be honest, my initial answer to this is 'in what way is this different or worse than Google?', but fellow 23er Laura has addressed this concern excellently in her blog, so I will say no more and refer you to her!
Finally, this week's things have really introduced the idea of tagging on a mass scale, and the concept of folksonomies. I found this excellent article by Clay Shirky saved by someone with the ox23 tag (via my Google Reader - see what I mean about delicious tags as a resource discovery method?), which explains why classifying the web in a traditional sense doesn't work, but tagging does. And secondly I'm going to embed a really good presentation here by Tim Spalding (founder of LibraryThing - another site that uses tagging heavily) wherein he explains the benefits that tagging offers as compared to library classification schemes like LCSH. It's a really thought-provoking talk, and while I'm not going to be a complete traitor to my profession and advocate throwing out LCSH completely, I do think that tagging has a lot to offer library catalogues as an additional feature. Of course, we have tagging functionality in SOLO, but as both Shirky and Spalding point out, tagging only works if a critical mass can be achieved, and SOLO is nowhere near there yet!
Learning is delightful and delicious
I adore delicious. It is one of my favourite web 2.0 tools, and along with RSS feeds is the one I'd say has definitely changed my life! I have been maintaining three delicious accounts for over two years now - a personal one which now has getting on for 1000 saved links, a work-related one that I set up to keep track of and share specifically work-related and web 2.0 related things, and finally the VHL's account, for useful links for our readers. I use the first one all the time, saving anything and everything that I might conceivably ever want to come back to, but it is distinctly designed more for me rather than for sharing with others - I make use of the 'mark as private' feature too so that I can save things there that I'd rather not broadcast to the world. The other two accounts are designed more for other people, a way to save and share things that I think other people might find useful.
For the library, this has been a particularly useful tool. There are so many really useful websites and free web resources relating to US Studies and US History in particular, and before I discovered delicious I was trying to build up a links page on our website in order to save some of these for our readers. It was cumbersome to maintain though as I had to log in to the CMS every time I wanted to add something, and also there were difficulties in deciding how to organise the links and make the list appear manageable and have everything easily findable. Delicious makes this all really easy - I can save links quickly as and when I come across them, and by using tags I can make that list browsable and break-down-able into smaller lists. Our tags do need a bit of work - I keep meaning to go in and sort them into bundles but never quite getting round to it. Perhaps I'll try and do that this week as part of the Things. I know that the Education Library has made good use of tags to offer lists broken down by course and subject, and that's the kind of thing that delicious does really well. Another useful feature is of course expanding on the sharing by putting the links elsewhere - our latest links show up in the sidebar of our blog, on our website (although there have been problems in general with getting delicious widgets to display in the CMS and whether they show up or not can be rather hit and miss), and are pushed out to Twitter and via RSS.
Another way in which I find delicious particularly useful is for discovering new content. As everything saved on delicious (and similar sites) has been done so consciously, social bookmarking sites become a kind of 'best of the web'. This means that searching delicious can have distinct advantages over searching via Google, particularly if you are looking for something which is likely to have a specific tag. And of course then you can subscribe to that tag (or to other users if their interests coincide with yours) by RSS and get automatically notified when new things are added. This is a feature that I use quite a lot as well, and have promoted to people as a good current awareness service. As part of this week's Things therefore, I've subscribed to the feed for the ox23 tag in my Google Reader.
I only really use the networks insofar as getting notifications via RSS - as I tend to only visit delicious to find something specific, I'm not going to go and browse my network just to see what's new, but RSS takes care of that for me too.
All in all, my thoughts on delicious can be summed up as follows: delicious by name, delicious by nature!
For the library, this has been a particularly useful tool. There are so many really useful websites and free web resources relating to US Studies and US History in particular, and before I discovered delicious I was trying to build up a links page on our website in order to save some of these for our readers. It was cumbersome to maintain though as I had to log in to the CMS every time I wanted to add something, and also there were difficulties in deciding how to organise the links and make the list appear manageable and have everything easily findable. Delicious makes this all really easy - I can save links quickly as and when I come across them, and by using tags I can make that list browsable and break-down-able into smaller lists. Our tags do need a bit of work - I keep meaning to go in and sort them into bundles but never quite getting round to it. Perhaps I'll try and do that this week as part of the Things. I know that the Education Library has made good use of tags to offer lists broken down by course and subject, and that's the kind of thing that delicious does really well. Another useful feature is of course expanding on the sharing by putting the links elsewhere - our latest links show up in the sidebar of our blog, on our website (although there have been problems in general with getting delicious widgets to display in the CMS and whether they show up or not can be rather hit and miss), and are pushed out to Twitter and via RSS.
Another way in which I find delicious particularly useful is for discovering new content. As everything saved on delicious (and similar sites) has been done so consciously, social bookmarking sites become a kind of 'best of the web'. This means that searching delicious can have distinct advantages over searching via Google, particularly if you are looking for something which is likely to have a specific tag. And of course then you can subscribe to that tag (or to other users if their interests coincide with yours) by RSS and get automatically notified when new things are added. This is a feature that I use quite a lot as well, and have promoted to people as a good current awareness service. As part of this week's Things therefore, I've subscribed to the feed for the ox23 tag in my Google Reader.
I only really use the networks insofar as getting notifications via RSS - as I tend to only visit delicious to find something specific, I'm not going to go and browse my network just to see what's new, but RSS takes care of that for me too.
All in all, my thoughts on delicious can be summed up as follows: delicious by name, delicious by nature!
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Indoors, with waiters and tables
Picnik is a new tool for me, and so this Thing is particularly exciting. I'm a Photoshop addict, and have spent quite a lot of time over the last few months learning the tools and tricks, and would now consider myself a pretty competent user, but equally I know how unintuitive I found it when starting out. I know there are a lot of tools around that aim to let you do the same kind of editing and manipulation but in a far more user-friendly way, but hadn't ever really explored any other than the functions on Picasa on my laptop at home. Picnik seems like a really good option for this kind of tweaking - the way it links directly with Flickr is great, and the editing options are helpfully labelled with actual words rather than the not-so-obvious images you find in the likes of Photoshop and GIMP. I played around with a couple of the photos I'd uploaded of the VHL, mostly just fixes like sharpening and adjusting colour/saturation/contrast, and also tried out some of the extras like the vignette, soften, Lomo and sepia tools. I'll have to have a play with some of the wackier options another time! For me though, much as I'm impressed with what Picnik offers, I don't think it'll tempt me away from my Photoshop.