8 Things On A Stick

Wow, I am severely behind on this project! Here's to hoping I get this completed on time. *crosses fingers*

I remember there being a huge amount of buzz when del.icio.us first hit the scene. Yahoo! purchased the start-up for an insane amount of money a couple years back but they now may be regretting that decision. At first it seemed like a no-brainer: the ability to tap into your bookmarks and impossibly-too-long-to-remember URL's available anywhere in the world 24/7 open on Christmas and all that. Anybody who's ever had to switch computers at work knows well the horror of losing all that hard-fought web work in the blink of an eye. But the reality is that a incredibly large percentage of web users don't surf all that much. They have a handful of favorite time waster sites (MySpace, FaceBook, m.u.d.'s, chat rooms, etc.) and they rarely stray from that regimen. They have these URL's memorized so del.icio.us is un-needed at best. Due to our harried modern life-styles, only the privileged minority has the luxury of regularly spending more than an hour on-line to research Wikipedia in depth, click on every Google hit for the subject of interest, etc. Due to an increased push for productivity since 2000, the amount of white-collar jobs available which include the perk of un-disturbed Internet goofing-off rapidly decreases almost daily.

On that note, it's worth noting that our library's patrons only get an hour on the computers. Combine that with semi-common bandwidth issues and that doesn't leave too much time for dilly dallying. Where del.ici.ous comes in as a valuable tool is a efficiency tool. For the first hour, scroll through the Google hits and save bookmarks of places you want to check out in depth. Then, next hour, log into your del.ici.ous account and save yourself the trouble of copying all those sites onto scratch paper. Then you can take the info you want and send it to yourself via email. Then you can save your word processing document in progress online via Google Docs. See, there is hope for the paperless office yet!

I have no real use for slide show presentations with my current position at the check out desk so I only briefly browsed those applications. PictureTrail worked fine, I liked the buttons for auto-copying the code to a blog. That sort of idiot-proofing time-saver feature helps tremendously with helping computer newbies to not become overwhelmed.

It's easy to take for granted how many people still lack even rudimentary computer skills. When you sit with folks in the internet labs, there is inevitably at least one person who can't even find where the delete key is. I don't mean to make fun of these people, but it is worth mentioning. IMOHO, one of the greatest challenges facing our country is finding solutions for a workforce which is no longer needed. Every paper in this country for years keeps running countless stories about unemployed middle-aged factory workers with minimal college education who now have nothing to do after the jobs moved overseas via NAFTA et al. These people have to be re-trained and the library (along with society in general) can help them get over their computer-phobia. It's the only chance these displaced workers have left as those high paying jobs are never going to come back.

Off topic, sorry about that. Anyhoo, Mosaic Maker and Big Huge Lab and their ilk (PhotoTrail, that means you!) still strike me as essentially worthless for grown-up's. Aesthetically, they are hideous. It's like making your photos resemble an old Geocities account. Another pet peeve is that Blogger deleted my slidw show because I had saved this post as a draft. On the plus side, the advertising was not nearly as obtrusive as many free sites have become.

LazyBase is a great idea! I only wish you could simply upload the Excel file you already have rather than having to start from scratch. For a compulsive list maker like myself, this is heaven!

I seriously am confused by the purpose of EFolio Minnesota. This is exactly the sort of thing you would create in some sad-sack job fair or boring college workshop that would make you feel better about yourself but have no bearing whatsoever on actually advancing your career. You get a job by networking and handing out resumes, not by creating yet another elaborate personalized web page. I seriously doubt a head hunter for Monster would click on your link, no matter how many times you emailed it to him/her.

I was very intrigued by the 50 New Ways To Tell A Story list. This is an awesome tool for helping educators communicate to the general public what is available to them free of charge that revitalized old narratives. Here's what happened on my last vacation gets so much cooler with these suggestions. A lot of them are dumb but some are pretty innovative.

In conclusion, the main advantage for libraries with this technology is the ability to let these sites host the data for us. As long as we remember where to find the URL's, it cuts down tremendously on bandwidth and data storage mishaps.