my flickr slideshow

Here is a slideshow of my photos on flickr. As you can see, I take way too many black & white photos, and way too many of bridges, too. :-) The account really needs to be updated - the pictures are all at least a few years old.

Thoughts about wikis

After learning about wikis this week in class, it is neat to think of all the different ways to use them. Whenever I had previously heard the term "wiki," I only thought of Wikipedia. But the list of wikis that was provided to us was pretty cool to check out in order to see the different organizations that are using wikis to share information and get people involved through editing and content contribution.

As mentioned in my discussion board post for class this week, there seem to be both positives and negatives associated with wikis. What worries me is that if you have a wiki for important information (such as a medical wiki), then anyone has the ability to edit content on the site, and who's to say that it's necessarily accurate? Though, as someone else mentioned in class, hopefully people using wikis to look up information would just use them as a starting point and then also refer to other (possibly more reputable) sources such as reference books or hospital/organizational websites.

After learning about the different uses of wikis (and viewing the commoncraft how-to-wiki video), I created a wiki for my friends and I to use as a planning base for our upcoming vacation. I think other possible uses of wikis could include similar things not related to library or educational organizations, such as: parents using wikis to plan things like parties for kids, sporting event banquets and fundraisers, family reunions, kids talking about their favorite books or writing fan fiction (I'm thinking Harry Potter and Twilight wikis here), etc.

LibraryThing & Rollyo

I first heard about LibraryThing from some students in my grad school classes. A few of them are kind of addicted to it and asked me to sign up to check it out. So I did. And I added two books. And I never logged back in....until this class, when I finally had time (and reason) to explore it. Actually, it does seem like a pretty neat thing. Tagging books seems like a nice idea too, though time consuming, so I haven't done any of that yet. The friend who originally got me to sign up is a tagging hound, but she enjoys it and it probably helps her find more books that suit her interests. I like that you can add other people as friends and view each other's bookshelves -- it might also help you find books that you might like to read if you see that someone else has already read them. I'd really like to start using LibraryThing on a regular basis to keep track of the books I own or have read, so I'm glad that it was included in this course.

When I did the Rollyo exercise, it seemed like a cool concept, but I'm not sure how often I would actually use it. Since I'm taking a trip to San Diego this July, I added links to a bunch of information on the city, some attractions, visitors guides, the page for the hotel I'm staying at, etc. Rollyo could be pretty neat, since it allows you to search just the sites you want for information you need, but I almost think I would rather just save the sites to a favorites menu and go through them one-by-one than search them all together. Rollyo can be useful if you're looking for a particular item or specific information but you're not sure which site it might belong to -- if you've included it in the Rollyo search engine you've built, it would be easy to search for it and find it. But, a downfall of this would be if you have too many sites saved to the Rollyo search engine, you might have to still sort through pages of search results to find the exact information you're looking for. It was fun to try out the program, but I think I'll stick with my favorites menu for now.