Second Life

Wrote the heading & then forgot to do the post!!

I'm afraid Second Life is something of which I can appreciate the technology & the results, but I cannot for the life of me see any benefit or point to actually getting involved. At the risk of sounding like an "old fogey", if libraries can't deliver their services to clients in the REAL world, face to face and aided by various technologies, then our whole society has some major problems!

Podcasts (Task 21)

Podcasts are something that I have been aware of for a long time, but hadn't made the effort to investigate. I like the fact that you have the flexibility of being able to listen to things of interest without being tied, for example to a radio station's scheduling, which won't always enable you to hear the item. I've been enjoying dipping into a variety of topics for which I've found podcasts .

YouTube & Second Life (Tasks 20 & 22)

While it is amazing seeing some of the stuff on YouTube, I can't see that I will be spending much time going back to it. It's good knowing a bit about how it works, but I would only go back to it if I REALLY wanted to find out something that I really couldn't find anywhere else - and then I would be wondering just how worthwhile the information was.

Library 2.0 Movement

The scope of the Library 2.0 movement seems to be huge! While I am finding some of the reading material quite fascinating, there is so much to get your head around that I feel that I am going to have to keep coming back to be able to digest it. At the moment I'm not sure exactly how much of it is directly relevant to me, however I can see that it will become more and more part of the daily fabric of libraries generally, and university libraries in particular, and as such will be interesting, exciting and challenging to be a part of!

del.icio.us

I've been exploring this site & finding it quite interesting. However, I didn't intend joining it as I felt I had more than enough different things going to keep me busy for a long time - that was until I found some REALLY interesting quilting & patchwork sites!! They have now been saved so that I can go back and have a better look at them.

iGoogle Page

I've been having a very interesting time investigating the myriad of iGoogle things that can be set up on my own page. So far, I have 3 pages, with plans for several more - no doubt many of the items will be discarded in time after I've had some fun 'playing' with them!!

Google maps, Google Docs & Google Book Search

I've had a bit of a play with the various items in Google Docs, but I can't see myself having a lot of use for them. Having said that, I can see that they could be useful if you needed to do something when you were away from home, eg travelling, but I wouldn't use it by choice when I had the full programs available as they are quite basic.

Google Books has kept me enthralled for a couple of hours, although I'm not sure that I'd use it all that much. It's quite fascinating dipping into some of the very old books & getting an idea of the language used & how much it has changed. I could possibly be tempted at times to use it to sample a book to see whether I really want to read it.