#17 Wikis

I have always loved Wikipedia, despite the bad rap it has among some educators, because I am all for collaborative learning rather than top-down authority.
I enjoyed (and wasted much time) looking at the ALA 2006 wiki photos; I copied quite a few of them.
And I know that a collaborative committee wiki will be very helpful for the work of the USBBY 2009 Outstanding International Books Committee, of which I am a member. We can only get together once and have much to decide upon before we actually meet.
Wikis might also work for some KDL committees, though it is often easier for us to meet face-to-face.

#16 Technorati and Blog Tags

Well, the informational viseo about Technorati features was from July, 2006, so it was not exactly relevant. Evidently the design has changed once again.
To search by way of the different modes (keyword, URL, tag, or blog directory), one must click on "advanced" next to the seach box in order to be taken to a separate page where such searches can be done. When I did that and searched for "library 2.0", keyword searching gave me 1346 results, tag searching gave 1198 results, and blog directory searching gave 670 results. The keyword and tag results were similar and included introductory statements about the blogs; many of the blogs had authority ratings. In contrast the blog directory results had little, if any, information about the listed blogs and most seemed to be by individuals who were doing a project for their own use.
Technorati seems like a useful blog search engine, and I am glad to have made its acquaintance.

#15 Del.icio.us

This is a fantastic tool! I am sure that I will use it from now on for organizing and accessing my personal bookmarks from my home and various work computers. I can also see it being useful for readers' advisory and research as I post relevant sites to this wonderful social aggregate.

#14 Web 2.0 best-of exploration

I explored www.picnik.com, an online photo editor. The free version was useful, but one has to pay for more advanced options. Also, in the trial that I did Picnik was not able to load my pictures from my PicasaWeb account. It would, nevertheless, be a useful tool for anyone wishing to experiment with some photo editing techniques (assuming that Picnik would be able to load their pictures).
I also used www.yourminis.com to post a couple of fun widgets to my Facebook account. Widgets are definitely going to be more and more pervasive, including on library web pages of course.

#13 - Online Poductivity

I experimented with Zoho Writer and Google Docs. I've started using Google Docs regularly - it's super convenient to access it through my Google account and is also a great way to coordinate work done at home with work at work.
I really like Google Calendar also. Here a miniature version of the Summer Reading Club portion (June / July only):

#12 - Google Co-up

I really liked these Google Co-up specialized searches -
One is for world information (look up "libraries" for library information from around the world):

The other is for "green" issues; it can be browsed as well as searched:
http://www.greenmaven.com/

I found that the Google customized search engine was more suited to my style than the Rollyo because it seemed more suited for exploration rather than for inventing something from scratch. Though if I do find the need sometime to limit searches to only a few sites, I will now know how to do it with Rollyo.