The Onion on reading

Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book

GREENWOOD,IN—"Instead of spending hours on YouTube every night, Mr. Meyer, unlike most healthy males, looks to books for gratification," said one psychologist.

#23 - 23 Things Summary

Yes! I did it! And in time to get a MP3 player, too! Yahoooo!
I am so happy to have gone throught these exercises and especially to have been given permission to play around and explore as part of my job. I will use so much of what I have been able to find - like blogging, rss and podcast feeds, and online productivity. I have already been able to assist library customers who need help understanding or discovering some of these tools. And I'm glad to have the conversation started about web 2.0 among the KDL family. I will definitely participate if something like this is offered again.

#22 Podcasts

Using Podcast Alley, I signed up for 3 podcast feeds in Bloglines:
Speaking of Faith,
Story Corps, and
Libraries Across Cultures
This last one looked very interesting, but it appears to have only one podcast (from July, 2006) about visiting a library in Toyota, Japan.

#21 YouTube

My son, Joel, on keyboard:




And Obama's Iowa victory speech:

Interesting article

Here's an article by Brett McCracken at Relevant Magazine, titled "Are Critics Relevant?" http://www.relevantmagazine.com/pc_article.php?id=7549 He's talking about movie critics, but his analysis could be applied to book critics as well, that is to those of us who make book recommendations and award prizes for literature. He sees the role of professional critics in this "Recommendation Age" as finding the good that might otherwise be ignored in our consumer culture, helping people sort through the "massive cacophony of chaff to find the wheat" as advisors rather than elitist gatekeepers. It makes sense to me, and gives me a sense of belonging as a librarian in this world of recommendation by tagging.

#20 "The Machine is Us/ing Us"

I liked the speedy history of webpage mark-up languages in this video.
4 1/2 minutes is a pretty fast history of anything, but the video gave a lot to think about.
Are we really so transformed just because so much of our lives are online? I would agree that digital text is radically different from linear text, but I don't know if that really means everything about us is transformed.
And, of course, the tagging-as-authority-source is a whole area of concern for professionals - an area that will continue to grow and into which we can only hope to have some input.

#19 Digital Music

I'm exploring Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/) and loving it. It may even be of help in creating a cd of honey and honey bee songs to use in a summer honey bee program. As I get a listing of possibilities, I may use a file sharing site to explore the songs more fully, but I'm not yet at that point. I just want to find the songs that I really want to use; then I plan to purchase them before cutting to a cd.
The Pandora streaming radio has lots of possibilities also, but it seems to limit stations to one type of music. I'm wondering if I will be able to create a station that has a variety of music on it. I will definitely do more experimenting (when I'm not on desk).

#18 Social Networking

Ah, well, the impact of social networks on the distribution of information has become so all-pervasive that talking about it is merely describing the normal. News, music, friends' and family updates - all come by way of online social networks. For the privacy downside, see this Wired magazine article:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-01/st_qa

Here is a part of my Facebook account:


My 2 daughters are also Facebook people, but my 2 sons are strictly MySpace users.