Thing 4: Social Networking

In the NYTimes article How Privacy Vanishes Online Jon Klingberg is quoted giving the following advice "When you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.” I realized that quite some time ago, just dealing with email. Once you've sent a message to someone you have no control over to whom or how many times it is forwarded. We had some ugly situations arise here on my campus with email jokes that were sent to friends but then forwarded to entire contact lists, resulting in complaints about misuse of state computers, reprimands, and dismissals (as I said, it was ugly).

That potentiality has only gotten worse with the rise of social network sites, listserves, blogs, etc. I approach use of these sites with the attitude that anything I post (writing or photos) can potentially be seen by anyone in the world, forever.

That said, I do use social networking sites, facebook in particular, and I enjoy them. I use them more for social and family activites than for work, but the college has a presence on both facebook and twitter, and we are looking into creating a facebook for the library as well.

Several of my collegues are also my facebook friends and this reminds me of the idea I posted a few days ago, that the use of the internet and social networking in particular is blurring the lines between work, home, and study.

Thing 3: RSS Feeds

Well, I have to admit that while I knew about RSS feeds, I had thought they would be too much trouble to set up. Not so. The trouble is that I still have multiple pages and sites that I go to for information: home email, work email, Nelsonlink (TNCC intranet), facebook, and now an RSS feed.

I subscribed to the TNCC news, VCCS news, This Day in Virginia History, Marketplace from American Public Media, and Gluten-free girl (my favorite cooking blog).

I recently read an article that was describing the Library 2.0 users as those who operate in a world that appears to have no boundries between work, home, study, and recreation. I've tried to maintain some separation - different home and work emails, two facebook accounts, etc. but with this RSS feed I've obviously combined work and "extra-curricular" interests and I'm starting to wonder how long it will be before I have to combine everything just to keep up.

Thing 2: Getting Started / Web 2.0 Concepts.

Thing one but actually it's week two on the schedule. I'm behind already.

And while I was catching up on the first week's tasks, I kept thinking of Dr. Seuss. While images of Thing One and Thing Two running around on the blog page would be entertaining, it probably would also be a copyright violation.

I really liked "The Machine is Us/ing Us" - so much so that I posted a link to it on my personal facebook page.

Meanwhile, back to the matter at hand. I started a blog for the library last semester http://tncc.edu/library/blog/ using Wordpress. The impetus for starting it was to provide a forum for online discussions of the college's book circles, and it's worked well for that. But in addition it's given us another avenue for announcements and for highlighting library events.

Getting more familiar with Web 2.0 concepts is one of the reasons I'm participating in this project. I'm familiar with some, have heard of others and I suspect am completly ignorant of quite a bit more.