#4 – Setting Up an RSS Feed
Time for.. Thing #4 – Setting up your RSS account.
a. Decide whether you want to use Google Reader (NB you will need a Google email account) or Bloglines. If you need some help deciding between the two, take a look at this article.
Of course If you feel like exploring, and you have the time, feel free to set up accounts on both sites, play around in them, get a feel for the interfaces, and decide for yourself!
b. Set up your account – following the guidelines, both are fairly simple to set up and use.
c. Add a few of your favourite websites, news sites and of course- blogs to your account. To get the most out of your reader, you need to add lots of feeds. Try to subscribe to 10 or more feeds in either Bloglines or Google Reader.
Of Course…… First of all you can add the 23Things blog so that you will know when new content is added!
Heres how: Copy this link to the blog : https://23thingsdevlibs.wordpress.com
If you’re using Bloglines: login to your account, click “Add” at the top-left of the screen, paste the link into the “Blog or Feed URL” box, and click “Subscribe”. The next screen will give you some options on where you’d like to save the feed (you can organize your feeds in folders), once you’ve made your choices, click “Subscribe” at the bottom of the page.
If you’re using Google Reader: login to your account, click “Add subscription” at the top-left of the page, paste the link into the input box that appears, and click “Add”.
Next Step: Once you’ve subscribed to the devlibs feed, take a look at some of these sites and subscribe to their feeds as well. To find their feed addresses, you will have to visit the site and look for the RSS icon or an ‘RSS/Subscribe’ link. They’ll be there somewhere….
Final Step: Still looking for more feeds to subscribe to? Getting addicted? Go to some of the library news blogs listed below. Some of these links go straight to the RSS feed – for the rest you’ll have to find the feed yourself…. Subscribe to feeds from the list. Read them weekly until October Daily is better. Why? Because you only really understand RSS by using it regularly.
Library blogs to set up feeds to:
Librarian in Black: Sarah Houghton-Jan covers many of the important stories in the ‘biblioblogosphere’ (!) in short and snappy posts.
Phil Bradley’s weblog: Phil is a professional librarian and his blog is very useful way to keep up with new Web 2.0 tools.
Stephen’s Lighthouse: Stephen Abram blogs about future strategic developments in libraries.
.Information Wants to be Free: Meredith Farkas’s blog. Meredith has written a very useful book on the uses of social software in libraries.
UK WebFocus: Brian Kelly’s blog. Brian is based at UKOLN and his blog focuses on all aspects of digital information management, but especially Web 2.0 developments.
Make sure to visit your aggregator at least a couple of times this week to check for new content in the feeds you’ve subscribed to! (you’ll be surprised at how addictive RSS feed-reading can become!) And don’t forget to blog about your experiences using these tools!
Further Readings (entirely optional!)
#5- Library Related Blogs and Newsfeeds
Now that you know all about how to use RSS aggregators/readers and have set up your RSS feed account through Reader or Bloglines, it’s time to explore the universe of blogs that will help you be a bigger, bolder, better information professional.
Remember to look for the orange RSS feed icon on sites indicating that a feed is available.
Explore these resources for identifying blog feeds regarding libraries
Use your feed reader to find blogs of interest. For instance you can search for blog of interest right on Bloglines with Blogline’s Search.
Library Blogs @ Yahoo Directory
LIS Wiki article on Library Weblogs (alphabetical list of links)
Search for Blog about Libraries on the Open Directory Project.
Other Sources
Syndic8.com – Syndic8 is an open directory of RSS feeds that contains thousands of RSS feeds that users have submitted.
Technorati Blog Directories – Technorati is a popular blog finding tool that lets you search for blogs. Since RSS feeds are inherent to all blogging tools, Technorati Blog Search can help you find RSS feeds for topic specific blogs you may be interested in.
Discovery
You may have already had a look at some of the library related blogs that I have suggested while you were working through #4 Thing – here are some useful links for you to discover which blogs would be most useful to you in your library work.
Great feeds for libraries
Docuticker – hand-picked selection of resources, reports and publications from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks and other public interest organizations.
Government Info Pro – a blog for government librarians
LISNews – Library and Information Science News
Librarians Internet Index: New This Week
Library Journal – News and Features
Library Link of the Day – your “of the day” resource on this list
Library Stuff – Steven M. Cohen
LLRX.com -Sabrina Pacifici
Resource Shelf – Gary Price in action.
The Shifted Librarian – Jenny Levine looks at innovative technologies.
Unshelved – A great library comic strip.
Finally:
Now that you are blogging, where do you want to take it? Is it just an exercise or will you start building your readership through your own RSS feed?
So you’ve found some good blog reads. Are you sharing these finds with others? How are you doing that? Through blogrolls on your blog?
Now that you are reading more blogs more regularly through the use of your feed reader, how are you going to use that knowledge both personally and professionally?
Activity:
Create a blog post about your experience. Don’t know what to blog about? Here some questions to think about …
Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use? Which Search tool was the easiest for you? Which was more confusing? What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels? Or what kind of unusual ones did you find? What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?
#6 – Setting up a delicious account
delicious is a social bookmarking site that lets you save and organize links to web content. It’s a bit like the ‘Bookmarks’ or ‘Favorites’ folders in Firefox or Internet Explorer. Only much better. With delicious ( formerly known as del.icio.us), you never have to remember which computer you saved that link on. So if you’re going from work to home, or use different computers around the library, all of your bookmarks are always available.
Some of the benefits for using social bookmarking are:
• Never be tied to one computer or browser anymore! Store your favourite sites online.
• Find others that have common interests and review the sites they have saved (you may just find a few that interest you that you have missed).
• Organize and discover new sites based on the tags that you and others have chosen to describe sites.
First:
Check out Devon Libraries own delicious account.
Next:
Check out the Getting Started section on delicious.
Ready for the #6 Thing? Time to set up your own delicious account!
Set up an account with delicious. But remember to do the following during the registration process!
• pay attention to the password requirements, and check your email inbox to complete the registration.
• download the delicious toolbar widget into your Internet browser when prompted. This is very important!
Once you’ve set up your account, bookmark and tag the 23Things@devon libraries page by using either one of these options:
a) Go to the 23things homepage and then in your browser click on the deli.cio.us ‘Tag’ widget you installed when registering. (This is the widget you downloaded in Step 1.)
OR
b) Go to your account on del.icio.us, click on the ‘Save a new bookmark’ link to the top right of the screen and paste in the URL. Click on ‘Next’.
Add a description to your bookmark. Often cutting and pasting a paragraph from the page saved is useful.
Add some tags and click on then ‘Save’ button.
Bookmark at least 10 other websites of your choice to your delicious account. Add descriptions and tags to each one of them. Remember: when adding tags, chocolate_chip_cookies and ChocolateChipCookies are both one tag, while chocolate chip cookies is three tags! So if your tag is a phrase and therefore has more than one word you need to make sure there are no spaces between the words.
Finally: Create a blog post about your experience of using Delicious. Reflect on the potential relevance of Web-based, social bookmarking to your personal life, professional life, and for library customers. Are there any particular safety or privacy issues to consider?
#7 – Facebook
Now that you have some background knowledge about Social Networking, we are going to explore some of the best known applications in the next four “Things”. The first of these is a world-wide phenomenum.
Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school or library.
Mark Zuckerberg invented Facemash on October 28, 2003 while attending Harvard University, but it wasn’t until September 2009, that Facebook claimed that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time
A January 2009 study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, “best-of” list, saying, “How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”
Facebook and MySpace probably get more mainstream press than any other tool on this list—besides blogging. And, as we all know, not all the press is positive. However, social networks are one of the main ways that young adults communicate with each other—68% of all teenagers use social networking sites. In the last couple of years, Facebook has also become used by more and more adults as a quick way of networking. Use of these sites has even surpassed landline telephones and even e-mail for a growing percentage of people. Recently libraries around the world have discovered the benefits of having a Facebook “presence” as a means of advertising events, reporting news and generally keeping in touch with their customers.
So, what does it all mean to libraries? Whether or not you become a convert to Facebook and/ MySpace, it is important to understand how they work. If our users are communicating through these networks, we need to be able to be there, too.
Background Reading:
Protect Your Privacy on Facebook
Activities for #7:
1. If you don’t already have one – now is the time to set up a Facebook account. www.facebook.com. If you have any problems , take a look at this tutorial.
Once you have your Facebook account, you’ll need to…
2. Create a Facebook profile
Facebook profiles are for individuals. Facebook pages are for organizations.
As you create your profile, Facebook will ask you if you want to find friends by using your email account. Facebook will ask you to provide your email account password. I strongly advise against this. There are other ways to add friends later. As a matter of fact, you can skip all of the steps in the profile setup if you want, as long as you enter your name and secret question. You can always go back and edit your profile information later.
3. Once you have created your profile, write on at least one wall and join at least one group. Here are some possible Facebook Groups to join: (Groups are only visible when logged in to Facebook.)
Or choose any of the groups from this list
Hottest Facebook Groups for Librarians – http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2007/hottest-facebook-groups-for-librarians/
Facebook is really not much fun without friends.
So go find some friends.
You can only see your friends’ profiles, and they’re the only people who can see yours. You can share as much or as little information about yourself as you want. When someone performs a search, only your name, photo (if you upload one) and the networks you belong to will appear in the search results.
The more information you enter about yourself in your profile, the more options Facebook gives you for finding friends. You can automatically find high school or college classmates, former co-workers, etc., if you’ve entered your education and work history into your profile. Even if you don’t enter that information into your profile, you can still perform searches based on that information—the only difference is that you have to enter that information manually every time you search.
You can also search for people directly by their names. If you’re at a loss as to who to add, type “Devon Libraries” into the search box.
In addition to searching for people, you can search for organizations. If you simply type an organization name, like “Library,” into the search box, and choose to search Facebook, you will get a list of all the different entities with that name in the title. If you limit the search to “Pages,” you’ll find only organizations. Once you track down the organization you had in mind, you can become a fan of that organization. Find Devon Libraries and become a fan. Well, we have to increase our fanbase numbers somehow!
Finally:
Many libraries worldwide are using social network sites to:
- Speak the language of their patrons
- Showcase their library
- Promote and assess library functions, through surveys and focus groups
- Repackage information
- Promote outreach – extend the support of the library beyond the physical walls
- Educate users/customers
Blog about your thoughts about Facebook. Which groups did you join and why? Reflect on why Facebook may be the fastest growing social network. Is that reputation deserved? Blog your thoughts and observations regarding setting up your Facebook account, and ways you think you might use the service in the future. Also, please feel free to blog any feelings regarding the balance of privacy and transparency, the marketing potential of social connections, conspiracy theories about all the personal information Facebook collects, or anything else that may have popped into your head throughout this experience.
#8 – Library Thing
Do you ever wish you could keep track what you were reading, what you have already read and books that you MUST read before you die?
Are you looking for a way to create a digital reading log for customers or for your local book group that contains their reviews of what they’ve read?
Do you want recommendations on what to read next?
Do you need to organise a master inventory of the books in your personal library?
Do you want to see what other people who enjoy the same kinds of books that you do are reading?
Then LibraryThing may be a great application for you to try out!
LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalogue their books easily. You can access your catalogue from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogues together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.
Information.
It does not require any software or downloads to run this application
You can set up an account for free that allows you to catalogue up to 200 books. You may also want to buy a personal account which allows you to catalogue an unlimited amount of books.
Setting up an account requires only a user name and a password. You can also edit your profile to make yours a “private” account. With a private account, nobody else can see what books you have.
LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloguing application based in the US, it searches the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 80 world libraries including the British Library. You can edit your information, search and sort it, “tag” books with your own subjects, or use the Dewey systems to organize your collection.
If you want it, LibraryThing is also a social space for book lovers and readers of all ages, often described as “Facebook for books.” You can check out other people’s libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, and swap reading suggestions. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.
Activities for #8:
1. Look at the LibraryThing home page
2. Take a tour of the site
3. Sign up for a free account on the LibraryThing homepage and set up your profile (you can keep your books private or make them public) and add a few books to your library.
4. Check out LibraryThing’s tools.
5. Time to blog about your Library Thing experience. Reflect on the potential relevance of LibraryThing to your personal life, your library, and to library customers. Are there any particular safety, privacy, or developmental issues to consider?
#10 – Social news and URL shortening
On many websites that you come across you will have seen one or more of the following icons:
So what exactly are these? Well..they are known as Social news applications. The term social news refers to websites where users submit and vote on stories or other links, thus determining which links are presented. They are places for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web, from the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog. The main applications include:
One of the first and one of the most popular sites is Digg,a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page.
reddit is a social news website owned by Conde Nast Digital on which users can post links to content on the Internet. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to become more or less prominent on the reddit home page.
Another is StumbleUpon which allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation site which uses peer and social networking principles. Web pages are presented when the user clicks the “Stumble!” button . StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. Users can rate or choose not to rate any Web page with a thumbs up or thumbs down. StumbleUpon also allows their users to indicate their interests from a list of nearly 500 topics to produce relevant content for the user.
URL Shortening.
Some web pages have very long and cumbersome URLs. This can be awkward to use if you want to add a link to Twitter, which only allows 140 characters, or even just posting a link in your blog or email.
URL shortening is a technique on the internet where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address.
For example the link to this web page is: http://devlibs23things.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/thing-10-socia…url-shortening/
The short link ( using bit.ly) is: http://bit.ly/cD0ubT
Although there are many providers of shorter URLs, the two most used are:
TinyUrl … http://tinyurl.com/
And
Bit.ly …. http://www.bit.ly/
Activities for Thing #10
1. Register for one or all of the following: http://www.digg.com/ , http://www.reddit.com/, http://www.stumbleupon.com/. Check out what is popular at the moment or maybe find a topic that you are interested in and see what other internet users rate highly.
2. Practise URL shortening for one of your own blog pages. Then send a message on Twitter using a shortened URL as a link.
#11 – Wikis
If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you might have heard the term “wiki wiki,” meaning, “quick quick,” and a wiki is a very fast way of making a basic website that allows multiple people to collaborate on, add, remove, and edit its content.
The ease of interaction makes wikis an effective tool for organizing content and collaborating on ideas. Wikis are considered a content management system since they share common elements with these types of applications.
The most famous wiki is the Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that was created by and is constantly being updated by thousands and thousands of contributors. We shall be looking at Wikipedia in more depth in Thing #12.
Why make a wiki?
- Anyone (registered or unregistered, if unrestricted) can add, edit or delete content.
- Tracking tools within wikis allow you to easily keep up on what been changed and by whom.
- There are Blog-like areas for “talking” (e.g., comments, discussion, and/or news pages)
- Earlier versions of a page can be viewed and reinstated when needed.
- Users do not need to know HTML, Web design, or have Web page experience in order to apply styles to text or add and edit content. Most wikis are no more difficult than a Microsoft Word document.
Take a look at this short video: Common Craft’s no-nonsense introduction to wikis.
Activities:
There are a huge range of wikis available on the internet these days. Here are a few suggested resources that you should spend time getting to know. They are useful for your professional and personal lives. You may even feel inspired to contribute to one or all of them!
1. A fantastically useful wiki for librarians and lovers of learning new things is Wikihow .. This is a How-to manual that can be edited by anyone. Things that you can learn range from How to make your own Soduku pattern to How to read a chest X-ray. Categories of articles include health, Hobbies, Computers, Pets, Home and Travel. Spend some time investigating this site.
2. Visit the library success wiki which was created to be a one-stop shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians from all over the world. Here is their opening paragraph which gives a flavour of why this wiki was set up originally:
If you’ve done something at your library that you consider a success, pleasewrite about it in the wiki or provide a link to outside coverage. If you have materials that would be helpful to other librarians, add them to the wiki. And if you know of a librarian or a library that is doing something great, feel free to include information or links to it. Basically, if you know of anything that might be useful to other librarians (including useful websites), this is the place to put it. I hope this wiki will be a venue where people can share ideas with one another and where librarians can learn to replicate the successes of other libraries
3. Libraries and Web2.0 is a relatively new UK based wiki, featuring various Public Library services and their response to Web2.0. Note that Devon Libraries 23 Things programme is discussed on this wiki!
4. Haven’t had your fill just yet of wikis and need to know more? Here are some additional links to fuel your interest:
Wiki index – A wiki of wikis.
WikiMatrix – A tool that offers you the ability to compare side-by-side features and functionality of wikis
5. Time to blog! In a new post reflect : Are you wiki-fied!?! Record what new ideas were spurred as you learned and reviewed some, or all, of the wikis above.
How do you envision the different ways in which you might use a wiki within your workplace?
If you are unable to apply immediately to your workplace what you have learned, are there ways that you could apply what you’ve learned about wikis to your professional or personal life?
Are there any particular safety, privacy, or developmental issues to consider?
#12 – Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s 14 million articles (3.2 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous internet users who write without pay. Anyone with internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles.
Every contribution may be reviewed or changed. The expertise or qualifications of the user is usually not considered. This is possible since Wikipedia’s intent is to cover existing knowledge which is verifiable from other sources, original research and ideas are therefore excluded. People of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles as most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet simply by clicking the edit this page link (found at the top of every editable page). Anyone is welcome to add information, cross-references, or citations, as long as they do so within Wikipedia’s editing policies and to an appropriate standard. Substandard or disputed information is subject to removal. Users need not worry about accidentally damaging Wikipedia when adding or improving information, as other editors are always around to advise or correct obvious errors, and the software is designed to allow easy reversal of editorial mistakes.
Further information about wikipedia can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About About Wikipedia
and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not What Wikipedia is Not
ACTIVITY
1. If you’ve never used the Wikipedia, now is the time to visit it and take a look around!
2. Search for a topic that you are personally interested in. Once you have found and read the article, do you have anything to add to it? Feel free to get involved and edit an article..maybe you can add references or citations, maybe you have additional information that might enhance the article. Go ahead..after all this is what Web2.0 is all about..sharing and communicating with others.
3. If you start to get really interested in the concept of wikis, you may ( and this is an optional activity!) want to set up your very own wiki. Follow these instructions on wikihow on how to start up a wiki of your own
http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Wiki
4. You are not required to create a wiki for this activity, but if you would like to try one, you could look at the website. http://www.wetpaint.com/. This site allows you to create a free wiki on any topic or subject that you would like. Other free sites include:
5. Blog about your views about wikis. If you have set up a wiki of your own..provide a link in your blog so that others can get involved. Or if you have edited an article in Wikipedia, tell us which article it is so that we can all benefit from your knowledge and experience.
#13 – Video Sharing and YouTube
There are several large video sharing sites which allow users to upload and share their own videos.
Video share websites are changing the way that we view media and the media that we view. On the Internet, amateur producers can share their videos with thousands of viewers and average people can steal the limelight from Hollywood stars.
Whether you’re looking for a clip of your favourite film, an important newscast, a how–to video or just some good entertainment, you’ll find it on the Internet. Video share sites make it easy to browse, find and watch your favourite streaming video.
On the other hand, individuals can become a celebrity or famous producer overnight. Video share sites offer the tools and resources that producers need to create and upload videos. Helpful articles and editing tools can be easily accessed. Some sites allow users to post their videos for everyone to view or keep them private.
A link to the most popular video sites can be found here:
http://video-share-review.toptenreviews.com/
YOUTUBE
Launched in 2005, bought by Google in 2006, YouTube is the most well-known video-sharing site. It has become an important place for seekers of news items, political campaign information, how-to instruction videos, classic music, pop culture phenomena and more. The majority of its content is user-generated, although there are some companies who have their own commercial channels.
Anyone can view videos on YouTube. However, in order to upload videos or to benefit from the site’s “social” features users need to register for a free account. Registers users can:
- upload an unlimited number of videos (that they have authored). Users should own the copyright of any videos that they upload – although its easy to find numerous abuses of this.
- rate and comment on videos uploaded by others
- save their favourite videos to their YouTube account
- create video playlists
- set up a subscription to receive new videos uploaded by their favourite YouTube authors (“subscribing to a channel”)
YouTube Channels
Every registered YouTube user has their own YouTube channel. This is their public page on YouTube and displays the videos that they have uploaded, plus their favourites, profile information and recent activity.
It is possible to browse the most popular channels on YouTube by choosing “Channels” on the home page.
YouTube EDU
YouTube EDU brings together YouTube content from Universities around the World. Although most of the channels on YouTube EDU are currently in the USA, you will also find universities in the UK, Australia, Canada and elsewhere.
Thing 13 – Activities
1. Search for and view some videos on a topic of your choice on YouTube. It could be recent news coverage of a major news event, or a recording of a favourite local band taken by a mobile phone!
If you can’t think of a topic try looking for library related videos – some of them are hilarious!
2. Choose a video and check to see if anyone has posted any comments. If you wish to add a comment yourself you will have to register for YouTube (but this is not required for this “thing”)
3. Find more videos uploaded by the same user by linking to their YouTube channel. You can do this by clicking on their username (just to the right of the video).
4. Find “YouTube EDU” by choosing “Channels” from the YouTube home page followed by “Education” and then “YouTube EDU”. View some videos from a university of your choice.
FURTHER ACTIVITIES
1. Go to YouTube and seek out a library or a related video to your blog.
2. Right click on the video you want to add to your blog. Click on “Copy embed html”
3. Start a new post in your blog
4. In the composing window of a new post, and making sure that you are in the HTML screen, right click and “paste”. Try a preview before publishing to make sure that the video is correctly embedded in your post.
Finally: A fantastic video clip from YouTube! Librarians go Ga-ga
23 Things @ Devon Libraries - Part Deux 
