Best in Show

So we've really reached the end this week!

Last week I focused on best practices in general, and I personally concluded that any of the things we studied could be conceived as "best" depending on how well it's used and maintained and how well it's promoted.  As many others have noted in their blogs, it's about justifying the need to implement social software and not doing it simply for the sake of being hip and cool.

This week, I want to focus on my personal evaluation of social software in my life.

Before coming into this course, I would say that I was most involved with Facebook.  I log into it every day since I got it and I post many items to my page and comment frequently on other people's walls and items.  For me, it is my blog, my wiki, my news feed (in regards to friends, anyway), my media sharing platform.  I think that's why I use it so frequently and why it is probably my favourite social software out of all the ones we studied: in some ways, Facebook employs everything we've discussed in its own way (tagging on Facebook, for example, is meant for tagging people, though that hasn't stopped people from informally tagging objects as well).

Out of all of the NEW applications I was exposed over the term, the one that I now use that I had not used before is an RSS aggregator.  My Google Reader is one of the first things I check every morning when I wake up!  It has really made my life easier in terms of getting updates from my favourite websites and blogs, and every time I see a new website I look for the little RSS icon.

I think tagging is the social software that I have the least interest in.  I will freely admit that I did not tag a lot of articles to del.icio.us and did not provide more tags beyond "lis9763" to the items I did find.  It's not something that came naturally to me despite having the del.icio.us icon in my toolbar and even though I probably found a lot of articles over the term that I could have tagged and ultimately forgot to (often because I might have found them on my work computer where I do not have del.icio.us set up; work computers aren't the best for this kind of thing!).  Also, for reasons I discussed in my blog when we were covering tagging and folksonomies, I have a bias towards controlled vocabulary since I'm a cataloguer and I very much enjoy working with controlled vocabularies.  I don't think tagging is a "bad" thing, just not something I would use in my life.

Wikis are also something I can't foresee myself using very often in my life beyond reading and editing Wikipedia, unless wherever I end up working uses a wiki for staff members.  I see its uses (especially having been a part of the Wikis group!), but a wiki is not really meant for personal uses; rather, they can fit well in businesses, especially libraries.

Gaming is something I love and I think I'll always have a console in my home once I'm out of school (they're too distracting right now!).  I love it so much that I've registered for the Second Life class FIMS is offering come Fall (my name is Eponine Osterham if anyone wants to friend me; just don't expect me to be on there often for the next couple of weeks because I don't have the right specifications so it's very choppy still, but I will fix that before term starts!).

I love YouTube and other related video sites like Veoh.  I can't say that I'm an avid Flickr user (mainly because Facebook has been my outlet for posting my pictures).  YouTube is fantastic in too many ways to count and I hope more viral videos continue to be posted regularly: everyone loves a good Internet star!

Blogs are popular and they will be for a long time.  I have enjoyed blogging for this class and I also enjoyed blogging for my final project (www.newbiewikipedian.blogspot.com for those interested!).  There are a lot of blogs that I read on a regular basis and I subscribe to them on my RSS aggregator.  I can't imagine a time where I won't be able to read blogs, and they're really an easy Web 2.0 application that ANYONE can get involved with.

This course has really shown me all the ways these websites and softwares can be manipulated in various ways to suit anyone's needs, particularly libraries' needs.  I hope librarians actively seek out these softwares and educate themselves on how they work, because it's no longer okay to passively take in the Internet.  More than ever, that "global village" definition is really coming to life.

This was a great term!  Thanks for all of your ideas, and take care!