Sunday, March 29, 2009

Delicious

For this activity I tagged the Jester Jim Show website. I feel that this site is a good way to keep webites in order. I would mostly use it as a cataloging tool for myself to keep all of my useful sites handy. In that way it would be a helpful reference tool for when a patron is looking for "good" sites on a specific topic I can tell them ones that I have I tried out myself without having to start from scratch and remember all of the lesson plan sites that were actually useful.

I find that delicious could be helpful with research because if you find something that is helpful then the tags could help you use other search terms to find similar items that you may not have thought of. I also like that you can access this site anywhere because if you are working on a project for school and find sites that are perfect, you can bookmark them to the site and save them for later instead of having to print out all of the info.

Although I never really look at or use our tag cloud it is helpful sometimes when the catalogs subject headings are just not finding what you are looking for. The tags can give you some other options to finding similar items.

Overall a cool site!

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Myspace and Facebook

Facebook


Mastics has 131 fans on the facebook page.


Other libraries that have a presence on Facebook are Hampton Bays Public Library, Patchogue Medford Library, South Country Library Children's Department and more.


There is nothing that I feel we are missing from our page that I can think of. I think that we are featuring all of the important aspects of our library. That is until the new page setup takes over and all of the hard work gets put into tabs.

Myspace

The main library myspace page has 16 friends and the teen page has 12 friends.

Two interesting elements on the site are the Ask the Librarian and the Shelfari features. I also like the calendar option but it was never working when I looked at the page.

Experience

I have had a pretty good amount of experience with both myspace and facebook. The two pages are similar because they are both social networking sites that allow you to meet new people and to keep in touch with old and new friends.

They are different because Facebook started out as a networking site for kids that went to college. You had to belong to a school in order to sign up. That is why myspace became so popular so fast, anyone could use it. The other difference is that even though myspace asks for your full name hardly anyone gives it. They all use screenname type names. On facebook you have to use your real name or you have to come up with a name that sounds like a first and last name and then other friends have to be able to find you. Also on myspace you can see a little more about a person before you befriend them. You can see a larger size of their image and hopefully you can figure out who the person is. On facebook you can only see a super small picture and find out what friends they have, then maybe you can make a connection to them.

Although I have been mostly using facebook, I like myspace better. I find that myspace is more user friendly for non-techy. It is a much easier point and click interface. Facebook I mostly use now because everyone has shifted from myspace to facebook and they are not signing into myspace as much anymore. I have found that facebook is so difficult to make your page unique. I liked seeing everyones personality show in their myspace pages and now facebook kinda took that away. Plus I really would rather hide behind a screenname in todays society. There are so many carzy people out there and now they know my full name and any other info I share. On myspace they had to do a little digging. Also I find that the facebook gods change their minds like underwear. Can they just settle on what they want their site to look like and leave it be. Instead they keep moving things all around and causing problems for all of the applications that people spend time creating. I just don't get it!

I think that social networking is so hot right now because it gives us away to keep in touch with people without having to bug them, call them, or even meet them. I know it is great to be able to keep in touch with my long distance family. I get to see pictures of friends weddings without having to ask. Its great! I think that it is a great tool for libraries because people can check out what is going on without having to stop in. Hopefully they see great things and that makes them want to stop in. Also if they are not able to come to the library we can still be a part of their lives. It makes our patrons ahve a "friend" connection to use.