Perspectives on Web2.0

I feel compelled to start by stating that I have a few troubles with New Age thinking. Those poor sods starving to death in the drought torn wastes of Africa can visualise roast dinners until the cows don't home and they will still be watching their children starve and die. And don't get me started on Darfur.

I think The secret and books of this ilk are actively damaging to a certain proportion of the population. (i.e. those who take it seriously.) All of the Staff of this Library can follow the steps and see their future as Chief Librarian but unless the Council decides to promote thirty people and permit democratic leadership all the planning and thinking in the world will still leave us with one Manager and twenty-nine disappointed dreamers.

What has this to do with Library 2.0 you could be forgiven for thinking? Bear with me.

Last week at our Staff Meeting we were presented with ABS xylophone graphs generated from the last Census which shows that Sunshine has the second lowest level of literacy (Dandenong owns first place), no surprises there, second lowest rate of households with connection to the internet (high five to Dandenong again) and once again no great surprise there, but we also have, and this is the surprise, the lowest rate of car ownership.

Got the picture? No car in this wide brown land. Not owning - or more accurately, not in the process of paying off, 'cos I'd be surprised if those on the mid to upper levels of socio-economic success own all of those people movers out there - a family car would be high on my list of indicators of folks doing it hard. Howard's Battlers as it were.

So my perspective on the reading I have done about Web 2.0 has been filtered through my perception and understandings of the area in which I work, because looking at this excercise from a professional and not a personal perspective I see our Library Staff who are educated, intelligent folks with a start up level of computer literacy and no restrictions (i.e. our patrons are permitted internet bookings of an hour a day) spending many, many happy hours tinkering (and frequently cussing) at the tasks and challenges of this 2.0 training program.

I cannot for the life of me see how our patrons are going to find the time - once they have done their emails and job applications - to use the 2.0 applications. The tools are excellent and if our Patrons have a home computer then all is well and you'll get no arguments from me about the value of these tools but the reality check for the residents of Sunshine is that mostly they don't.

Abrams bold statement that we will all have an avatar by the year 2012 chills me by its failure to define who 'we' consists of. It seems to me that 'we' are the middle to upper classes of employed, educated folks with the finances to furnish our home with a new computer (and upgrade it every few years) and the knowledge to get antiviral, antispam, antispyware, antiphishing programs loaded the minute we first plug in to the net and then the leisure time to spend pursuing delightful activities within the online communities.

Casual observation tells me that the bulk of our Patrons who aren't applying for work, massaging their resumes before applying for work or checking their emails in the hope that there's some positive feedback about work alongside a few emails from their families and friends so far, far away, spend their time in chat rooms.

The web 2.0 training is surprisingly short on the how tos of managing chat rooms.

Lest you think I'm being too negative here let me add that the Brains Trust (age 15) thought Abrams map of the 2.0 world one of the cleverest things he'd seen in a while, and is finding much of what I am passing on to him to be of interest and use, so possibly the best use of 2.0 for this work environment is going to consist of those at the Info Desk drawing Patrons attention to useful applications when they can see that there might be a use for them in specific cases. (I have long done this with the SLV's excellent list of search engines, complete with links, that all students go 'WOW' over becasue they had no idea such a useful page existed on the SLV website.)

technorati

Good trawling tool.

Was able to hunt for some interesting items.

Conclusion: a person could spend a LOT of time at this portal.

del.icio.us

Fifteen minutes a day.

One and a quarter hours per week.

Difficult for those working part-time and by definition having a substantial time commitment to desk shifts to manage but not impossible.

Three tasks in a week that suggest you create accounts, explore the sites and then play around in them...

ach, people, do we need more stress in our lives?

Notsomuch.

Round 1. del.icio.us yeah, can see the use for this. The downside as I see it - and it certainly affects my actions today - is that a person would need to add tools to their browser and this may not be a fast and easy option to those in the worlds of public access pcs and internet cafes. I'm unwilling to create and account and test this out because doing so would involve toying with this workroom pc, and am uneasy about the doing of that.

I've go to log in to view the info about making a network badge and I don't know the log in info for PLCMCL2 because while I'm sure it was sent to us my email all goes to my home account which, once it's been downloaded I can no longer access online, I wasted 10 precious minutes asking if anyone in the workroom knows the login but apparently the rest of those here today are not up to this activity. So I'll have to pass it by.

Later on Monday

Hmf.

Still cannot make linkage work.

Ergo, Rollyo. Task completed at: http://rollyo.com/xaelle/knitblogs/

Also, LibraryThing - another link that won't - so:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Xaelle

Cheers!

An excercise in frustration

Something, our firewall or a glitch in Blogger, is refusing to let me add in the Rollyo link.

The html tag is visible and correct in the draft but the link will not go through and show.

Also, the Librarything website is experiencing problems so that will have to wait til next week on account of my need to eat.

Rollyo

Monday morning and still working on last weeks tasks:

Rollyo:



I can see the use for this tool, if you had a humongous lists of sites to trawl through this would be a nifty way of linking them in the one spot...

Or you could just list them under 'Favourites'.

Monday, Monday: Generators

Generated with ease @ http://www.glassgiant.com/back_to_school/ , accessed via http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ a great place to spend a few hours monkeying around with different images and avatars for those lucky souls with too much time on their hands.

Over @ http://www.letterjames.com/start.php?mod=image-personalization I tried to add text to the georgeously named 'Chicago Wacker Drive' pic but LetterJames rejected my attempt to tout for those tasteless, talented, hilarious, renegades over at Chanel 2, 9 pm, on Wednesday nights and suggested that LetterJames may not like my choice of words or their server was overloaded.

Fair enough.

After some thought I tried taking the apostrophe out of The Chaser's War on Everything but LetterJames was still not happy. So, upon reflecting about the state of these trying times I considered that the program might not like the word war in any way shape or form and tried again with The Chaser.

Alas no go.

To test the censorship theory I then tried to label the lovely building in Wacker Drive with the words Hugs and Puppies.

Further rejection.

Therefore I'm going to opt for the failure to generate being down to an overloaded server.