Thing 27: Twitter

So I finally joined this whole Twitter thing, I have been hearing about it all over the news. It seems that everyone is doing twitter so I was pretty excited to get to this thing. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I created my profile, added a picture and a few friends. I think that it is neat that I can go to one website and get updates not only on my friends but also on my favorite authors, bands, and other people that I find extremely interesting. I also like the fact that there are libraries as well with profiles. I think that it allows people in that area to befriend their library and get caught up on updates or events going on at the library. Its a great way for the library to get in touch with more people and to seem more up-to-date with technologies and what its users are using in their personal lives. It is great to see the library progressing and branching out to different mediums to get the message across and to get users into the doors of the library.
I tend to babble on and get kinda lost in what I am writing so sometimes it is hard to do this whole micro-blogging thing. I always want to say more to convey the right message but I guess I will just have to learn to be more concise. I think that this is also something that I could apply to my daily life, sometimes I think I can be long-winded. I tend to go off on tangents and lose my train of thought on what I am saying. Kinda like how all my blogs tend to turn out.
So in conclusion, I am now on twitter. You can follow me, my username is jabeans.

fringe

Thing 26: Join the 23 things Ning

I joined Ning in the 1st round of 23 things. The first time that I had an experience with it, I just browsed around and didn't do much to my page or add friends or anything. This second time around, I changed the appearance of my page, added a picture, added some friends, and commented on a friend's page. The only group that I joined in Ning was the 23 things group. I don't really see myself using Ning on a regular basis or really getting involved with it at all. To me, there are so many social networking groups that in order to be an active member in all of them, I would have to be on the computer all the time. I could see the forums being a useful thing for connecting with other librarians. I read a post someone had put up about recommendations of books for high school students. They wanted to know if anyone had any other websites that were useful. I could see these forums as a benefit for the workplace especially for smaller libraries that may only have one librarian and so no other way to connect and ask questions.

Thing 25: Blogger's Toolkit

I added the snow effect and the Picasso painting a day widgits to my blog. I also added one of those map things that tells me where the people that look at my blog are from. I am not sure if I installed it right because no one has looked at my blog yet. But I hope it works, we did this same thing when we created a wiki for our Teen Read Week and it was neat to see that for some strange reason, a lot of people in the UK were looking at our site. I am curious to see who will look at my blog but I am sure it will probably just be people in the program.
I am not much of a fan of clutter and it seemed like a lot of the things you could add would be just that. They seemed fun but unnecessary to me. I spent almost an hour and a half looking over all the widgets but honestly, I got bored and thought that there were much better ways to spend my time. Although, they seem fun and cool on blogs or whatever, they don't seem to have much importance to me in the library setting.
I was not as big of a fan of this thing as I have been of other ones. I did add a few things to my blog, but I wouldn't be surprised if I got sick of them and took them off in the future. I do really like the snow effect thing though, I wish the snow would pile up on the bottom of the screen, that would be a neat effect.