Zipf-adeedoo-Bob

Thing 14 of the 23ThingsonaStick asks that I blog mainly how I see my library using LibraryThing. Hmm… Well, since I don’t work in a library, nor am I a librarian, I am simply going to blog on what I personally liked about LibraryThing.

Early on I blogged about how I dreamed of a catalog experience similar to that of iTunes. What I found in LibraryThing is a step in that direction. The whole service was intuitive and I was adding books with tags within minutes. No learning curve, no frustration. I used the ISBN for finding books, and it worked like a charm. Each of my books appeared with data complete and images of the covers. The only thing missing was the actual content of the books, which could then be fed into a device (e.g. Kindle or Sony E-Book). However, I know the main purpose of the service is more about Web 2.0 social networking.

On that note, I do see how maintaining my entire library on such a service could be handy. For one, I have no such database currently. All my music and videos have been transferred into iTunes, which acts as a catalog in addition to a media service. At least entering my books into LibraryThing would provide me with a catalog that I or others could reference for any number of reasons.

In conclusion, I like LibraryThing on a personal level. As for use in an actual library, I’ll leave that up to the professionals ;-)

In this latest Thing, I explored a number of productivity tools… specifically, services that could keep me on task and organized.

Starting off, I actually already use a start page via iGoogle. In the past, I have used certain productivity gadgets, such as post-its and to-dos. However, my long-term adoption of these did not take, and they were eventually placed by local weather and a college football ranking gadget from ESPN.

The most impressive of all the tools I saw had to be Scrybe. I loved the way it expanded out your month-view calendar days to a visual of when you were free/busy. Also, since it is a web-based calendar, I liked that it maintained an offline copy of itself on your computer for disconnected use. Other features about it were very intuitive and overall it felt really good. It is definitely a product I would recommend it… but probably not use it.

Why not, if I liked it so much? Part of the failed adoption of iGoogle notes and tasks was that it was separate from my corporate system that already does a lot of these things. I am big on not duplicating services in my life. And although the Scrybe product totally kills the Oracle Calendar service I use at Penn State, I must maintain the Oracle Calendar for work… which is where the bulk of my schedule complexity is anyway. (My off-work hours are pretty easy: Play with boys until bedtime, then homework until I collapse.)

The same goes for BackpackIt, which was a very cool concept and tool but would have to be maintained separately from my work services. If I ran my own small business or was in charge of IT at a smaller organization than, say, Penn State University, I think that these services, as well as host of services offered by Zoho would be an innovative and cost-efficient approach to business and collaboration.

On a parting note, I will mention at least one BIG (and corporate) productivity tool that we at University of Oklahoma are all familiar with to one degree or another… Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft now offers a hosted version from them, for a price of course. But I mention it as a Web 2.0 tool because the web interface and backend technology make Exchange available to just about anyone with a browser and allow you to share and delegate information with anyone in your organization. Also, integrating with the service is now a built-in feature with a host of devices and systems, including BlackBerry, Palm, the iPhone/iPod Touch, and even Mac OS X! I am not the biggest Microsoft fan, but I love Exchange. If you haven’t done so yet, explore all the capabilities of your OU Exchange mailbox. (I’m especially excited about the upcoming 2010 upgrade!!!)

Before I get into this…

Here are the current top five from MIXX:

1. Kim Kardashian: Sister’s Wedding Best Night of …
2. 9 Amazing Facts About Bill Gates
3. Prozac Approved in Europe for Children as Young…
4. New Marine Corps Combat Fitness Test
5. Facebook Marketing Case Study - Mad Men

Now from DIGG:

1. xkcd - A Webcomic - Creepy thumb
2. Awww, So Cute: 5 Smallest Countries in the World [w/Pics] thumb
3. On what Planet was this NOT a Hate Crime!?
4. DNA Test Shows Hitler Skull Is That of A Woman
5. This Week In

And from Newsvine:

1. ‘Grandma Bandit’ Robs Two Houston Banks Hours Apart
2. Some Texas districts change tune on abstinence-only sex ed
3. Debbie Stabenow Makes The Best “Your Mom” Comment In Human History
4. Facebook poll asking Should Obama be killed causing stir
5. Grandma Arrested for Purchasing Cold Medicine

(Evidently Reddit was hacked yesterday and most of the top five reddits were about that.)

I do not like these ranking services and have found nothing in this Thing to convince me otherwise. Simply put, popular does not mean quality. If the examples above aren’t proof of this, watch broadcast commercial television. Most of this is tabloid and shock news. I’m sorry to be a snob about this, but most of the crap that goes viral and ends up on the top of these lists is not news, much less pertinent. It’s there because it shocks and gets a reaction, or because it’s gossip, or any other classification you can come up with that does little to truly inform.

In conclusion, I like editors and editorial boards. I want a professional assembling a portfolio of articles within a particular scope for me to digest. I trust they have done their work and that the selections represent pertinent information about the world I live in, be it news and articles about politics, technology, the US and world, sports, whatever. If they haven’t, it will show and I’ll take my information behavior elsewhere.

Before this thing, I must admit that I have only done minor tagging in my life, and I had never used del.icio.us before. I’ll start with del.icio.us…

As mentioned, I’d never used the del.icio.us service and really knew very little about it other than it was a “social network for bookmarking” (and that its name is hard to type). But I now know that description is lacking it justice. del.icio.us is much more than sharing bookmarks with friends. Primarily, it acts a central, Cloud repository for your bookmarks. And since their are tools to integrate with almost any browser, it does do a nice job at this. From the the social aspect of the site are really more about 1) improving your own understanding of common tags (more on that in just a second) and 2) discovering other websites that may be of interest from others based on your own bookmarks. This last part I find especially fun!

Tagging itself is still an odd thing to me. I understand and appreciate that it is at the heart of the information seeking world we live in today. However, it is subjective and only as accurate as the person doing the tagging. (Ex: Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s campaign website.) But I suppose this has been a problem with cataloging and organization since the days of Alexandria. On that note, I do like that del.icio.us allows you to see how others have been tagging the same link, so that you may see what standard terms others are using with the same subject.

I’m guessing that’s why tagging and del.icio.us were combined for this Thing.

PS: You can follow my bookmarks at del.icio.us/bobzipf, to which I will also create a link at the About Me section on the bottom of this page.