Final thoughts

On the positive side, I enjoyed Things like setting up my igoogle page, listening to podcasts and editing photos in Picnik and I think I would use Googledocs again. With some things you can see their potential, even if they don't interest you personally. I didn't get on with delicious very well - I don't think I'm alone there - and wikis are still a bit of a mystery to me.

Just a thought - it would have been better perhaps to run this over the Long Vacation rather than during our busiest term, giving people more time to do it at their own pace as it did feel rather overwhelming at times.

Having said that, it was an interesting experience that introduced me to Web 2.0., something I knew little about before. I appreciate that a lot of work must have gone into it and I hope to use some of it again in the future.

And the hamster is still going strong - must give her a name..

Well done to everybody who managed to make it to the end (and those that fell by the wayside)!

Gadgets galore

Displaying the photostream worked after a technical hitch kindly solved for me by 23 Things HQ. Gadgets seem to be straightforward to use.

Delicious is probably my least favourite Thing as I didn't find it very user-friendly or appealing to look at - it seems to have swamped my iGoogle page with a lot of things which I haven't been able to remove.I guess I'm realising that there's an awful lot of 'stuff' out there and that you need to be quite precise with your searches to find what you're looking for !

Googledocs and ThinkFree Office

I have looked at these and created a document to share in Googledocs which seemed pretty straightforward.I would use this again but probably not ThinkFree which wasn't so intuitive in my opinion.

Wikis/Wikipedia

I have now explored the Oxford web 2.0 wiki and read some of the posts on the Oxford Libraries Discussion forum - there is certainly an interesting ongoing debate about the relevance of all this technology and the challenge of how to get people involved.
Wikipedia seems very straightforward to navigate which is always appealing. I looked up my old school - disappointed that my name wasn't mentioned in dispatches but another Sally(Gunnell) was. I'm guessing that she came through before they sold off the playing fields - it seems to be more business and science orientated now.

Twitter,twitter

Have now signed up for Twitter and played around with it a little. My attempts to find family members on it showed the disadvantage of having a common name. It seems quite straightforward to use and could become quite addictive but it's not something that interests me personally.

Much tweeting in the garden from blackbirds fighting over food. They have learned how to save energy by flying right into the little tree on the lawn for food in competition with the smaller birds.

LinkedIn

Have now joined this and can see that it would be very useful for people looking to make professional connections.

Facebook

This was my first look at Facebook (yes really!) and while I don't feel that I know enough about it to comment on its use for libraries, I guess it could be useful for disseminating standard information in general to targeted groups e.g closures due to bad weather. However, I imagine that a lot of our readers would probably prefer more personal contact usually. There's nothing like talking to a human being after all. I also wonder how the resources would be found to support all these new technologies in these straitened times.

This has been another tiring week.

On the bright side, term is nearly over and the hamster is still going strong.