Cycho Librarian

So for Thing 13 we're investigating the revolution that is tagging through del.icio.us . I remember when del.icio.us first came on the scene, and the extent of my thoughts at the time were "isn't that a clever way to use a .us domain name." I really didn't think anything of it until we were changing computers at work and I was worried I'd lose my bookmarks. So I created a del.icio.us account and moved all my work bookmarks in there. Turns out my bookmarks all transferred anyway, so I haven't really used my account since. Once again, this is largely a matter of convenience. Since I'm at the same computer at work each day and the same computer at home each day, I almost never have to access the bookmarks on one computer from another. So I never really had the need to use del.icio.us. I could see myself using it instead of bookmarks if Firefox has a del.icio.us add-on that functions like the bookmarks do, but until I need to access my bookmarks fr...

I always knew that by this time I'd be sick of the election. There was no way that the campaigning could go on for this long and still have me engaged and interested. What I wasn't counting on was how utterly disappointed-- and frankly upset and angry-- I'd be with the way things have fallen out. This election has gone far beyond normal negative campaigning. This election has gone so far beyond normal negative campaigning that as far as I'm concerned it's verged into outright libel and slander. Where the disappointment comes in is that it's come entirely from John McCain. There was a time when I thought he had a conscience. There was a time I thought he had the courage of his convictions. But what has become clear is that he is a petty, angry, vindictive, and at best Machiavellian bastard who clearly doesn't care if he drags the entire country down with him. My problems with the McCain campaign really fall into 4 groups: Muslim, Terrorist, Socialist, ...

Now a month behind, we come to Thing 12 : Twitter . I honestly can't remember when I discovered Twitter, but the first time I tried playing with it was to see if I could find a way to quickly share information across the entire library system. Twitter seemed like an ideal way to do this. If we created location-specific Twitter accounts and then had everybody follow each other, then when we needed to share information quickly between locations we could just "tweet" it. Power goes down at some location? Our infoline tweets it and everyone knows. Staff member goes home sick and you need emergency coverage? Tweet it and someone who can spare a person rides to the rescue. You get the idea. The catch was that there needed to be a way to see the tweets other than on the Twitter website. The Twitter website doesn't automatically refresh, and it's not sitting on top of your desktop. So the whole "quick notice" idea kinda goes out the window. I played w...