John and the 23 Things

I don’t remember when i established my del.icio.us account, but after the initial “rush” of using it, i pretty much ignored it.  For week 3’s assignment, I revisited my account and what i found was, i had tagged a lot of stuff i no longer use, and in fact, probably never had use for beyond the initial reading. I think there’s definitely a use in a professional setting, but it requires more work than simply clicking around and adding links that look good.

Pros of del.icio.us:

• your bookmarks are available anywhere you have an Internet connection (and del.icio.us isn’t a blocked site)
• you can see how others have tagged a bookmark
• you can see other sites/pages assigned the same tag
• you can see sites others have felt were worthy of bookmarking
• RSS feed of your bookmarks can be displayed on your blog or webpage

The most obvious cons of del.icio.us are indicative of typical problems in information classification and retrieval.

Cons of del.icio.us:

• Lack of controlled vocabulary -  Since librarians tend to have access to subject classifications like Sears and LCSH, i don’t think this is a huge  problem but it’s a con none-the-less.
• Finding related sites dependent on others using same tag - Non-librarians aren’t necessarily going to choose from a controlled vocabulary, thus the term they use may not match the term you use. Homographs and inconsistent choice of tags – as in choosing between “bikes” or “bicycles” – limit the benefit of this feature
• Too easy to add links “just because” resulting in increased recall at the expense of precision.

I rarely pay attention to emails from either the ALA or SLA, but the “Learn and Win Using SLA’s 23 Things Program” subject line in my inbox caught my attention. One of my professional goals for the current fiscal year is to learn more about social networking applications, so this ties in rather nicely. If you’re interested in what this 23 Things thing is all about you can check out their site.

From what I’ve gathered looking at the other SLA 23 Things blogs out there and the lack of comments on them, this is a rather lonely exercise for something that’s supposed to be social in nature. We’ll see what I can do about that.

I’ve been blogging on LiveJournal since 8/2001, although I didn’t call it blogging then, and i don’t really call it blogging now either. There’s just something about LJ that makes me not take it seriously as a blogging platform – maybe it’s because for a long time, when you’d hit the “view random journal” button, you’d end up the journal of some 12 year old girl talking about math class or her latest crush in pink font on a white background.

I’m also on Twitter. I love the micro-blog concept, although mostly i look at what i post and think “who cares about this?” I’m not even sure I do half the time. That, I think, is a bigger concern of mine, and maybe I’ll make a post about that.

Thankfully, since Twitter can update my Facebook status, it does get some response and thus, in some small way, lives up to it’s social promise. Much more than I get updating Twitter alone.

For this project, especially after looking ahead to some of the exercises, Twitter would be problematic, I think, as a primary platform. I can imagine it playing a useful support role however.

Maybe some enterprising individual will want to do their entire SLA 23 Things on Twitter?

Anyway, so, why WordPress? Because I have to use WordPress at work to update a blog (I post things other people have written, with minor edits here and there). My hope is that I’ll learn a lot more about it during the 23 Things project, since I’m restricted in a lot of ways on the work blog, e.g. I can’t go on a widget-adding bender.

My impression, after spending 15 minutes choosing a theme from tons of colorful options, was that the dashboard is rather sterile – like it’s trying too hard to be professional looking and not offend anyone’s tender sensibilities. Maybe I’m reading too much into it though. Or maybe it’s that pale, washed out blue.

It also took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to edit the About page. When I found it – Manage, Pages – it was a “Duh!” moment to be sure.

Anyone using WordPress want to tell me what their favorite feature is? Is there a way to edit the dashboard’s appearance? (Keep in mind I’m using the free version)