Week 3: Social and Professional Networking

I am not currently a social or professional network user, and I've decided not to establish a personal profile on any network at this time. For me, the main reason is lack of time. It's all I can do to keep up with email! If I was looking for a job, I could see many advantages to participating on LinkedIn.
I enjoyed looking at ALA's Facebook. If I was going to set up a social network presence for my library it would definitely be on Facebook as opposed to MySpace or Ning, mostly because Facebook has so many users (more than 400 million). I enjoyed skimming the news and some of the articles on ALA's Facebook, everything from the news which came out yesterday that teens are texting more than actually speaking on the phone, to an article about Mark Twain as a book critic, to the history of library cards, to how to clean books. ALA also provides a lot of interesting links to the organization's website, including various Factsheets and recommendations for viewing and listening and best websites. It made me realize I really need to check out ALA's website on a more frequent basis.
I have to say that I got one of the best laughs I've had in a while when I came across two librarians on MySpace who have started something called "Project Brand Yourself a Librarian." They are urging librarians to "brand" themselves with tattoos to show their pride in their profession. One of the librarians has had the image of a person reading a book which you often see on library cards branded onto his forearm. On his other forearm he has a musical scale, which I first thought was a barcode until I zoomed in on the image. It's demonstrates pride in your profession, and if you're planning on attending the ALA Convention in June they're hoping someone can recommend a local tattoo parlor.

Week 2: RSS Feeds

I am interested in politics so I decided to subscribe to a number of RSS feeds that deal with this topic: top stories from Politico.com; the politics feed from Msnbc.com; politics from Cnn.com; latest news from the Huffington Post. Since I usually visit these websites on a regular basis, I didn't have any problems finding RSS feeds on this topic. I also subscribed to News Releases from the VCCS and news from the Library of Congress. I noticed that for some sites, when I indicated I wanted to subscribe to the feed it was placed in a Microsoft Feeds Folder, so I didn't place these subscriptions in the Google Reader. Has anyone used RSS in the Ebsco databases?

Week 1: Getting Started

This is the first time that I have blogged, and I am looking forward to participating in 23 Things. I guess you could say that participating in these activities will help me to migrate from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in my own personal web usage! I mainly use the web to just retrieve information and I have to say that I share some of the concerns on the social impact of Web 2.0 as enumerated by Andrew Keen in one of the articles we were given to link to and look at for this assignment. I look forward to reading everyone's blogs each week, and I want to start by thanking Jami for sharing some blogs for librarians, which I definitely plan to look at.