My colleague Erika and I have been out of the office for the past couple days presenting at the Off-Campus Library Services Conference in Salt Lake City, UT. Since I am based in Minneapolis I was looking forward to some warmer weather, but unfortunately it has been overcast and rainy. However the beautiful mountains around Salt Lake City more than make up for the lack of sun (beautiful mountains always tend to impress us from the “flat” Midwest).
Conferences are such a great way to find out about new ideas and share what you are doing with others. One of the presentations I attended today was on Web 2.0.
Not sure what Web 2.0 is and how it can help you in your coursework check out the following links on the Library’s Guides & Tutorials page:
- Cool Tools (brief overviews of Web 2.0 tools such as Assignment Calculators, RSS, Social Bookmarking, Wikis and more!)
- Enhancing Library Research Skills with New Technolgies (this is a presentation you may want to check out at your next Colloquium)
What is your favorite Web 2.0 tool?
Robin
Margery Runyan | 28-Apr-08 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
Dear Web2.0 Geeks – I have a website, a blog, and a pbwiki. How should I be differentiating how I use them? Who are the audiences? What is the optimum utility for each? And how can I increase their visibility? Thanks. Mercy
Kate | 01-May-08 at 2:35 pm | Permalink
One helpful way to think about it might be the relationship between form and function.
A website is useful as a static way to share information (one way transmission),
A blog is more like a diary with new information in reverse chronological order (by its nature it changes) but the comments feature facilitates two way communication
A wiki is great for group collaboration-when a group of people all contribute information on a subject (building collective intelligence on a subject). This also changes over time.
Kate | 01-May-08 at 2:36 pm | Permalink
It is great to experiment with each of these tools to see how they work and what they can do. The next step might be to select your audience and purpose for each of them (and let form follow function). Then develop a strategy to how to reach the audience you are interested in and spend some time targeting that audience.
There a methods to improve traffic to your blog (or other Web 2.0 application)—most of which involve improving the metadata (that the search engine spiders crawl through), posting useful content on other related blogs and registering your blog or site with different highly used discovery sites (digg, technorati, stumbleupon)