I LOVE wikis!

I love wikis! I use them for just about everything. When I was planning my wedding, everything was on a wiki. I keep my recipes on a wiki. I use wikis to give job assignments to the interns. They have a million uses and are the best thing that Web 2.0 has given us (in my opinion). A service like wikis would have cost a FORTUNE ten years ago, but now it's free. Miraculous!

Delicious and Technorati

While I use both of these services, I prefer to use Google's iGoogle and add my bookmarks to my widgets. I do, however, have accounts with both services and use them for bookmarking certain things. Because I have two jobs and a lot of personal interests, I try to keep some services for professional or personal uses and not both. It makes my organization easier!

Glogster

My glogster

Blogrolls and Your Privacy

For those of you having difficulty sharing your blog rolls, make sure that you allow sharing under your user profile in Bloglines. For the majority of questions that have been emailed to me, that has fixed the problem.

Another concern that many have expressed to me about blogging in general is the matter of privacy. While I understand your desire for privacy, please know that Blogger only shares the public information that you give it. Frankly, I think we all have a lot of other privacy concerns before the information we have posted on our blog.

I teach an research class at a local college. My students, mostly in their teens and twenties, have used computers for almost everything for as long as they remember. This being the case, I was surprised at how little they knew about protecting their online privacy. The truth is, given someone's name and the town in which they live, I can find out pretty much about them in a short period of time. The students were most surprised when I was able to tell one volunteer how many parking tickets she got in the last year. And it only took me about ten minutes to get this information, including the amount of her tickets and where she was illegally parked!

The point is that there is some information that is shared online whether or not you ever use a computer. As our society becomes more and more reliant on the instant access to information, we do give up some of our privacy. But for this class, you are only giving up the information you want to post. Everything can be done anonymously. If you have any questions, please give me a call at the library!

Social Networking Overload

Twitter. Facebook. Google Buzz. LinkedIn.

All these social networking sites are great opportunities. However, I am updating these for both personal and business purposes and, frankly, it's becoming a chore. Add to that - 8 email addresses for my various personal and business ventures.

While I am snowed in today - and suffering from some serious post-shoveling back problems - I am going to surf my couch and develop a class for the library to help businesses manage their social networking. It sounds like a good idea to me!

The snow has wreaked havoc on my tiny patch of the mountain. The snow is only a few inches below the stop sign at the corner. My husband and I shoveled and shoveled - and it doesn't look much different than when we started! While the library is opening at 4 p.m. today - a weird decision in my opinion - I will not be going in today. But I'll be working from here!

I'm thrilled at how much blogging is going on from class participants. It's so great to see people embracing new technologies and coming up with all kinds of ways to use it.

A Great Start!

I'm so excited to see so many people learning to blog! One of the questions many people have asked me is - what can I use a blog for? The answer to this is both simple and complicated at the same time. You can use a blog for whatever you'd like! Some people use it as a way to communicate with friends and families, while others write their blog for the whole world to express opinions about everything from their favorite television shows to their political opinions. People have blogs about the most bizarre things. To sample some blogs, you might try visiting Technorati's Top 100 Blogs page.

I've been spending my time snowed in at home looking at some of the blogs people in our 23 Things Ephrata program have created. I'm looking forward to see posts for next week!

Penny