Thing 21 : Podcasting

Podcasting is a low-cost and effective way to reach audience and share information with them. Many users particularly like audio podcasts because of the conveniences and the great varieties of subjects available to them. They can listen to news, sports, entertainment, life skills, lectures, and even obituaries from any computer or from a MP3 player when they are on-the-go.

To many users, podcast is like a blog . With a microphone, even amateurs can talk like a professional radio host and broadcast their thoughts to the world.

For me, podcast is a new way to touch base with my hometown which is 10,000 miles and 12 time zones away. Some of my hometown newspapers and radio stations have podcasts that provide the latest local news and radio programs, I can visit home without actually leaving home.

Podcast.net is my primary source when searching for a podcast, search is fast and easy and it includes podcasts in foreign languages. A recent keyword search of "library" in the same directory produces 63 results, quite a few libraries as well as companies such as SirsiDynix have already been using podcasting as a tool to dispense information. To find booktalk podcasts, Washington Post and New York Times are good sources to go to too.

Connecting to a podcast through Podcast.net can be slow sometimes , a faster way to connect is to subscribe to individual RSS feed, through which I can also get the latest episode of the podcast.

With YouTube, everyone can become a filmmaker, with audio podcasting, everyone can become a radio host. When podcasting is becoming mainstream, will it pose a threat to radio station?

Thing 20: "I AM big, it's the PICTURES that got small"--Sunset Boulevard

If Norma Desmond had lived a few decades later, she could have reinvented herself in the universe of YouTube She could have been the 80-year-old British pensioner and widower, geriatric1927, whose series "Telling it all", is one of the most subscribed videos in the short history of the site. In this series, he talks about himself and the world around him, and one of his episodes has actually reached over 2 million viewers so far.

The same movie quote can also be used to describe the phenomenon of YouTube. It is a small screen that shines brighter than any social networking sites. Even though it has more popular videos than quality videos, it is still a land of many possibilities, it's social impact has been widely recognized, and libraries should capitalize this opportunity.


YouTube, with 100 million views worldwide everyday, is a place where library can gain high visibility. From what I have seen in YouTube and Yahoo video, many libraries have already used this social networking tool to conduct virtual library tour, to promote library programs, to share information, and to create training manuals. Picture is worth a thousand words, messages in this visual format can really travel far.


Free flow of information, A+ Partners in Education are two of the many causes that our library always champions, one of YouTube's nonprofit programs, "Broadcast your cause", is a place where I think we can reach out and make a powerful statement.


I found the following video in YouTube after I had read about the World Digital Library Project in the newspaper. The project is initiated by the Library of Congress, and people who are involved know where to go to broadcast their message.

Thing 19: Wanna "Yelp" about it?

Yelp, one of the Web 2.0 award winners, is a local community guide. Type in a zip code, I can find suggestions of where to eat and shop, where to find local libraries, or the best route to take to go to work. Recommendations come from members of the site and they are usually rated, this adds credibility to the reviews and it literally puts local businesses on the map.

Yelp is more than a local reviews search engine, it is a social networking site as well. It lets each user blog about almost anything in his daily life. It gives users a platform to discuss what is going on in their own communities. From what I have read on the "Conversations in Columbia" page of this site, topics can be anything from Halloween party to Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize. Yelp also provides users an alternative way of communicating with their friends, it looks more and more like the social networking site, Facebook, to me.

This is what Yelp, or Web 2.0 is about, connecting, communicating, and sharing information, users' involvement is very often as important as the information itself if not more.

This blogpost is created and posted directly from Google Docs. I choose this program over Zoho simply because I have already had a couple of gmail accounts, this makes trying some of the program's appealing features easier.

To start this free service, I don't need to install any software. I very often work from 2 different workstations, now I can have easy access to this service from any one of them.

Google Docs looks and works a lot like many conventional word processing softwares, it requires very little technical expertise to use it. I can invite up to 200 people to share, and 10 people to edit my document simultaneously. This concept of sharing and collaborating is very similar to wiki. Like wiki, all revisions are recorded. Unlike wiki, I have better control over the quality and the access to my work with Googke Doc. I can also add a RSS feed to alert other participants of the latest update.

"Word count" is a nice feature to have too. It is statistics that analyzes the structure of my work, and I can take it as an advice to improve my presentation.

Once my document is created, it's saved and stored automatically inside Google Docs, this makes floppy disks more and more obsolete. It can also be searched by keyword, there's no need to go through the extra step of tagging the document.

Now more and more people turn away from conventional e-mail and prefer to communicate through text messaging and social networking sites, Google Docs, with its many nice features, can make e-mail relevant again.

Thing 17 : Wiki sandbox

I added a comment to the Maryland libraries sandbox, which was not difficult to do, but I was unable to add my blog to the list of all Maryland library blogs, someone had inadvertently deleted the Blogs! Here page. This problem is exactly what critics have been saying all along about wiki, when people are allowed to edit freely, the content of the wiki can easily be compromised.

Once law and order is restored to the wiki community, I will try adding my blog to the master list again.

Thing 16 : Wiki

At first glance, some of the library wikis mentioned in "23 Things" look very much like an intranet or a website, in fact they are the sum of many efforts and results of an incredibly versatile tool, WIKI.

A conventional website or intranet is a one-way communication tool, adding and changing contents is often managed by a few. Wiki is less rigid by design. It offers a place and an opportunity for people to meet, to collaborate, and to assemble information without leaving their desks, and results are instant.

Libraries can use wiki to conduct meetings, it saves phone calls, e-mails, text messages, and travelling time and expenses.

Librarians can pool their knowledge and set up resource wikis for internal and external use.

For libraries with limited resources, wiki can be used as an alternative to website or intranet Wiki can also serve as a community bulletin board for local groups and organizations, or a public forum for people to voice their opinion and exchange their ideas.

Wiki offers libraries alternative ways of communication, it can easily be adapted to different library needs, its democratic nature makes it an appealing addition to any organization.

Thing 15 : Web 2.0 : How do I connect thee? Let me count the ways.

Web 2.0 is about “Connection”.

Libraries connect with their users in numerous new ways. They blog, they send the latest news by RSS feeds, they run online bookclubs, they help users navigate the internet and make suggestions of useful websites. They also understand the power of social networking sites and some have already made their presence in MySpace and FaceBook.

In the past few weeks, we read success stories of websites such as Flickr, FaceBook, MySpace, and LibraryThing. They succeed mainly because they give users a chance to contribute and to share information they have.

We also learned about the significance of virtual world. Many businesses campaign aggressively in Second Life. Education institutions and medical communities such as American Cancer Society and Center for Disease Control create avatars to dispense and share information.

These new technology tools are no longer for the young and the hip. They can help create a library without borders where users can fully participate and share resources. These tools are designed to build user loyalty by engaging them and connecting them on many levels.

When information flows freely on the internet, library users expect the same from libraries. Libraries need to break down barriers and share their resources. Users should be able to access to every electronic resource owned by every library in this country.

New technology has opened many doors and Web 2.0 is becoming part of the library culture. However, it works only if every library user owns a computer and participates in the same network. What if, for example, I need a tablespoon of sugar in the middle of baking a cake? Instead of looking for my buddies online, I would go to a different reality, I would knock at my neighbor's door. I would like my library to be the neighbor whom I can still count on when internet has its limitations and fails to connect.

Thing 14 : The Zen of Technorati : searching the moment

According to Technorati, there are 70 million weblogs and I'm going to find out if this search engine can help me find blogs about “Learning 2.0”

There are 3 ways to search in Technorati, by blogpost, by tags, and by blog directory.

It seems it really doesn't matter which search option I use, whether it's keyword search on homepage, “their favorites” or advanced tag search, the results are almost identical, around 25,000 blogposts for “Learning 2.0”.

I'm not sure how blog directory works since there are only 20 topics listed , anyhow, I get 683 results, which is a big improvement.

The search becomes interesting when I search by tags. First I go to tag page for suggestions. Unfortunately, the tag page lists only popular tags, most of them are too broad to be useful. I'm not sure where my “Learning 2.0” fits in. “Education”? Maybe. Or should it be “Technology”?

Finding relevant results by tags has everything to do with how the blogs are tagged. Take Japanese food for an example. There are 110,458 blogposts about Japanese food, with the help of related tags such as snacks, bento box, fish, vegetarian, etc., I can narrow down my results significantly.

Unfortunately, there are no related tags available for “Learning 2.0” and thus makes the search much more difficult. So I decide to put in as many tags as I can think of using the advanced tag search option. “Learning 2.0 or 23 things” gives me 1,316 results while “Learning 2.0/23 things” gives me 5. Obviously, “or” and “/” do make a difference in results.

Sometimes I wonder if tags are the best way to search a topic, especially after reading the tag statistics from Technorati. According to them, only 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags, majority of the posts didn't. So my final verdict is that if I know exactly what I am looking for, I will do an advanced keyword search, type in the exact phrase, choose “blogs about”, and I will get a manageable size of 102 results for "Learning 2.0.

While I was navigating the site, something interesting was happening at the same time. “Learning 2.0” began to emerge on the “Top search” list and was climbing up the chart. What it really means is that right AT THIS VERY MOMENT, my coworker Regina and I happened to be searching the same topic multiple times, our collective effort put the topic on the chart. Next day, when I checked “Top search” again, my topic was no longer there. Technorati is about living the moment, searching the moment.

Searching in Technorati is a frustrating experience for me. First, the site froze a few times during my navigation. It seems to me the site handles the volume of traffic better in the morning than around 6:00 p.m.. Second, there are not enough sorting tools available to me to find relevant results. Most blogposts can either be sorted by language or by “authority”. Authority here doesn't mean quality or reliability, it means popularity, it means the number of blogs linked to a certain blogpost.

Technorati may not be my choice of search engine because of the problems cited above. However, if there's breaking news, or if I want to know what people are talking about at this very moment, whether it is politics, entertainment, or business, this is the place where I want to be. The new blogpost page is updated continuously and some of the blogposts actually come from reliable sources such as CNN.

Thing 13: It takes a village to make it del.icio.us

When it comes to cataloging websites, some people may call the community created by del-icio-us an anarchy while others may see it as the democratization of the cataloging practive. In library world, subject headings established by institutions such as Library of Congress are used to catalog books. In del-icio-us, websites are cataloged by the “tagging” system. Each user assigns tags to a website he's discovered, tags link similar websites found and tagged by other users together, this collective effort makes all websites searhable and retrievable in the del-icio-us community.

Since there are no specific cataloging rules in del-icio-us, the success of finding relevant results really depends on how each individual tags his site, users may have to go through several pages of related tags to find what they need.

I think del-icio-us works best within a group of people who share common interests and objectives, and would likely use similar tags to index their collection of websites. del-icio-us allows users to set up a group account, PLCMCL2 account is a good example to show how group efforts work in finding, tagging, and sharing useful sites.