Delicious

Finally, I am back with Delicious.

I have to say it is not user friendly to me. I have got so many troubles trying to sign in. I was first asked "Do you have a Yahoo! account?". Yes, I do. "Sign in with your Yahoo! ID". OK. I did. Then there is the option "Choose a link your Delicious account". I chose to Link my existing Delicious account to my Yu Ning account (I considered it as my Yahoo! account). Then I was asked to sign in again. Whatever I put in, I was alerted with Invalid username/password. OK. Then. I won't use this Delicious anyway in my future, even though I thought I could learned it better if I did some real play with it.

The funny thing is that during my troubles to sign in, I swithed back and forth with Delicious's webpages and I got to know a bit more about its Tags and Bookmarks. So, if I am able to be signed in some day, I believe I could play Deliciously.

Twitter

Just found a piece of interesting information about the content of tweets :

Based market research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a 2-week period in August 2009 from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and separated them into six categories:

Pointeless babble – 41%
Conversational – 38%
Pass-along value – 9%
Self-promotion – 6%
Spam – 4%
News – 4%

Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "peripheral awareness" or "social grooming"

It should not be shocked to see the rates above. Like other networkings, many people use Twitter to babble and gossip and many people use it as a conversitional tool. I think then Twitter loses its advantages if the rates keep at this way. Except the Internet, Twitter messages can be received with other devices, such as SMS, and Twitter was designed as information networking instead of social networking. These are all the unique features which Twitter has and people should have better uses on.

LibraryThing

I think LibraryThing is very user-friendly. I like "Zeitgeist" and some groups in "Group", such as "What are you reading now".

Flickr & YouTube

It is good to know Flickr, I am just not sure if I would use it.
I like YouTube. One feature I like very much is that when I find the video I have searched and other related videos displayed as well. Those videos are all linked, like the linked websites, so users could go wild and have no way to come back to the videos that they are firstly interested.

RSS : a good stuff to use

According to the instruction, I have successfully set up an acount on Bloglines. I chose some websites from the Recommendations to have a list of my "Feeds". It works well. I get on the Internet, then Bloglines, and all the websites I'd like to have a view are there! The functions of Add, Edit and Options are easy and clear. So next step, I think I need to do is to set Bloglines as a default main webpage, then move all websites from "My favorites" to Bloglines.

Google Universe : my favorite products

There are so so many products in Google Universe.
I could only say my favorite ones are: Google Maps, Google Images, Gmail, and Google Web Search since I use them often and they are very much helpful.
Google Blogs and Google YouTube are very popular. So I know I am a bit behind the wave.
Google Directory, Google Books and Google Scholar are pretty useful to people doing specific research. I think I should get used and be familiar with them.
As about other products, I could not say I dislike them, I am just not familiar with them.

Google Universe: Google Translate

In Google Universe there is one product called Google Translate, which can translate the webpages between 52 languages. It is a very interesting and useful product. If a customer who reads little English want to visit Calgary Public Library's website, it will be very helpful the customer uses Google Translate to translate the webpage to one's native language, and the webpage can be switched between "Translation" and "Original".

Also there are some problems of translation. Since the translation is processed by the computer not by person translator, quite many grammar mistakes exist. Words chosen to match the original texts are sometime very awckward as well.

But still, Google Translate is such an interesting product, it should add credits to Google Universe.

Social Networking: Facebook

I feel that Facebook is sort of the combination of Blogs and Forums. I can put everything on, journals, pictures, articles, ..., whatever I would like to share with other people. People can write back notes and comments to me. Even there should be certain security, I heard stories like that Net-buddy but real-life-stranger found out one's real address through all the details leaked in one's Facebook and payed a surprise house call, and stayed for quite many days!! I have no experience with Facebook, but have used Myspace to creat an album for my children so that Grandparents can see all the pictures without receiving and downloading through Email or MSN.
So I think it just works for everyone by different way.

Wikipedia : how easy or difficult was it to find articles needed editing?

It is not easy to find errors in the articles. This is not because there is no error but from people's habit. When we look up a dictionary or read a book, we are used to trust the information in the dictionary or book. So it is easy for people to regard the Wikipedia as a very reliable resource.

I have used Wikipedia quite often. When I do a search by Google, usually I would pick the link of Wikipedia. See, I trust it. But I do found something that could be edited. Like the article I have just read, "Records of the Grand Historian", I think there are some mistakes on grammar, such as the writer used "is" when it should be "was".

For my understanding, it is not important to really find some errors in Wiki articles for this assignment, but to know it by heart that Wikipedia is editable and creatable by anyone, even like you and me!

What do you hope to learn from CPL2.0?

Web 2.0 is not a new term, but to me it is.
Thanks to CPL2.0 which gives me the push to learn more new technologies.

I have used Wikipedia for information search, I have read some people's blogs but don't have my own one. I have listened musics by YouTube. Except these things, all other topics on Web 2.0 are strangers to me, such as Social Networking, Google Universe, RSS, Flickr, Online Productivity Tools, Twitter, mashups and folksonomies.

It will be great if I can learn all these technologies. I hope I would have a chance to use any of these, if not, at least I know something about them.

Web 2.0 is web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-cntered design and collaboraton on the World Wide Web. Since I am working in a library system, I am very courious about what these applications would do to our library? What will be covered under the topic "Library things"? I could not wait for that part.