Latest pictures of Jenna - Easter and general 19 months old pictures.

Week 3 Web 2.0 class - Social Networking

I signed up for Facebook and Linkedin. I had already had a MySpace account, with nothing in it. I must say, Facebook and MySpace are very overwhelming. I can see that MySpace is popular with teenagers. I did not really care for it because there is way to much stuff on every page that I looked at. They were all too "busy". I liked Facebook for the networking aspect. So far I only have 1 friend, and she is a huge Facebook user. She has added a couple of friends and I received that notification. It is still confusing to me. I liked Linkedin. That did seem to be the more professional networking site. I contacted some of my co-workers that had already registered to ask them to be one of my contacts. We are a relatively small university, so I was surprised that there were 50 people registered from here.

I can see where privacy would be an issue on both MySpace and Facebook. I do like that both sites ask for the other person's permission before you can be added as a friend. I didn't look that in depth into Facebook, but I know on MySpace you can make your site available only to people you allow to see it. I do like that feature.

Since we are a medical school, I am not sure that either MySpace or Facebook would be useful for us. I think Linkedin would work well in communicating with the faculty.

Differences between wikis and blogs

I am having fun working with wikis and blogs. There is so much that one can do with both that it is rather overwhelming. The main difference that I am finding between wikis and blogs is that anyone can change any wiki page that has not been locked. This is scary to me. When I was added the links to my blog and my wiki to the class lists, I could change that whole page if I wanted to. As one of the instructors stated in an email to us, someone had alphabetized the lists. That was a very nice thing to do. The point of starting a wiki would be to allow others to add and edit pages. This facilitates communication and collaboration. With blogs, you can communicate with the author but only through the comments. You cannot change anything on the blog itself, which you can do with wikis. A blog would be used for information purposes, like library policies, hours, holiday closings, etc. A wiki can be used to communicate among staff members, or even between faculty members and library staff.

How to use RSS feeds at our library

One way to use RSS feeds in our library is having the tables of contents of journals sent to the faculty. There are several faculty members who have the TOC sent to them, but they have to go to each individual journal and subscribe there. On the library's web page, we can create subject areas, such as Pharmacology or Marine Biology, and share our organized RSS feeds with the faculty in those areas. We would use an aggregator such as iGoogle to facilitate this.

It is only a few weeks until the start of the baseball season - go Cubs! Jenna has much more hair now than she did is this picture. She got to meet Ron Santo and Pat Hughes last summer during a Cubs broadcast. Now at 19 months, Jenna loves to dance to "Go Cubs Go"