Like my animal friends, I've been having a good time digging in the garden. Time to get back to the 23 things. I spent a bit of time with all four tools and have concluded that they could be very useful to me at home but seem less relevant at work. Much of the emphasis is on the popular and sometimes wierd but interesting stories. My work is much less sensational and newsworthy. Since many researchers who come into our library are interested in genealogy, I thought that genealogy would be a good search term for these tools. One of the things I discovered was that genealogy, heritage, and family history are frequently used as terms for such things as computer programs.
On Digg I got four hits for genealogy. The first and best was an article on Geni.com about Genealogy for Web 2.0. The Second was about Windows Vista inheriting the sins of the father. Don't get me started on Vista.
Reddit yielded more results for my search on genealogy, about 50. Some were relevant to my interests and others not.
Newsvine was the most graphically appealing of the sites and represents what the world is talking about. Unfortunately, those are not the conversations in my library where researchers are focused on very specific topics, most of them in the past.
Mixx includes stories, photos, and videos submitted by users. I enjoyed looking at the popular photos, which were a diversion from work.
In conclusion, I could see spending time on these sites on vacation or in retirement. My acid test for Library 2.0 things is whether it saves me time and enlarges my understanding of my work and our clients' needs or if it wastes time and distracts. These sites fall into the second category.
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