Thing 13 - Tagging

I love tagging items so the can be found easily. I do this all the time in my online catalog. I create lists of books that I know I am going to have to pull again for a teacher/ grade level/ or project. I would love to be able to "tag" a book with a teacher's name/ lesson idea, etc for others to see and to be able to easily pull it up. Our librarians could really network indistrict if we could tag a book with a grade level and teaching concept. It would make lesson planning SO easy!

Thing 12 - Twitter

I have not mastered Twitter yet. I do have an account but I enjoy following people mor ethan I do posting. My favorite person to follow so far is kirk franklin. I love his posts! He keeps me on my toes!
I still don't completely understand hastags. I have a friend who uses them all the time but I don't understand how to follow the hashtag... Does anyone know how???
I update my twitter from my cell phone and I am trying to link that to my facebook but I keep getting an error when loading the application. I am going to keep trying and maybe soon everything will be linked!

Thing 11 - IM

I have been instant messaging for a long time. I use my yahoo email account and instant message from there. I also use the instant message feature or chat feature on Facebook. I like that instead of waiting for an email to come thorough or a post I can have a conversation as if I was on the phone. Text messaging can even be a little difficult because you are always waiting to open the next text and it is hard to go back and look at what is said. I like that with a chat you can constantly have conversation and have a record of everything that was said on your part and theirs. This is a great tool for our libraries because it allows us to communicate with our patrons and we could even send the info to website people for new information for a FAQ's page. If someone needed to know the answer chance are that others so too! I have used a chat feature with the North Richland Hills Public Library when I was in library school. I actually conducted an interview that way! It was really neat to have everything I needed right in the chat window.... I love that they have a "live chat with a librarian" on their webpage. It makes their services so easy to access.

thing 10-Ning

I had heard about Ning but had never been there before. This is a neat space that allows networking with a group more conducive then Facebook does. My husband is a youth pastor and trying to help them network on Facebook has been difficult....Ning would allow this to happen a little better. My only reservation is getting them to all switch over. They have other networks on Facebook and I don't know if they would switch over to Ning or check Ning if they still have most of their contacts on Facebook.
I do think this could be a good way for our district librarians to network together better. I like that you can easily post videos in your network and have a "catalog" of videos to choose from that everyone can easily look through.

Thing 9 More Facebook

Groups: So far I joined groups that people invited me to. It was interesting to be able to look through and pick my own. I joined a few groups: Stimulate the economy-Forgive Student Loans, We will NOT pay to use Facebook, and 100,000,000 Christians Worship God!

Facebook is such a neat networking tool.
I must say though that my sister in law was very upset when they opened Facebook to everyone and not just college students. She is constantly commenting that there are all of the "old people" on there now... She makes me laugh!

Thing 8 Facebook

I love Facebook. I am addicted and can spend far too much time there before I even realize it!!! I have to be careful. I love that I can get lots of information about my friends in one stop. The weakness of Facebook for me is that I don't contact my friends near as much becuase I am able to see how they are doing by checking their Facebook.... probably not a good thing for a friend to do!
My husband is a youth pastor and I love that we can post things for all of our teens to see in one place and we can check on them easily as well!

Thing 7 RSS Feeds

I am not sure why this is distinguished from thing 6 except that now I know what an RSS feed. Most of the links were blogs like we did in thing 6. I did like being able to put star telegram headlines since I am a news junkie. These past two "things" have made me look at websites for ways to subscribe.

Thing 6 Blog Readers

I created my blog reader using google reader. I like that I can see more than just that the person has updated it. My blog lets me know there has been an update on blogs I followed but doesn't let me do the wuick look at all of them. I wish there was a way (maybe there is and I haven't found it yet!) to set it so that it shows me when people make comments. I have a couple of blgos that I like to see the comments for as well as the posts when they come in.