# 23 The best of the nest

What a fantastic opportunity to have an exercise as grand as this one that provides us with an interactive overview into technology available. I was rather daunted to start with. I found it frustrating as I did not have any knowledge of even how to go about making these applications work for me. A 30 minute overview each week prior to the exercise coming out would have been helpful.
Time was a BIG factor. I don’t think anyone would have put in just 15 minutes seven days a week (that’s a total of almost 2hours). I think I would have spent at least 4-5 hours of my time scouting around the different sites. That’s a very large commitment in any person’s week. Especially if one is studying too. Just a reminder there is a life outside work and to provide an ‘on the ball’ service, staff need to have balance between work and home life commitments.
At last I have an idea of what Face book is or My thing or how Flickr works (among many others) and how each of these could enhance the library and my profession. So let’s use some of them.

Any way I am a survivor- I have thoroughly enjoyed this. Should time (work time!) permit I will revisit some of these sites for a more thorough look.

I particular I liked the following:-

RSS feed – fantastic idea to keep up with information and ideas in the library environment. A quick way to provide feedback directly to librarians. Needs to be managed to prevent having an information overload situation.

Library thing- sharing booklists and ideas. Obviously customised for the library environment.

Blogposts- for the NSL webpage. Communication and ideas library and book related. But who will manage this. We desperately and urgently need a Web team. As a large library system we should be leading the way in this field. I reckon our website is ‘behind the times’ – come on NSL.

Podcasts and Flickr –to promote the library, through reviews and images of events.

E-books – a great invention. Clean, lightweight and convenient due to download-ability.
Image generators-( Image Chef, library clouds etc) a great fun thing- Boy it’s endless what technology can do!
Well that’s it from Poppy. Thanks for the introduction and opportunity to partake.

Well worth the time. But relived its now over!

#9 Technical Technorati- share your thoughts

Unfortunatley I was unable to access the Technorati videocast tour. If anyone can offer suggestions on where I may have gone wrong, I'd appreciate that.
The website looks good. I thought it was great that it orders the blogposts by the number of 'fans' , with the most popular being at the top of the listings, showing the most popular 100 blogposts by fans or authority. Clearly layed out with the new additions of postings in a separate section. The top searches was useful. Thought that the number would have been rounded to say 20 listings.
I liked that the site shows the related tags, but this was inconsistent with the entries in the 'Top seaches' section.
It was good to be able to click directly on the related tags and access this information from the blogs with the same tags.

I hope others have enjoyed finding out about this format of social networking and information sourcing.