Wednesday, 28 July 2010

Summary of Web 2.0

This has been a good exercise, as I am a rather incidental stumble-onto-it learner when it comes to the Web and IT stuff, and it has been good having to go through the structured exercises, exploring some things deeper, learning new information and reflecting on how these things impact our work, or orgnisation and our lives.

Looking forward to the next round!

Facebooked

I started using FB about 2 years ago, and would consider myself a heavy user. Having many family and friends overseas was the main reason why I chose to link up. It has been awesome how we can stay in touch in fun, frivolous and fabulous ways, from virtual pokes, to sending flowers to private messaging. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to do social networking. I do set my security settings quite high, and I do have a list of limited profile friends... cos I don't want every other acquaintance of mine to be privy to what I am up to.

And yes I have joined the Manukau Libraries page and do (from time to time!) read Tosca's posts! I think FB is a great way to share information and generate interest, as you have overlapping networks and someone who finds a post interesting will share it with their networks and eventually you do get a lot of coverage. I think it's quite cool how it happens.

I have also joined the Singapore public library page, as it was my first home and, along with sensible parents,  responsible for this incurable desire to read and read and read... !

Most of our customers are of the Bebo or Myspace fraternity, but more are starting to use FB. So havn't really had any asking about it, more about whether accessing it is free or not! Well I do sell the benefits of FB that way as opposed to a gold coin for Bebo! :)

Some of my pet peeves about FB are the endless requests to join people in saving the world, or tending their garden, or signing up for cause after endless cause. I find the latter quite annoyiing as I feel if you really wanted to stand up for something, you should be doing more than just clicking a button and adding your name to a list. Having said that, I have been highly informed, educated humoured and moved by many of the posts, links, quotes and status updates  and that I receive.

So I hope FB will stay around for a long time to come...

Tuesday, 27 July 2010

Music music music!!

Hey hey hey... so here we are at one of my favourite topics!

I use different MP3 sites from time to time. Mostly I search by song, so I end up with whichever site that has the song I want.

I chose Amiestreet and when I went to the site, I encountered my first problem. The brower is not "Modern" enough, so the message that pops up says! So IE 6 is ancient already... hmmm maybe I should hv done this one at home on my Mozilla Firefox!

Anyway... I thought the site was easy enough to navigate and use. I think the net savvy customers we have at our branch would have no problem with it. Only frustration was how SLOW it was, but it was prob due to the browser not being "modern" enough! Will explore it more at home...
Just had a thought which Tosca n co might already have thought of! Can we put these links in the Favourites of the Learnnet web browsers? :)

The Blogger returns...

So.. I dropped out of Web 2.0 Blahhh! So much enthusiasm, too little time... what can I say? :P

But here I am, back again, having got my second wind, like the proverbial pheonix rising from the ashes.. NOT! To be honest it's cos I have more time to actually do this stuff at work now, rather than trying to fit it in at home whilst watching Bones or something...

Anyway... I was supposed to comment about how to use Goodreads.com as a Reader's Advisory tool....

If a customer was interested in reading something new, I would introduce them to the search function, which I like cos it provides a visual of the book cover, which I personally think is very important to getting the customer interested. It also has tabs to other related search results, so you get good value for money! For example, if you search for Babara Kingsolver, you not only come up with the books she has written, but quotes attributed to herm, articles and stories which mention her, and of course Trivia questions to answer!

Popular Lists are another good one to browse. Cos they are fun in of themselves to browse! With titles  like "Romance in Books that are longer than 300 pages" or "REALLY Underrated books" wouldn't you just want to take a peek? And if one is really bored you can answer never ending trivia questions!

Customers can also create a reading profile, link up with like minded souls, do reviews, rate books ad nauseum etc etc!

With so much to see and do, why wouldn't we introduce our customers to this site?! :)