This is the End…for Now

I was repeatedly amazed by how much 2.0 tools there were available for people to use (if people only knew they were there). I feel lucky to have the chance to keep up with the times and to learn to use these tools. I was actually concerned that I might not be able to get through all 30 Things (or that I would be able to learn anything at all). I am glad to have a supervisor who supports my efforts and to have co-workers who covered some extra hours on the desk so that I can finish. Their efforts have really made it possible for me to explore 2.0.

Thank goodness that the deadline was moved to the end of February; I took longer to get through all the discovery exercises than I expected (Writing these blogs can take up so much time!). I was surprised that so many of the Web 2.0 tools were available for free and that most of them require creating an account with them, too. Having to keep track of so many different accounts (and their accompanying passwords) can be exhausting and off putting. The social aspect of 2.0 took some getting used to, because I felt uncomfortable having so much of my personal information on the web.

While I can see that a lot of well thought out planning went into the program, there are still some areas that can be improved:

Basic computer or internet skills need to be considered. Throughout the exercises there seemed to be an assumption of certain skills, such as bookmarking, including hyperlinks, finding and copying html codes, and adding blog elements. Perhaps there should be a pre-survey to find out what people know how to do or need to learn before starting Learning 2.0.

In the beginning, the discovery exercises tended to have more instructions and explanations; I liked the reassurance (sort of like someone holding your hand as you venture into unfamiliar 2.0 territory) that I was heading in the right direction. A few of the later ones would have benefitted with instructions, especially pertaining to how to get the html codes needed to embed something into the blog if we had to post the results of our experimenting somewhere in the blog. Library Thing and Rollyo come to mind.

I would have liked to read fewer articles (or hear less podcasts) for the sake of learning how to use a 2.0 tool instead of reading about it. I often found that I did not see the potential use for a lot of these 2.0 tools before actually using them (or subsequently creating accounts for them).

Is there any way to cut down on all the accounts we had to create throughout Learning 2.0? I grew nervous with the increasing number of accounts I had to keep track of. Or is there a way to direct the created accounts towards library work, so that creating an account would be useful?

The time commitment required needs to be considered. The time needed to complete the discovery exercise and still keep up with work deters some staff from participating, especially part-timers. Some of the part-timers I’ve talked with would like to participate, but they simply don’t have the time with the hours they work to do both 2.0 and maintain their workload. I’ve also noticed that fewer technicians and aides tended to sign up.

Perhaps the beginning of the 30 things should have started out more actively, because the amount of articles, podcasts, and video clips to wade through can be mind-numbing and a turn off. Many of the exercises are more hands-on learning than what the first couple of discovery exercises suggest, and some people don’t have the patience for all the background information.

Here are some of the discovery exercises that could be condensed and fixed:
*Learning about Web 2.0 Library 2.0, and then discussing it with co-workers. We have to be instructed to discuss what we learn? That’s sad.
*Move the Lifelong Learning exercise closer to the blog exercise, if we still have to blog about it. It was a bit confusing blogging about Thing 2 during Thing 7.

*When the blog account is created, perhaps there should be more encouragement to play around with the page elements, blog layouts, edit/delete posts, etc. A few explanations or directions on how to use them might have helped. While some people might do that on their own, I think a lot of us might have a little tunnel vision when it comes to the exercises, doing what's in front of us instead of looking into the tools a little more.

*Instant Messaging should be more hands-on. While I think it’s great to learn about how the Library is using IM, perhaps one of the exercises should involve practicing with an actual IM account (though creating yet another account might frustrate some).
*I found the MySpace and social network articles rather unhelpful in my understanding of the appeals and possible benefits of social networks.
*Try cutting one of the Technorati exercises. Having it twice seemed a bit redundant.
*One exercise with podcast was probably enough. I didn’t find myself learning that much more from Thing 24 to 25.

While going through Learning 2.0, I ran into some trouble with some websites used in the exercises being blocked. Could the filter be removed for the duration of the training?

I realize that the blog entries need some direction, but ironically I find that writing the blogs to answer the questions raised in the exercises took more time than the actual lesson!

Could the exercises be offered in smaller portions? Even with the extra weeks allowed, the weekly schedule made me feel like I was falling behind when I had to stop my 2.0 progress to keep up with work.

Last of all, if another discovery program like this is offered in the future, I would definitely participate! This was an amazing opportunity that I leaped at the chance to take.

Play Time is Over…Time to Share and Compare

So close to the end—this is exciting! After a lot of sporadic starts and stops, I am almost finished. I had so much to learn and yet I had to keep putting 2.0 aside to keep up with work and program preparations. There were a couple times when I learned extra stuff that were supposedly basic (so basic that they weren’t among the 30 Things), but I was glad Learning 2.0 gave me the chance for me to learn them. I was overwhelmed by the number of accounts I had to create as I during the discovery exercises, but some of the tools were easier to learn if I actually used them, so I resigned myself to creating more accounts than I could remember. I was simply relieved that we had the time extension to finish all these discovery exercises.

There were really about 20-something exercises, not counting the registration/introduction and evaluation portions, and I liked some more than I did others. I sort of have this love/hate feeling towards blogging, because parts of it are needlessly complicated, and blogging about a discovery exercise takes more time than doing the actual exercise! I was thrilled with the potential of RSS feeds and readers, but unfortunately many of the sites I wanted to subscribe to don’t have feeds. I had fun adding an entry to the Reader’s Advisory wiki, though I would probably have less fun if I had to start up a wiki (reading the articles makes creating wikis sound difficult). I liked the chance to create an account in a social network, since having an account is very different than reading about one. I was glad for the chance to play with Flickr photos through all these third party sites (and glad that they willingly share their ingenuity!). The Web 2.0 awards had a wide variety of categories, winners, and new sites to explore. I had fun looking for videos in YouTube (and escaped creating another new account). Playing around with image generators was fun (though there were some duds), and I was constantly amazed by what people can come up with. I was glad to have a whole exercise devoted to Library Thing so that I could play around with the features. I could see some uses for the Del.icio.us and Rollyo accounts I’ve created.

It was fascinating to look at what my fellow bloggers had to say about Library 2.0 and to see how they have personalized their blogs. I saw all sorts of interesting widgets and decorations on different blogs. It was more fun when I could find the blog of someone I knew and look at what they had to say. Sometimes looking at other people’s blogs have helped me figure out some of the exercises, too, as other bloggers shared their experiences. It was reassuring to know that asking and sharing is encouraged, because I was not as comfortable on the internet or as knowledgeable about the web tools available as I thought, and I often needed help.

Learning 2.0 was big boost to my lifelong learning. I’ve had a chance to learn about all these Web 2.0 stuff I’ve never heard of (and ended up loving). I’m grateful that the Library department offered everyone the chance to explore the Web 2.0 tools available, because quite frankly I wouldn’t have known where to look for many of these incredible tools. Learning in the name of work; I can do that.

Rolling On and On and On…

Rollyo took some warming up to. Perhaps my topics were too obscure when I tried out the search rolls for e-Books, rare books, photos and quotes from Thing 28. Ironically, most of the photos in Free Photos were from Flickr (I had already created a Flickr account!), so I didn’t find this search roll too useful. I was able to find some interesting quotes in Quick Quote, but the book searches were dissatisfying.

This search tool didn’t thrill me at first, because I had to create yet another profile. Again. I had originally planned to do option 2 where I just checked Rollyo out, but I didn’t find the experience particularly enlightening. So I gritted my teeth and registered for a Rollyo account.

It took me awhile to get the hang of how Rollyo worked. For instance, the searchrolls showed up as a dropdown menu on the top of the screen instead of a new window even when you’re at the bottom of the screen. It was easy enough to create my own searchrolls: I clicked on the tab, chose a title for it, and typed in the URLs. I could have also copied searchrolls from other Rollyo users, but I wanted to create my own searchrolls with websites I’m familiar with. I ran into a little trouble, because I wanted to link back to Rollyo account in the blog, but I found out that I had to make my searchrolls public for anyone to use it. I thought my searchrolls must be simplistic compared to other users’ searchrolls. However, when I searched through some of the searchrolls similar to mine, I was pleasantly surprised to find that mine were comparable, having more websites than some, less than others.

Rollyo wasn’t too exciting until I tried to use them for searches. When I entered a topic in one of my newly created searchrolls, it pulled up results from all the websites I selected. I was thrilled by the ease of searching multiple websites with one search. Rollyo feels like a combination of Google and Del.icio.us, with a search engine searching through sites I’ve added to a list as I did with Del.icio.us. At the worst, if your searchrolls yield no result, you can have Rollyo expand your search to the Web as well.

Flickr Exercise, Take 2

Rainier Aurora 2,
originally uploaded by Dan Hershman.

This is my attempt to post a Flickr photo through Flickr's Blog It feature. Interestingly enough, I could write my blog in Flickr and it wills still show up with my blog! Unfortunately, there's no formatting features, and I have to go back into Edit Posts to fix that. Now if I can retroactively go back to my first Flickr post and add the picture right...

This Comes from Working in the Library

Who would have thought that so many people would feel the need to categorize all the books they’ve ever read and liked? Clearly, this is a popular hobby because Library Thing has so many members that it can boast about being the largest online book club in the world. Membership is free up to 200 books in your catalog, and then you have to pay for a yearly or lifetime membership. That little tidbit sort of took the fun out of cataloguing my own library; I now have to worry about staying within my limit when I have so many favorite books I want to add. I ran into Library Thing back in Thing 19 and have been slowly adding books into my library since.

The work to get my Visual Shelf from Library Thing to show up was practically another triple lesson for me! In addition to learning about Library Thing, I learned to add links and other page elements to my blog, to make certain text in my blog hyperlinks, and to search for the html code for materials to embed into my blog. For the longest time my blog was extremely plain without any Widgets or decorations, but after all these extra lessons (mostly from other co-workers), I can proudly say my blog isn’t so bland anymore. I went on a slight detour from the discovery exercise to adding hyperlinks in some of my previous blog entries, to find widgets for my blog (I had a slight disaster on my blog when certain widgets were inserted too many times; I also tried to alter the dimensions of a widget to fit it into my blog), including a list of links to some of my fellow bloggers on my page, and adding a cool photo slideshow on my page!

I found the experience overwhelming when I searched for favorite books, because some titles have lots of different editions and I have the option of choosing the edition that I liked. I found some books in my favorite series grouped together, but their pictures rarely appeared while on my bookshelf. I found it slightly confusing how to include and modify tags, especially with the older entries; I still find myself unable to edit the tags on them. Library Thing has the option for you to add favorite authors, but the process sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t (or I fumbled my way onto the correct path the first time and now can’t repeat the steps).

Library Thing clearly offers more to readers who become members than those who just want to browse around. If you’re not a member, you can still get quite a bit out of the experience. Non-members can search Library Thing’s catalog for information about a favorite book, read the posts from discussion groups and look at the statistics for different categories in Library Thing, People can get book recommendations for titles they might like (and even recommendations for books to avoid based on the title they searched for!).

Perhaps, Library Thing is the solution for some of our customer woes. Take for instance those customers who always want to know what the title of that great book they’ve read (and then bemoan the fact that the Library doesn’t keep records of previous checkouts). If they have a Library Thing account, they can save the title in their very own catalog! Those people who want to join book clubs or find others with similar reading tastes? Well, Library Thing has plenty of them—surely there is going to be something for everyone! Now, all we have to do is persuade those same customers to check out Library Thing while making sure they still have reasons to visit the Library.

Someone Clearly has Too Much Time on His Hand

I can’t believe some of these huge image generators originate from people’s blogs! Really, someone must have a lot of time to make all these generators for us 2.0ers to enjoy. The Generator Blog had 927+ generators for playing around with different names and images!

With so many image generators to explore, I guess it’s no surprise to run into some duds. The Christmas Tree decorator reminds me of one of the Facebook applications, just a little trickier to find and “give” gifts. The Snowflake generator made a snowflake that looked unremarkably like the star drawn by an elementary school kid, and the snowflake looked the same no matter how you moved your mouse. The Brain Scanner generator looked fun, but it seemed random how your name gave you certain brain cells when your brain “scan” was generated. Alas, the result wasn’t so amusing because my brain scan only had angry or sad faces.

I tried a couple name generators and didn’t find them particularly impressive. The Tibetan Name Generator sounded interesting, but the link didn’t work. I found a Chinese Name generator where you could even choose different styles of calligraphy from ancient style to handwritten style, to have it written horizontally or vertically, but the unfortunate thing is that it generates a Chinese name only based on the phonetics of your name, so it’s really meaningless gibberish.

This generator is for someone who adores chocolate.

This link is to the chocolate I personalized. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the image to show up in my blog without creating an account with the site, so I included a link instead.





This is a variation of the Ninja text with a wizard instead.

I actually spent less time on Letter James and FD Toys in this exercise. Letter James didn’t seem to offer much image generating fun and felt more like a money-making venture. Back in the Flickr exercise, I had already checked out FD Toys. It didn’t have as many image generators, but they were easier to customize and often did (unfortunately) require you to have a photo file to play with. All in all, a little fun makes learning go a lot faster.

The Pod Invasion Continues

Let me get this out of the way: More podcast exercises don’t make me like it more. While I’m impressed with what other libraries, such as Arizona State University, Denver Public Library and Sheridan Libraries have done to incorporate podcasts and videos into their website, I don’t see myself avidly podcasting either.

I can see some of the work that is needed to make podcasts successful, and it is a big undertaking. If the Library starts posting podcasts, we need to make sure entries are added regularly so that listeners will come back for newer entries. Denver Public Library had podcasts dating back to 2006! I would think if we ever do podcasts, each library would do their own podcasts about stuff at the particular library. We’d also have to figure out how long we need to keep the entries. The podcasts should also be searchable by content, so categories for podcast topics and tags for podcast materials can help the customers find one that interests them.

Podcasts can be great, but they still have some faults. Podcasts are still for the most part audio files, so they aren’t as immediate as a person talking or reading to you. How about those people who are visual or tactile learners? Audio format won’t be as effective for them. While some of the storytelling I listened to from other libraries’ podcasts was great, I missed seeing a book with pictures in front of me. It was disconcerting to hear a disembodied voice read a story but not be able to see the storyteller.

The Pod is Overrated

For instance, think of the overpriced iPod or the fact that “podcast” was 2005’s word of the year. Perhaps it is because I hardly ever listen to radio shows, but I don’t find podcasting particularly exciting. I am amazed by how many podcasts there are out there, so much that podcast directories have been created to gather them together! It was enough to find a podcast to subscribe to. The difficulty lay in the subscription process.

There were so many different feeds for readers depending on whether you wanted to read or hear them. My mind was simply reeling. There are tons of library related podcasts around, and there’s such a wide range of what they cover: from news at your library and reference tutorials to book readings.

I can see podcast being useful for the library, but just not for me. It sounds too time-consuming and too much like a talk show over the internet. I think this could be useful for the Special Services division of the Library, especially when today’s computer savvy customers will be some of our future Special Service customers. News can be regularly shared through a podcast that anyone could subscribe to. No more money spent on cassette tapes for Special Services’ audio newsletter and we can keep up with the times. Special Services can have its own talk show and loyal following!

YouTube—So Easy to Use, So Difficult to Realize That

It’s funny. I hear a lot about YouTube having tons of video clips and see that a lot of friends use it on MySpace and Facebook, but I’ve never really looked around the site before. And when I got on YouTube, I nearly turned around and left. Was this yet another profile to create? Then I looked closer. I only needed to create a profile if I wanted to upload stuff or leave comments. I was saved.

It was easy enough to find videos for particular topics. The hard part was figuring out which video clips are worth watching, since there was usually a lot of results. Adding to the difficulty was the unintuitive steps needed to post a YouTube clip to my blog. Ugh.

Wading through the results can be time consuming, since I wanted to stop and look at so many of them. Some of the videos I found had problems with freezing for moments before resuming. I decided to look for Lion or Dragon Dances, since Chinese New Year is on my mind. It’s funny that a lot of the videos/performers use the folk song "On the General’s Order", used as the theme song for some of the Wong Fei Hung movies.

I checked out the Google Videos and Yahoo Videos. I was amused to find that most of the results in Google and Yahoo were from YouTube! Other than that, I wasn’t too impressed with either of them. If their videos are coming from YouTube, I might as well go to the source for my searches.



And this one had the folk song. I was amazed by how much effort it takes to learn to perform the Lion Dances.

The Order: Play with Flickr.

What can I say? I am thorough. When I first created Flickr and looked at its features, I sort of already explored some of the mashups and third party applications available. However, I did stop to look at the mashups mentioned if I haven’t explored them before.

I wasn’t too impressed with Mappr, since it didn’t look too attractive with photos on a map (unless the map is huge enough) and it would be a bit of work to print off something huge enough to see the photos. I already looked at the Color Pickr for #20 and was amazed at the pictures pulled up in shades I thought would be hard to find. Spell with Flickr had some interesting effects, but I didn’t care for the images of the letters used and I didn’t like being unable to choose the design for the letter. It was fun in the randomness, but a letdown in the lack of personal input.

Mongtagr was pretty cool, pulling photos from Flickr to make a mosaic of a particular picture. Unfortunately, Montagr pulls any pictures of the right color even if it’s not part of the theme. I looked at sunsets and felt the effect was ruined when I saw that some of the photos were of people who made up the right colors for the sunset Montagr put together.

I checked out the Trading Card Maker from FD Toys and had a little trouble because the picture I used was too big. I didn’t realize the size of my picture mattered, and I can’t see how to resize the picture before inserting it. Otherwise, I thought it was a fun way to make our own library-themed cards to use. Hmm, my brain’s whirling with ideas for what we can do with them!

Learning 2.0 is all about discovery and playing around with the internet tools available to us (if we know about them), but I can’t believe we actually need to be assigned to play! Really, what workaholics we are.

Tag! You’re It!

To be perfectly honest I didn’t find much to learn with this lesson, since I already looked at the help menu in Flickr and read up on tags after creating an account. Perhaps Thing 21 was to catch those people who jumped right into Flickr (and maybe created a Flickr account) without looking too deeply into what makes Flickr’s searches work. And that is tags (presumably).

Tagging your pictures allows you to organize your pictures with descriptive tags and to search for particular pictures because of their subject matter (hence, tags). In the bigger context of the Flickr community, tagging allows your pictures to get grouped with other similar pictures based on themes and location. The Flickr community is different from other photosharing websites because members can add tags, comments and descriptions to another’s pictures.

I wasn’t too impressed with the “10 Ways to Use Flickr in Your Library” article, except maybe for the idea of the virtual tour of the library. That would be a way to market the library (and let the VA residents who don’t know the library discover it). The idea of “highlighting new materials” seems like a waste of time, and doesn’t work too well with our procedure of sending new materials to fulfill holds….unless Collection Management or Cataloguing would take the pictures before sending them to all the libraries. My only concern with posting library pictures are any including customers. How would a parent feel knowing that we have a picture of their child posted on the internet for all to see? Flickr would be good for publicity, but not for the resulting headache of jumping through all the privacy hoops.

Capture the Moment…and Then Share It!

I started off my Flickr experience with a groan. I have to create yet another account/profile? With Yahoo this time. At least Flickr makes it easy to upload images from Flickr onto your blog, though you have to set up that between Flickr and your blog account. After grumbling about it some more, I finally sat down to explore Flickr, and I was impressed with the photos I saw there. Then I grew overwhelmed. With all these great photos there, why do I need to add mine?

To avoid the topic of which pictures to upload to my account, I looked around at some of Flickr’s services and features. I stumbled onto Flickr’s Interestingness feature that has highlights of some of the remarkable photos from different dates to look at. And Flickr’s boast that it is easy to loose track of time while looking through these photos was definitely true. (This is how I found my interesting image to share.)

It was exciting (and humbling) to see what other people have used Flickr for in the third party applications of Flickr services. If you want pictures of a certain shade of color, you can pick one from the Color Picker; I was awed by some of the pictures I found matching the colors I selected. You can make motivational posters or customized movie posters by simply selecting a photo from your files, filling in the information blanks and then you get an instant poster! I was tickled by the busy message while your poster is made: “Digitizing your wisdom, great one...Please wait.”

I gave a cursory glance through some of the libraries using Flickr, and it reminded me of the photo archives in our W drive except online. This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great to have an online photo archive? This way, all the photo files won’t take up so much room on the W drive. We would also be able to share these photos with other libraries from all over the world!

And the Winner is…

I was surprised to learn that there were lots of awards for Web 2.0 features, and that there were so many different categories (I didn’t know what half of them did!). I ended up looking through the award winners, because the list of nominees was harder to wade through and had a lot of extra links to follow.

Here are a couple of the websites I explored. I looked at all the winning websites under the Books category (the natural place for a bookwyrm to look, right?). I wasn’t too impressed with www.lulu.com, since it was an online publishing company and wouldn’t be very helpful with reader advisory. I thought www.biblio.com was sort of like an Amazon, except limited to books and more for private use than library use.

I was most interested in www.librarything.com, because it is (supposedly) the largest book club in the world! Here you can find people with similar tastes and get recommendations on different books to read, and they aren’t necessarily only new books. You can also tag books and blog about books. Joining Library Thing only requires creating a user ID and password. The major drawback is that they charge for membership.L Sign up is free and you can have up to 200 books in your profile, but if you want to enter unlimited numbers of books it’s 10$ for a yearly membership or 25$ for a lifetime membership.

I looked at a couple of the online word processing websites. I was excited with this discovery, because they could be useful to the customers who need word processing but don’t have Microsoft Word. I was unimpressed with www.writeboard.com for several reasons. I didn’t find it very user friendly—Writeboard required html code to format the document. It is designed to allow for collaboration because all files require separate log-ins to access them and you can share the log-in with your collaborators. It is for people comfortable with the internet; less so for people who are only looking for a word processor to use.

I have signed up for a Google account, and I haven’t looked at all the features available to a user until I saw that Google had won first place in the Collaborative Writing and Word Processing category for http://docs.google.com. I guess it’s no surprise that Google has become the place to go for quick information searches and even for basic word processing and simple spreadsheets, too. The design was more similar to Word and easier to use. Google Docs also had a nice auto save feature that saves what you type every few minutes. Of course, you would have to create a Google account to access all these useful features.

There are many websites with incredible features and options, and we only need to discover what’s out there to take advantage of them.

Technorati, Take Two

I wasn’t impressed with Technorati when it was introduced earlier, and I’m not impressed now. Why do I need a Technorati account so that I can practice tagging? What is so exciting about finding countless blogs about a topic instead of the facts? I considered signing up for a Technorati account, but I wasn’t interested in registering my blog when I might discontinue my blogging after the finish of Leaning 2.0.

I found it ridiculous that Technorati’s most popular movies, celebrity or news is based on the most new subscriber daily instead of the total of subscribers. The bloggers with the most authority are those with the most subscribers. Does that mean I should trust the information found in the blogs? I don’t buy that.

I can’t see myself using Technorati for library work. Perhaps I could use it for personal uses, but not for work. What makes blogs authoritative sources of information? Until I get that answer, I can’t say that Technorati is a particularly useful reference source to the library.

Simply Del.icio.us! Food for the Mind

Wow, this was practically a double (or triple) lesson for me. I’ve rarely bookmarked before (not enough to grasp the usefulness of bookmarking), and now I’m learning to bookmark and jumping to social bookmarking and tagging at the same time! I am on a roll here.

Reading about the articles on social bookmarking left me completely lost. I’ve only bookmarked maybe once or twice before, so I fail to see why social bookmarking is such a big deal, how it could be useful or why people practically swear that it is a lifesaver. I felt more confused, because tagging sounds like it depends on social bookmarking, or it’s a big part of it, at the least.

I figured that the only way to understand social bookmarking was to create a Del.icio.us account for myself. I created one, but that didn’t help my understanding much. After I talked with a co-worker who used Del.icio.us before, and she bookmarked and tagged a website with me, it made more sense. I can see more potential use for social bookmarking now.

A fellow 2.0er raised this point: What if we offer computer classes and we have tons of useful websites to recommend? Instead of giving patrons a long list of complicated URLs, we could just give them the URL of our Del.icio.us account or create one for library use containing all the suggested sites that they can browse at their leisure. If we update it, when the students access the URL, they have the most current information!

If there’s a group doing research, then saving all the links to one Del.icio.us account makes it accessible to all the members and doesn’t take up room on the library’s shared folders. All in all, social bookmarking bears a striking resemblance to RSS readers, sharing a lot of similar features with each other. Uh oh, is the RSS reader, this tool of 2.0, is becoming obsolete already?

I Have a Space on the Internet to Call My Own

MySpace isn’t quite what I expected it to be. It wasn’t the sketchy website full of obscene images and rude opinions that some co-workers visited instead of doing their work. It took me a long time to see MySpace as a social place for many different people, some of them whom I actually knew. The main reason I eventually join was because I found out some family members and friends were on MySpace.

When I first created a MySpace account I found it extremely overwhelming. Fortunately, I had family members who read up on MySpace for Dummies and helped me set up my account. My sister even beat Tom (the MySpace Administrator who is everyone’s first friend) for the privilege of being my first friend!

In the beginning, it was exciting to search for stuff to personalize your page, add some music, fill in some background information, and search for friends. I was amazed by the fact that decorating on MySpace required searching for and copying URLs for graphics and background designs that I wanted.

I was concerned by copyright, but my friends insisted that these files were there to be used and that everyone on MySpace did the same thing. They informed me that if the owner of the designs or music removed them, then I would just look for another file. This borrowing of files to put on my page was mind boggling. Profile names could also be changed as constantly and as easily as the background, music, video clips, etc. Pure Web 2.0 in action, right?

It took me a long time to put up a profile picture or choose my URL, even though uploading the picture wasn’t too hard—just like adding an attachment to an e-mail. Keeping in touch with friends in MySpace could be pretty easy. You can add quick little comments to friends’ pages, sort of a quick message or hello that everyone else can see. For more private messages, you can send a private e-mail through MySpace to the e-mail address in a friend’s profile.

Now that I have MySpace under my belt, maybe I should move onto Facebook, where I have a different network of friends to connect with…