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.

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!

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?