Week 5: Thing 11

I feel like I'm tottering toward the future because when I explored the Web 2.0 winners at least some of them now sound familiar. I chose Google docs to try and I think it's a great idea. Its an application that lets you share any document online with people you select to share with. I think this would really come in handy for working on projects, grants or professional development with other people. Is this going to be the way of the future - everything stored on the web instead of on our desktops? It seems like these new web applications are trying hard to help keep us connected as we work in isolation at our own computers.

I also joined Ning and discovered that the librarian group I'd joined had been started by Joyce Valenza, the fabulous Joyce Valenza. When does that woman sleep? I did join an elementary librarian group to see what issues were being discussed there and it was only slightly interesting. I think as with any social network, you have to find people that you find interesting and whose opinion you respect before you can get more involved. The biggest challenge seems to be wading through all of the extraneous postings to find something that is of interest to you, and there is so, so much to wade through before you get what you want. Persistence is important on the web, so that once you find something good, you can then use your newsreader accounts and RSS feeds to deliver them to you. That's when you can get down to the nuggets of valuable information and sharing that could be meaningful to you.

I'm also wondering what the recommended procedure is regarding userids and passwords with all of these new sites that I'm signing up for. I think you're not supposed to use the same id/pwd for everything, but it does get very complicated trying to remember which combination of items you used for each new application. Maybe this topic will be the point of some further research.