Personally............

Wiki for the family!

Last year for our Webpage Design subject at TAFE, I designed a website which served the purpose of communicating with my family about the family christmas for 2011. It was attractive, informative and well received by everyone - they all thought I was sooooo clever! However, it was not at all interactive (other than the phone calls and emails we received exclaiming about how nice it was etc.) The website also cost $$ to get up on the web.

Now that I know about Wikis, I can see that a Wiki would be a better way of getting the information out there and enabling family members to comment and add things. For example, the most important menu for Christmas lunch/dinner could be added to and who is bringing what sorted out so easily.

Last year, despite the brilliant information on the Christmas website, we were still getting phone calls asking us questions about things that were clearly outlined already. A Wiki would enable people to give feedback, ask questions and interact with the whole family group, saving a lot of time.

Quick, it's a Wiki!!

Explaining a Wiki.......................................................

"Named after the Hawaiian term for “quick,” wikis are interactive Web sites to which users can contribute. In a wiki, any user with a Web browser can add entirely new pages or add new content to existing pages, as well as change or delete existing information. Users can also edit the organization of the wiki, in addition to the content, and need not know HTML or have Web design skills since Web-based forms provide the simple editing interface. The software that runs a wiki is called a wiki engine and there are many free open source wiki engines available to run wikis.

Although some wikis are intended for the public, like Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) or Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki (http://www.libsuccess.org), this technology is now being adopted by organizations as a collaborative tool for managing knowledge among their employees. A wiki can be used in multiple ways as a conversational knowledge management system to support the goals of many organizations, including libraries. This paper explores how wikis can be used in library reference services to manage knowledge and why they are well-suited to this environment. "

Wikis could be used by libraries in many different ways - as a space for collaborative work among staff, &/or for input from all members of the library community. If you want your library to become the hub of all community information, then Wikis are for you.

Wiki......another way of sharing information!

In the clouds with Tag Clouds

"A tag cloud is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata (tags) on websites, or to visualise free form text. Tags are usually single words and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or colour. This format is useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms and for locating a term alphabetically to determine its relative prominence. When used as website navigation aids, the terms are hyperlinked to items associated with the tag"

Wow, I'm so glad that I now know the official name for these interesting looking 'clouds' aka web tools. There is one on Kiama Library's website.
http://www.library.kiama.nsw.gov.au/

Tag Clouds would be a useful, novel way of drawing attention to a certain area on the website and then highlighting important topics. Kiama Library use theirs to 'keyword' different parts of their collection and services - patrons can click on the word and go to that part of the website to find further information.

Delicious Delicious!

Delicious, as quoted directly from their web page,  "helps you find cool stuff and collect it for easy sharing. Dig into stacks created by the community, and then build your own!".
Mind boggling amounts of stuff written and posted on stuff!
Delicious would, I imagine, be a chronic web browsers dream. Just imagine how many hours you could spend trolling through all the interesting snippets on there. Education, Art & Design, Entertainment, Fashion, Food and so much more!
To sum it up in their own words, "Delicious is the place to collect and showcase your passions from across the web. Save what you like - videos, pictures, tweets, blog posts, or articles - on topics you enjoy, and compile them into one themed stack for easy sharing".

To think this is how it used to be done!! Librarything would be mind boggling for the libraries and librarians of old!!

Another thing........Library Thing!

Librarything is every book lovers dream website. An ideal spot to store all the information you like about your books, what you have in your personal library and to find out what other book lovers have and are enjoying reading. It is a giant, online book club! Never again should members of librarything be stuck for ideas about books to read next or the opportunity to share their ideas and thoughts with others. Facebook for book nuts.
It is also a useful way of cataloguing and keeping excellent records of your own library - for those of us with overloaded brains, it is a way of actually being able to remember what you have read! In other words, a great way to list and organise your books.
For librarians and libraries librarything is a very useful tool for promoting, discussing and recommending particular parts of the library collection and enabling patrons to give feedback and ask for suggestions of what to read next. As libraries already have extensive cataloguing systems, it would not be necessary to use librarything for this purpose, but definately provides opportunites to socially engage with your local library and other book lovers in your area.