Week 8 thoughts

I tried several of the social opacs. Overall, I found them easy to use. I especially like the user comments, which I use a lot already at sites like amazon.com and epinions.com.

Now I know how the Harry Potter series ends, without having to read the books :)

Week 7 thoughts

So I can see how this would be useful for research. It's an easy way to find stuff on the web that other people have found useful enough to bookmark. You can also easily see how popular something is by how many others have bookmarked it.

One thing that threw me a little bit. If you click on a tag with a number of entries like "mashup," for example, you'll see

<> page 1 of 3

at the top and bottom of the page. I'm used to seeing

previous next

or something like that on web pages I frequent. It's a minor point, but I had to think about it for a second. I understand why they word it that way though.

Week 6 thoughts

I used Google docs to create my document. It reminds me of MS Word very much, and I found it easy to figure out the basics. My biggest problem with these online tools is privacy/security. Will some hacker gain access to all my files someday? Will the government? I'd be leery of providing personal or sensitive information to these tools.

Week 5 thoughts part 2

Editing the wiki page was fairly straightforward. Technology usually becomes easier to use over time. Remember DOS on the early PC's? Things have come a long way since then. If wiki's and all the other parts of Web 2.0 are going to have mass-market appeal then ease-of-use must be a high priority.

Week 5 thoughts

The wiki's I looked at were interesting. This wiki, http://instructionwiki.org/Library_2.0_in_15_minutes_a_day which is the first one I looked at, could use some graphics and images. I suppose that's because I'm used to using Wikipedia.

Is a wiki a wiki because it uses special wiki software? To me UpToDate is very much like a wiki. It's a collaborative effort by a number of medical experts. It looks and feels like a wiki to me. Does that make it a wiki, even though I'm sure it uses it's own proprietary non-wiki software? The same can be said for many online reference books.

As time goes by there will be more of this blurring between what's a wiki, what's a book, and whatever else.