#8 Facebook, MySpace aka Friend Networks

i've been using myspace for about 3 years now, i've found this to be a fun & useful way of enriching my online communications with friends and family - i often upload images to my photo albums, change my profile song to share music with friends, and leave goofy comments on friends' pages. i like myspace. it's omnipresence gets a little irritating sometimes, but i enjoy the simplicity of the interface.

facebook, from my persepctive, is sort of a much ado about not much. i have a facebook profile, but i don't use it much. the facebook interface is a little too busy for me, and unneccesarily complex. i don't want to spend 3 hours learning how to use a social networking site; myspace works just fine for me. all of this stuff about facebook supplanting myspace as the networking tool of choice...i don't know. i'm not really buying it, myself. facebook is a little too complicated for its own good, there are all these bells and whistles on facebook that are supposed to add content to the site, but i find myself look at these widgets, and asking myself "what's that supposed to do?" and then i shrug, log out, and go back to myspace.

#7 Flickr fun photosharing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32614037@N00/232832830/

i've been using flickr for a couple of years, and often use it to share images of life out here with my friends and family back in the midwest.

when maron and i first came out to washington, in august of 2006, it was for my interview with sno-isle. one of our side-trips during this excurison was down to aberdeen, so i could check out some the nirvana/cobain-related sites - above is a picture of kurt cobain's childhood home i took during that trip.

#9 YouTube, Hulu and Fancast — streaming video

wow. i am going to totally eat my anti-streaming-media words from the last blog entry.

i am very familiar with youtube, and have been using it for about as long as it's been around. i'd been collecting stuff like this for years on bootleg videos

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTtXVrANEhU

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZuByRM0GOw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0hcw81X2nI

& it's pretty amazing to be able to pull obscure stuff like this up with a few keystrokes.

hulu and fancast were both revelatory - i had NO IDEA that this kind of material was freely available online. even though the prospect of free, 24/7 access to every episode of the original "star trek" is something of a workplace nightmare...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Star-Trek/96413/watch-it/on-fancast

this kind of thing is incredibly useful for public libraries with long hold queues for popular shows. for example, season 3 of star trek: TOS currently has a hold queue of 16, with 4 holdable copies...whichever way you look at it, any interested patron just adding themself to the hold list for this item is going to have to wait at least several weeks. all of these episodes are on fancast - this kind of instant access to materials can really be a tremdendous help to patrons (with high-speed internet access) who don't want to wait in the hold queue.

#6 Pandora and Streaming Music

I'm not a big fan of streaming media, whoever the provider. I managed to set up a Mog account (after 30-45 minutes of trying) and, at the end of the experience, I'm kind of scratching my head and wondering exactly why this is considered to be an improvement over just playing a CD??? I can understand the appeal of the ipod/mp3 player (though I don't own one or plan to ever use one), and I can understand the appeal of having an old-school stereo (which I do have at home and use every day), but I don't really see the appeal to this kind of thing. This is, to me, a perfect example of how an online gizmo-thing isn't always an improvement over whatever it is its supposed to replace. Bottom line for me is it's still easier to just bring my CDs with me. Oh well.

#5 RSS and Feed Readers

I set up my Bloglines account after Collection Development training a few months back, and it's proven to be a real time-saver. I'm also a lot more methodical about reading my blogs, too - just because I don't have to spend all that time surfing around checking one site after another. This is a very useful tool.

instant messaging

I've actually been IMing for years - usually I use AIM, but it was cool learning about Meebo...I like the real-time games feature. I've been playing chess via email with some friends for a long time, the real-time chess is a nice feature!