Thing 19: instantbull.com

www.instantbull.com is actually quite good! If you look up a stock by its symbol, you can browse through a collection of different message boards about it. Under “INFO” there are links to an excellent assortment of financial websites’ information regarding that particular stock.

Plus, there’s a ling with 32 different RSS feeds about business, as well as a page with a tag cloud of business topics.

Thing 18: Technorati

I would probably use Technorati more if I didn't already feel guilty about not reading enough of the blogs of my MySpace friends.... It seems that the search feature has changed. I believe I saw a search where it had the blog posts, the tags, and the blog directory earlier, but just now I couldn't find that. The only choices I saw were to narrow the search based on authority or language. They don't seem give you an option for keyword, etc., either.

It's interesting, considering how many blogs there are and how many users there are, that even the most popular blogs have only been favorited by a relative handful of people.

I checked out a few of the hotter blogs. Apparently Amy Winehouse has impetigo. Also, women actually are worse (though less dangerous) drivers than men.

The popular books section was of some interest, although there, too, it doesn't seem to take much for a book to show up there.

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Technorati Profile

Thing 17: Folksonomy & Del.icio.us

You can't really get a handle on Del.icio.us until you set up your own account. It definitely makes for nice portable bookmarks. As to the research application, it has some of the problems of wikis, but at least you can get a sense of what is popular, which one could assume would tend to be the most useful, although not always for what you, in particular, want.

Thing 16: Create MySpace Profile

This is my tribute page to Walt Whitman:

http://www.myspace.com/whitmantribute

While it takes a little getting used to, I have always found the tools on MySpace to be user friendly, with a few glitches here and there.

I'm sure--aside from the free music and videos, etc.--the real reason for the popularity of MySpace is the ability to connect very easily with people you can relate to or who share your interests.

Thing 15: 411 on social networking

I don't see any reason why the library shouldn't use MySpace (not Facebook!) to communicate with teens, but I wouldn't be too optimistic about it amounting to much. Most teens have so many MySpace friends that even bulletins would most likely be overlooked, as they quickly get replaced by other bulletins. Any teen who was into the library enough to want to actually visit our profile on any sort of a regular basis would probably be fairly well informed anyway.

But it would be worth trying, interesting to see how it would go.

Thing 14: Reader's Advisory wiki

I've never been a big fan of the text editors on wikis and this is no exception.

The most useful application for wikis in libraries would probably be recommendations and comments on books read in storytimes.

Thing 13: Wikis

Most of the wikis listed in the discovery exercises were either of too local interest or had the sort of information that is readily available elsewhere. However, the Library Success wiki had an enormous amount of useful information, in great detail.