Curiosity and Project Play Year-in-Review

I am both curious and passive. That means that sometimes I have to be dragged, kicking and screaming into trying new things. I was afraid at the beginning of PP when the first assignment was to create a blog of our own that we would use to comment and try out web 2.0 technologies. When I discovered how easy it was to use many of these tools, I lost the fear.

As stated in the 11-12 week assignment post, not everything will be useful to all libraries and all people or situations. Evaluation of each need will determine what steps are taken to solve a question posed by a patron, fellow staff person, or new need in the library environment. The six steps are a great reminder of this. Mashups definitely are examples of curiosity and creativity to fill needs people have encountered, trying to make life easier. Blogs, bloglines, survey monkey, Gabcast, Flickr (for events pictures), Librarything, del.icio.us and tags are definitely things that I can use in my library in what I do on a regular basis. I recommend Librarything to patrons, as I have used it for several years. I would like to see myself using web 2.0 technology to have a social community book review/what-I-am-reading-now site.

My curiosity will keep me interested in keeping up with new technology, and my passiveness will probably keep me from trying any new technologies until I find a need that the new technologies can fill in my personal life. Thank goodness for newsfeeds (rss). My library life... I do not know. I am certainly more outgoing with people when living in my library environment.

Mashups

I added Verona Public Library to the Mapbuilder sandbox. That was pretty cool. Easy to do too.

I liked the idea of mapdango's where you can type in a city and see the weather, see a list of events in the area, music playing, flickr images, and wikipedia info about the different sites to see... all color and number coded on a google map. I did not see any source information except that the site says that it is not affiliated with flickr, Wikipedia, Weatherbug, Eventful, Gruvr, or any other third party. It was a Mashups award winner. I can see its usefulness in a reference interview regarding events or music. All you have to do is type in a city and state to find the info that you are looking for.

Soon I will be putting up my condo up for sale again. To see my competiton, I tried to look up real estate mashups. I also thought it would be cool to look at crime in my area. I tried many real estate search mashups for my zip code and found that they were not very helpful. It is easier to go to realtor.com to find the information I wanted. I tried the mashups to see if I could find one with info on crime rate by neighborhood and see if one was connected to real-estate and did not find one that was useful. I looked for a mashup that stated that there was information on crime included; so far I found one that claimed to. Fizber.com had census data, and other info by city, but nothing was broken down by neighborhood, only city. Other sites did not include the crime info, but were simply property search sites that had less information than a realtor's website.

I learned that for some searches mashups will be useful, and other times a straight website will work better.