2.0 Social Networking

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are very popular for many reasons, especially for friends and families who are far apart. They allow people from all over the world to keep in contact with each other at little or no cost. The ability to keep in contact with many people at the same time is a benefit and organization of events is easy to coordinate. Looking through friend pages is often a way of reminding one of people they may have forgotten and who they may wish to get in contact with again.

The appeal is in being able to send quick notes to friends just to keep in touch or to provide information. The ability to control how much information is public, set up through the privacy control settings, is also of great appeal in order to send messages only to intended recipients. This allows the participant to use one site through which they can be contacted should they so choose.

Probably one of the most appealing aspects to these networking sites is that people can be found by name and not by an email account address.

2.0 Wikepedia

It was quite easy to go through various websites and find articles on all subjects in Wikepedia. The subjects I checked through appeared to be factual and I did not find any spelling or grammatical errors. I was surprised to not find spelling of grammatical errors as most of our everyday emails, advertising and notices usually have some errors which were missed in proofreading.

I enjoyed this exercise as it sent me back to check up on some favourite subjects, and it tested me on my own knowledge.

The site I chose was one in which I was able to expand the knowledge for the Wikepedia entry.

2.0 DELICIOUS

I enjoyed working through the Delicious site and can see how it can be a very useful tool for research for CPL staff and patrons. It does take some time to get to sites as I am not very familiar as yet and may tend to head to Google just because of my past use.

The main problem as with most websites is consisteny indexing. Reference staff constantly using the site will probably not find this to be too much of a problem as they may have many repeat requests for research topics.

Overall I see it as a good new reaearch tool.

Last weekend's Worlds

Congratulations to our great Canadian skaters. They all came ready to compete at this competition and have set themselves up well for this summer's training and next season's competitions. Get some well deserved rest.

I was particularly pleased with the international skaters to see Daisuke Takahashi put together two great programs and show us the really amazing skater he is.