from Google Imagesflickrsoup.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_archive.html
Thank you Web 2.0 team for the excellent coordination of this long but fun-filled journey.

An increasingly expansive sea of visual and written flotsam and jetsam has been revealed. This sea does contain treasures but they are rare. Well constructed blog sites with good content and excellent presentation can be very interesting.

Many sites appear cumbersome and capricious especially as the most recent post always dominates and the rest retire to older uninteresting? posts. RSS feeds exciting at first became a burden in their excess. Loved fiddling around with images, saw good educational uses of wikis, pondered over copyright and disinformation. had a great time and saw many uses for libraries especially in the local history area.

Good design, purposeful and insightful content, maintenance of quality, all take time and effort. The quirkiness and whimsical nature of most sites have a 'here today- gone tomorrow' feel. Who owns the software? Will it always be free for all?

Social Networking and libraries

Most of the Libraries visited were American and invited social comment from teenagers. http://www.myspace.com/brooklyncollegelibrary The music on home pages was a nice added-dimension. Most invited comments but few comments were made.
Rss feeds for the latest books were a good idea.


There is a lot of social networking discussion from librarians. For example Libraries in Social Networking Software
By Meredith Farkas May 10, 2006

commented on Facebook's “Pulse”, where the top 10 movies, books, tv shows, etc…can be listed on your library page.
The new advertisement option in Facebook also offered funding possibilities.

Library would have to in my opinion offer excellent sites with meaningful and interesting content. ( so many are difficult to navigate and appear disorganised). This would involve staff time and how many users are there? (Who has this much time?)

Use of social networking for gathering Local History is exciting
Examples
http://www.aadl.org/taxonomy/term/302 Local history blog

Five towns local history http://ftlh.blogspot.com/

http://localnotes.wordpress.com/ the great weblog of Leichhardt Council’s Local History team who are based at Leichhardt Library in Sydney’s Inner-West.

Here I can see many possibilities. Comment from the community which establishes, verifies and presents new local history is worthwhile.