Thing 46: Review

The task this week has to been to review Blogger, Flickr, Bloglines, Find RSS, Generator and Librarything. The general comment for all of them is that they have got bigger, more (and sometimes more user friendly) features and generally have spread their nets wider - Flickr has more photos (plus picnik editing), Generator has more image generators, Syndic8 more feeds accessible and so on. The benefit of going back over these pieces of kit is not so much what new functions they have had bolted on to them, although some of them are improvements that are worth knowing about, rather I saw it is a chance to re-evaluate the tools after a period of time.

Of all of them, the example of Librarything seems to offer tantalizing shortcuts and potential value for catalogued print material and maybe also as a selection tool. Its tagging/sharing aspect could be exploited to provide useful info to our organisation. Our staff might for example use it, in some system friendly form, to keep a personal catalogue of the texts/materials they use, which is then socially available either organisation wide or, depending on the area, only to others in their teams/units. Anonymous knowledge of the tags and materials used by experts (eg CoE members) in particular areas would be informative for people new to a line of work, wanting to research a specialised area, in hand overs etc. No doubt our current LMS could do much the same, however that info is not readily available to the wider organisation. The same overall process might also be adopted with intra-organisational tagging of blogs and feeds taken by different areas of the organisation, on the assumption that the most popular are also the most useful. (something that is not always the case). It is like a process of distilling or sieving the most used and most useful material from the rest.

Generally the 2.0 applications have all got bigger, better and smarter and the fact that they are still around may be indicative of their utility to business. On the other hand, a peek at my kids' Myspace and Facebook offerings tends to make one wonder about MS & FB ever being used as a serious tool.