When you try to explain Delicious to (non-information professional) colleagues, do you feel like Laurel and Hardy doing Who's on First?

I know that I, for one, often make people glaze over with both my explanation of how it works and my overzealousness at my perception of social bookmarking's unparalleled awesomeness. I'm a Believer, with a capital B. I've been often using Wikipedia to explain social bookmarking for the "non-believer."

"Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata."

Wow, Wikipedia sounds like it was written by a fellow Believer! :D

CommonCraft (a blog I would highly recommend) created a short video to explain Social Bookmarking in Plain English. This is a great introduction for staff, patrons, managers, and your parents when they ask, "do you shelve books all day?"

Labels: delicious, social bookmarking, web 2.0

Because. Humans. Explore.

CERN Large Hadron Collider @ YouTube



This is such a great example of promoting science by capturing the imagination. It doesn't have to be about economic development or spinoffs. Does poetry have spinoffs? No, we appreciate it for appreciation's sake. Because poetry is proof of something higher in our collective psyches, of something beyond the daily grind of life, it says "look what we can do!" Why is science any different? We put a man on the moon (yes we did! don't argue with me!) and yes we achieved many spinoffs that have significantly improved life on Earth but is that why we did it? I hope not.

Labels: cern, high energy physics, science outreach

Slowly but surely we are beginning to use LibGuides. I have played with some of the fantastic advanced feature (you can do almost anything with the rich text editor) but my Library's first official foray will come later this month with the publication of our first eNewsletter.

Surf the Web Smarter(tm) was originally a hands-on class I taught and sometimes adapted for presentation. (This is my Googlpages outline of the presentation). The name was catchy and the class was a huge success. I know that a "library newsletter" would be seen as another link to overlook - self-serving marketing - to the jaded researcher (I say that with love). So, steal the name of a succesful class, throw in some juicy web surfing tid-bits and THEN start in on the shameless self advertising.

Surf the Web Smarter: 10 Tips for Surfing Google Smarter includes the earliest intro to Google as well as our reported top journals, new books (from LibraryThing) and other goodies.

I realize that posting this here blows my anonymity. It goes without saying, well no it doesn't since I'm going to say it - the views expressed in this blog are solely mine and in now way show endorsement or reflection on the institution for which I work. :)

Labels: LibGuides, marketing, web 2.0