Assignment One

Part One

The first part of the assignment was not hard because I've created email accounts many times before. I created a gmail account. My gmail account is bookgirl66@gmail.com.

Next I used google blogger to create my very first blog! This was a daunting prospect for me because I have little technological experience. I didn't realize the software would be so user friendly. I really enjoyed creating this blog and believe that I will continue blogging after this class is over. I found some gadgets to add to the blog and linked to one of my friends blogs. The url for my blog is http://kimberlyboyd.blogspot.com/ . The rss feed for my blog is http://kimberlyboyd.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Part Two

Creating a stand alone RSS feed still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I did not find this application to be as easy to use as googleblogger. I didn't see a lot in the way of directions and I think I may be missing the point. http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/23496/.

Part Three

Next I started using Google Reader. I did this by clicking on reader on my gmail page. This is my favorite application I've used in this class so far! I like the idea of consolidating a bunch of sites that I look at everyday onto one page. I subscribed to a few of my classmates blogs, to some feeds listed in course content, some of my friends blogs, and to my public library's feed. I also subscribed to the MLIS feed and Odum Libary and to some news feeds which is the way that I get all of my news these days. All of this made a somewhat messy page so I organized by creating some folders. I will definitely continue using this after this class is over. Unfortunately, I'm not able to post a link because you would need my password.

Part Four

The fourth part of this assignment was the most confusing and most difficult for me. I've not worked in a library before, I'm only in my second semester of library school, and I'm not at all technologically savvy. Further, I couldn't decide whether I was supposed to be creating a real wiki or imagining a wiki that I thought would be useful for a library. I'm glad I finally got an answer to this question. Since I haven't worked in a library before, I decided to focus on creating a wiki for my public library that is fun, useful, and dynamic for patrons rather than for employees. Decatur Public Library is the main branch for Dekalb County Libraries. It has a home page (http://www.dekalblibrary.org/branches/decatur.html) and a blog (http://dcplive.dekalblibrary.org/). The web page and the blog are nice and informative but are not overly interactive. The purpose of the wiki I imagine is to allow a space for library patrons to discuss books, both recent and older releases with one another. It is also a forum for patrons to interact with Librarians, making collection requests, etc. It is a place where librarians can post activities occuring in the library and provide rss feeds to recent arrivals. As I've said, I am not terribly technologically literate so I used wiki choice wizard to narrow down my choices in wikis. A page history would definitely be needed in case a page needed to be restored after being spammed. WYSIWYG is important so that patrons without extensive knowledge of technology will be able to write on pages easily. I also looked for a wiki with ACL (http://www.wikimatrix.org/wiki/feature:ACL). I looked for a wiki with host blocking so that Libarian's could block repeated spammers. I believe in radical trust but I also believe that sometimes people just feel freer to misbehave online than in the real world. The wiki should also have rss feeds, capability to attach images, and have a calender for posting library events. After using the wiki choice wizard, I narrowed my search to 64 wikis. This is the url for that search http://www.wikimatrix.org/wizard.php?d%5Bflag%5D=0&d%5Blanguage%5D=&d%5Bsupport%5D=&d%5Bwysiwyg%5D=yes&d%5Bhistory%5D=yes&d%5Bgo%5D=1&x=35&y=9. After comparing some of these wikis I settled on Dekiwiki because it was tagged as a wiki that anyone could use. This the url for the description of the wiki I choose http://www.wikimatrix.org/show/DekiWiki. Additional reasons that I choose this wiki are its free software, ability to edit sections, it's plugins for blogs, and it's unlimited revisions capabilities.

Part Five

For the last part of the assignment I used Google Docs to make this blog post and then used the share button to post it to my blog.