Infopeople's 23 Things Experience

I have really enjoyed the experience of the 23 Things challenge. I want to thank those who put it together, and look forward to the next 23 Things! It is important to keep some kind of dialog going on this subject, as well as gauge the progress that is being made in public libraries as they apply some of the Web 2.0 applications to Library 2.0 operations - wouldn't be a bad idea for a wiki.

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0

I have enjoyed my recent exposure to Web 2.0 websites as part of Infopeople's 23 Things challenge. I had not been keeping up with many of these new applications, and was pleased to have the time to explore some of them. I have been pleased with the fact that I am now more knowledgeable about many of the terms when I read about both Web 2.0 applications in the news and popular literature as well as Library 2.0 in the library literature. I must admit that while I usually like commentary from Walt Crawford, I found the "Library 2.0" blog in Cities and Insights too long and cumbersome and slowly lost interest about half way through it (even though I read the whole d. . . thing). I guess part of the difficulty he had in finding the essence of the term "Library 2.0" is part of the lesson in itself.

As with anything, there are some things I like about Web 2.0 and some things I don't. I am encouraged and discouraged by the burgeoning number of blogs and the explosion in personal expression that they represent. However, I'm also concerned that there is no "publishing house" control over the "literature." In other words, how do you separate out the truely expert commentary from the dribble? There isn't time to read it all, even when narrowing it down to specific subject areas using a Technorati tags search. I need a service that sorts through all of the background "noise" of all these blogs and finds the ones that are particularly expert and thoughtful. I need tools that don't make me read more (I already can't read everything I want to, and I read a lot), but allow me to read the best that is out there without spending a lot of time searching for it and reading inferior quality blogs along the way. It doesn't really matter if certain blogs have more hits than others to me - just being read a lot doesn't mean you know what you are talking about or are particularly good at saying it. There still needs to be some qualitative review of all of these blogs to separate out the good from the not so good. There may be a niche here for some enterprising librarian to start a blog evaluation service. Probably a daunting enterprise given how many blogs there are out there now, but one that is obviously needed. Maybe someone has already started it, and I just haven't found it. If anyone has, let me know.