Thing 20: YouTube

Thing 20 is kind of a freebie for me, because I am well-acquainted with YouTube already. I don't see many downsides to YouTube. It's fun, and often informative, and provides a pretty good platform for people to get their quirky, interesting stuff out there. Until recently, I had mostly only been familiar with YouTube as a place to view funny videos friends sent me, but since my ten-year-old son started playing guitar I have learned that there is quite a bit more to it than that. He does actually take guitar lessons in person, but thanks to YouTube, he's been able to get video instructions on how to play many songs on his guitar. It's really a great resource.

Similarly, I could see a great potential for libaries to use YouTube to teach customers how to use some of our more complicated services like e-books. It is often very difficult for people to wade through a lot of printed instructions when dealing with a new technology, and I think that video instructions, with screen shots, etc. might prove very helpful.

Below I've embedded a video recently sent to me by a fellow librarian friend in upstate New York, but which features librarians from nearby Virginia. YouTube in particular, and the internet in general, can make the world seem very small indeed!

Thing 19: Zillow

Winning first place in the Web 2.0 Award's Real Estate category, Zillow http://www.zillow.com/  is a really useful tool that I could see sharing with customers looking to buy or sell a home.  First off, Zillow allows  you to enter an address and see the sales history for that property, ie:  if you are buying, you can find out what the current owner paid and when.  Zillow also gives buyers and sellers context by listing what have homes sold for in a given area, using a map-based format.  If you're buying, you can also enter detailed search criteria:  number of bathrooms and bedrooms, price range, zip code, type of dwelling, etc.  Zillow could potentially affect the real estate profession the way sites like expedia and travelocity have affected travel agents, rendering them nearly obsolete.  Thanks to Zillow, and sites like it, any potential buyer and seller can do a lot of research on his or her own to yield very useful information about how to approach a real estate purchase or sale.  And you can also pull up information that would be useful when just starting to think about buying a home, like where open houses are in a given neighborhood, etc.

On the downside, just as most of us find Mapquest to be lacking something in terms of suggested routes in areas that we know well, it is easy to find that Zillow has quite a few errors.  All I had to do was look up my own house to know that I shouldn't take what I see on Zillow as gospel.  In addition to not listing the number of bedrooms at all, it showed an incorrect number of bathrooms, and couldn't account for things like our installation of central air conditioning.  They do have a feature where you can send in information about your home, but I probably wouldn't do this unless we were putting it up for sale.  Zillow's value estimates are probably affected by missing and incorrect information like this though, which compromises its value to a degree.  Also, when I clicked on the "view listing website," (which normally takes you to the realtor's write up) for one home that caught my eye, it turned out that it was no longer for sale.  So, unless or until Zillow can resolve some of these problems, I suppose realtors will be remain in business for at least awhile!

Thing 18: Zoho writer

Okay, so Zoho Writer was a mixed bag.  It was easy enough to create my document and to make it look pretty good, but I could not get the "post to blog" feature to work.  In the end, under "share" I chose "publish" and "make public," and it assigned my document its own URL (linked below).  I can't quite figure out what I did wrong, but so be it.  I am happy enough with what I have learned so far. 

http://writer.zoho.com/public/caitlin.mccarthy/untitled

Thing 17: Sandbox Wiki

Woops!  The sandbox wiki seems to be one of the things on 23 Things that has disappeared.  I can't seem to find a way to create an account, and the links from Maryland Libraries Learning 2 are all dead, except for the PB Wiki Tips one.  Okay, well, in an effort to at least somewhat do this assignment, I will link here to my favorite Twilight-related blogs:
http://twicrackaddict.blogspot.com/
http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/
They are indeed most silly and fan-girlish, but what can I say?  Even 42-year-olds need brain candy sometimes!

Thing 16: Wikis

Having mostly only been exposed to Wikipedia as an example of a Wiki before this assignment, it was interesting to see how many wikis there are out there and all the different uses to which they're being put.  Even though I am as guilty of falling back on Wikipedia as anyone else for my personal research, I still bristle at the concept of wikis for trying to find information that needs to be accurate.  I got my MLS in 1997, when the internet was still relatively unformed and we studied print reference sources in class and took the issue of their accuracy and authoritativeness quite seriously.  It's hard to even begin to explain these concepts to today's wired teens. 

So, of the wikis that I looked at, I thought that Princeton Public Library's Books Lovers one http://booklovers.pbworks.com/Princeton%20Public%20Library was a good use for the wiki format and that it was well done.  Book reviews and other sorts of discussion-oriented topics seem like a good use for wikis.  For subject matter that needs to be authoratative though, I am still mistrustful that wikis are the way to go.  Perhaps there are limited-access, moderated, or peer-reviewed wikis out there too?  A wiki produced only by subject experts within a field would be a different story from what I've seen so far.  I thought that the Library Success wiki about wikis http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=What_is_a_Wiki presented a very helpful overview of the topic.