These sites were fun to visit. It could be very convienent to have all your bookmarks on del.icio.us so you could access them from any computer, especially if you were moving around a lot. We might put one together one for our patrons so everyone could have access to our librarian-selected favorite sites. Maybe we could put a link to it from the library web page.
I spent quite a bit of time playing around with technorati and was a little disappointed in it. I was trying to find blogs relating to flute playing and got many, many irrelevant hits. I know James Galway has a blog and I never found it using technorati. Perhaps there’s more that I need to know. If it worked successfully, we could use it to help our patrons find blogs about things that interested them or that would help them with research, etc.
My favorite of the these three sites was LibraryThing. It was quite fascinating to see how many people liked the same books I did and how well the recommendations matched up with what I like to read. This would be fun to share with some of my distant friends so we could see what each other was reading. I think the library could use it, too, but I think we’re going to get something similar when we finally get community reviews up with Millennium.
A problem that often plagues popular websites is the tendency to rely on good reputation and name recognition instead and letting services and usability slip while lesser-known competitors continue to innovate and improve. Perhaps this might be happening to Technorati. It never lasts for long…loss of market share or revenue can often wake the sleeping giant.
-Garrett
Comment by svl2 — October 31, 2007 @ 11:14 pm