Social Software for me

I am officially hooked on a lot of these applications now!

So...here's my quick summary of my thoughts on each of the applications that we looked at:

Blogs & blogging
Love them! I will likely keep blogging (I did blog before this course though), but - depending on what I end up doing - I may revert to the more personal, "for family and friends" blogging that I had done in the past. I was surprised at how much I didn't know about blogs and blogging. I will definitely use blogs as an information source more now - certainly they seem to be the place to go for information on Social Software!

RSS
Yep - will continue to use this...probably mostly to keep up to date on my friends' blogs. I would use it for current awareness on any specific subject that I needed to be up-to-date on and I would also use it to support researchers within a library setting and alert them via email of new publications.

Wikis
I was very pleased with my experience using wikis for our group presentation, and would take advantage of a wiki again for any collaborative project that I might be involved in or be facilitating. (PS I still love Wikipedia.)

Social bookmarking, tagging, etc.
This is the one that surprised me the most. I knew almost nothing about it at the beginning of the course and have become an avid tagger. I have a lot of sites that I use pretty often and find this as an ideal way to access them easily and to organize them. I also have started using them to share articles & sites with friends. For me, this was the greatest "oh wow - this is exactly what I need!" part in this course.

Online social networks
I was on Facebook before this course so will continue to use it - especially to stay in touch with fellow students after graduation! I am certainly more savvy about some of the potential problems and some of the possible uses of OSN now. I would be interested in setting up my own little OSN on something like Ning.com (thanks for that, Marco!). Would I use it in a library? I think so. At minimum, I would create a library profile.

Gaming & Virtual Worlds
Aye...there's the rub. Ok, I am convinced that they have value, and feel like I have learned a lot about them in theory. In fact, I have had a bit of a change of heart about gaming. I simply need to spend some time wandering in Second Life, and actually try an interactive game - sounds like a good way to spend a rainy day! Will I use them? yep! I am pretty confident (given my love of games in the non-online state) that I will become pretty hooked!
Use in libraries? I am not 100% convinced yet, but am open to it - I don't know if virtual worlds should be used in libraries, but I definitely think libraries and librarians should be in the virtual worlds!

Overall
This course has piqued my interest and I will continue to explore these applications - I do think they are here to stay and can contribute greatly to the provision of library service.