RSS and Bloglines

I have to say I'm not really interested in RSS feeds. I never really understood the need for them, and felt it easier to go to various websites to get their content directly. My feeling is that I get more from going to the source so I can view the context the original content was in than by pulling the raw text from all these sources to see it in one place. I mean, who knows, perhaps there will be an article or some other content situated nearby that I might be interested that isn't in the feed itself.
Anyway! I made the bloglines account in an attempt to give them another chance, but I dont' really like it either. I listed a variety of feeds, but only half of them seem to be currently active. I ended up getting a few feeds from the New York Times as well as from the Palm Beach Post. In theory, this would be a good way to keep up with the news. Alas, whenever I click on my feed, in the right hand pane all the stories come up at once and are then considered read by Bloglines. I don't like that, and if I want to keep them, I have to click on each one individually to keep them new. Too much work!
So, I still don't like RSS. But, that's ok.

Blog post with Flickr

In the stacks
Originally uploaded by larsonj23things

So I've never done this Flickr thing before. I'm really not all that interested in taking pictures, to be quite honest. This seems like a nice picture. I'm taking mine with my phone, and Flickr has a neat feature whereby I can send to photos directly to my Flickr account by simply emailing it to this specific email address. Pretty neat!
I've wandered around the library and I've taken a few random photos. I did that because I read that Flickr requires one to have at least five public photos.

I'm not really sure how much this impacts libraries beyond publicity, but then again I'm not sure how much beyond publicity blogs themselves could do. It all ties back to that, it seems.

Anti Prom

Last night we had a program for the teenagers. It was supposed to be an Anti-Prom, although if someone had asked me to organize it I wouldn't have really known what to do. What is anti-prom food? I would have said the antithesis of prom would have been to just stay home. I'm too literal for things like that.
As it turns out, I didn't have to organize it, so it turned out well. We played guitar hero, DDR, watched "10 Things I Hate About You," and had pictures taken in front of randomly painted backdrops, which included a happy cow, a graveyard, and aliens. Seems anti-establishment enough. We didn't have as many kids as we would have hoped for, but those that did attend seemed to have a great time. I practiced my guitar hero skills, and everyone had a good time.

Staff Reaction

Here at GB we're having a grand old time with these 23 things. As a member of the millenial generation, (I think,) most of these tasks are second nature to me. As such, it's amazing seeing the rest of the staff tackle these tasks. I've been asked for help numerous times, and it's a joy to see the reaction from the staff at what could best be described as the "new toy" look.
My supervisor, in particular, has taken like a fish to water with her blog. She's trying to chronicle incidents of vandalism in our public men's room, which particularly bothers her.

Blogging in libraries.

I've come across many examples of blogging by libraries, and I'm hoping that through these exercises we'll have some provided on behalf of the library system. My old library system has a publicity blog, as well as a blog kept by the library director. I believe that these two types of library blogs are the most common, as I haven't seen many others, except for a lone librarian posting rants, but those are of a more personal nature.

7.5 Habits

I feel that they are fairly self-explanatory. I don't anticipate any problems, but it will be interesting to mentor and guide some of the other staff members.