Thing 20

I think many people's first reaction to gaming in libraries is negative. It certainly has never been a "traditional" library service. But I think it's another way to move into the future and bring more young people into the library. They may come for the gaming and discover other facets to the library. It is also a way to be more "relevant" to the younger generation. I don't think anything that brings people (especially younger people) into the library is a bad thing. I'm sure it would seem odd at first to have gaming in the library, but it probably seemed odd when public computers were first avialable too.

Thing 19

I love the new lint. It's much cleaner and easier to navigate. I can customize it how I want it so that the stuff I want is right there in front of me! Yea!!! Good job, LINT team!!! I struggle to find things on our current LINT pages if I don't use them a lot, so I think this will save me a lot of time. It also appears we will have many more options of stuff we can do on LINT, which I think will be very useful. The first thing I did was change my password.

I didn't really have any reaction to the content management articles. I get what they're saying, but most of it won't really affect me directly, as I won't be responsible working with that end of things.

Thing 18

All the survey stuff kind seemed the same to me. Probably because I have never used any before so I didn't really know what I was doing. Survey Monkey- it's just a fun name. That made me want to use it. I found it very easy to get signed up and get going. What I discovered is hard is creating the different types of questions correctly. I messed up several times and had to restructure my questions. Granted my survey was somewhat nonsensical, but I made it worse by creating poorly structured questions. I liked that there were several choices of how I wanted my survey to look, and although I struggled with the design of my questions I don't think they could have made it any simpler to create. I was able to look at examples of the types of questions I was creating, which was very helpful. If I had created a survey on an actual topic that I had some idea of what I really needed to know and the type of information I wanted from people that might have helped. I will say Survey Monkey gave back great, easy to understand results.

I think that open ended questions are a double-edged sword. You may not want to use them because you may want to give people just specific options to choose from to determine a particular issue. People may not be as willing to answer them because they take more time than just picking from provided choices. I frequently leave comment boxes blank when I take surveys. On the other hand, you can probably get lots of additional information or ideas from open-ended questions than from other types. But this would also make analyzing your results more cumbersome. I really thing it depends on what you are trying to get out of your survey.

Thing 17

I joined Gather just to see what it was like. I liked it because it had something for everyone. I started perusing the pet groups and I joined one. I had friend requests almost instantly! This site seems more "grown up" than Facebook. There's not this constant stream of who's doing what all the time, which I find annoying on Facebook. But at the same time, do I really need to belong to another one of these social networking sites? I doubt it. Maybe if I was really involved with some hobby or something, or maybe if I had more time and didn't spend so much time with actual living pets and actual living people I would be more involved in these sites. But to tell the truth, it's just not all that appealing to me. As I've stated many times on this blog, if I were younger I would probably be more into this! And also, I just don't feel the need to connect with a bunch of strangers from around the world. So these sites are nice for people who don't work or maybe are shut ins or maybe just don't have realtionships with very many live people. But it's not really for me!

Thing 16

I set up a Facebook awhile back, mostly as a joke for my daughter. Then some of her friends wanted to be my friend, and then some real adult people joined Facebook and became my friends. So I've just kept my account going. I never changed my profile, which is all goofy because I initially did it as a joke. But I've grown to like my profile so I refuse to change it. I'm not a huge fan of sights like this, and I pretty much only hop on my Facebook when I get an e-mail notification that someone posted on my wall or gave me a gift or something like that. But I know that younger people live on these sights and if I were quite a bit younger I'm sure it would be more appealing to me because it is an easy way to keep in touch with your friends and see what they're doing. It's kind of crazy because my daughter will request to be friends with some famous person and they just accept anyone as their friend. I'm assuming some peon deals with that for them, but she thinks it's really cool. Most of the kids also have a My Space page too, but right now Facebook seems to be the more popular site. I also set up a Dogbook page for Ruby and she has some dog friends! That's why she's smiling in this pic!

I intially didn't join any groups because, as I said, I just set my account up goofing around. But now I have joined my high school class group because they are having a reunion and they keep bugging everyone to join their group. I think if MCPL had a Facebook it would be popular with younger teenagers, but who knows there could be a wider appeal. Since I've joined I've found out that more and more adults are on Facebook.