Web 2.0 etc.

Hooooo boy! First of all, I don't know half of what these people are saying, and, second of all, the parts I do get: zzzzzzzz. But, that being said, I loved this quote from Paul Graham.

"The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation."

Now, I'm not the world's biggest fan of wikipedia and I don't recommend it for homework assignments, but I will reveal an embarrassing secret. (shhhh...come closer...I use it all the time...if I don't know what the heck somebody's talking about...which happens a lot...this is the best place for me to go so that I don't feel like such an idiot...)

As for Library 2.0, though, I love it! My coworker April was just telling me about a commercial she saw where two guys are talking about how quiet their cars are and one tells the other his is "library quiet." Ha! Much as the library is changing in a physical way, we are evolving in so many other ways. But we have a lot of work to do. These tasks, the 23 things, are a great start.

“Ask yourself if your library is ready for this type of shift [in technology], because, overwhelmingly, the answer is no,” writes Jenny Levine of the Shifted Librarian blog and the American Library Association. “Librarians just aren't thinking like this yet, and we need to change this. It's at the very core of the whole 'Library 2.0' discussion, and this is why it's so critical. If we keep our content locked up on our own web sites and don't get it out there for people to use as they want to use it, then our content will fall by the wayside.”
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html