Fly the web

I'm blogging from the CILIP Universities College and Research Libraries seminar Fly the web: power to the user, which is focusing on Web 2.0 applications. Everyone else is creating a blog in blogger in a hands-on session, but I thought I would sneak into this instead and mention some useful insights so far. Brian Kelly (UKOLN) gave the introduction, and he has posted his material at http://ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/cilip-ucrg-2006-12/ It includes his PowerPoint and some del.icio.us bookmarks. He gives an introduction to the concept and some of the tools and application areas. I won't try and answer the question "what is Web 2.0?" in this entry, as he's done that already!

Things I noted down include: that Web 2.0 is essentially a marketing (rather than technical) term; the importance of http://www.technorati.com/ as a search tool for blogs; how Northumbria University is using Google maps in a neat way to customise maos for particular occasions or events. Also he highlighted the use of the tag "embarrassing" in http://www.librarything.com/ (the place where you can create a catalogue for your books online - mentioned in one of my postings a while back) where people use the tag to flag up books they are embarrased about owning!

The session I'm in at the moment is being run by Dave Pattern (pictured above), Library Systems Manager at the University of Huddersfield. He gave a nice introduction and again has posted his presentation at http://library.hud.ac.uk/cilip/ together with a very useful set of links. He's actually started talking again, so I'd better stop blogging!