Thing 7_Web 2.0 Communication Tools

These are my forms of communication. My friends and even my boyfriend's parents use e-mail as their primary form of communcation. My parents make an occasional appearance on e-mail and they always reply when I send them e-mails.

Of course, my office uses e-mail and I have worked to make myself more productive. I maintain a zero inbox strategy! When I see people who don't or have given up on it, I wonder how they deal with the chaos in there. I also have turned off my notification flag for e-mail and have just reconfigured my send receive setting to every 10 minutes (instead of instantaneously).

My friends circle uses IM throughout their day. Most of us have our personal computers configured to open up our preferred chat device on start-up. I generally use Trillian, which is a chat client that allows for integration of MSN, AOL, Yahoo, ICQ & IRC. The paid version also includes Google Talk. I have been using Trillian for about 8 years.

SMS or cell phone texting is definitely not my favorite thing, but I do send and receive message. My most regular messages come from DJ friends who send out invitations to their shows on that forum, and even allow for us to respond if we'd like to be added to a guest list.

And, as a remote member of my department, I provide most of my training via WebEx, which is our company's chosen web conferencing software. I also train other members of my department on using WebEx... which I am realizing is a little ironic at this very moment.

So after some personal tech reverly - on to the important topic. How do I see this fitting into libraries? I am all for e-mail and chat reference services. I see those as ways that I would be far more likely to ask a reference question. Especially as a student who lives off campus, I do not tend to reside in the library and so when I have a question, it is usually when I am in my apartment.

I also believe that offering web conference training is a fantastic idea for all sorts of folks. As a college student, I would have appreciated being able to sign up for demos on using the latest database tools, special resources and topics. Recently, there was a post on iLibrarian titled 6 Free Web Conferencing Tools Librarians Will Love.

So overall, I would say that I am definitely a Web 2.0 communication advocate. However, Twitter is not my style. I find that most of the information my friends are generating there is cute and funny but not something I would want to have streaming into my life real-time.