Keeping Up

I plan to keep up with the "web 2.0" tools, because I have to. The world changes very fast, and new forms of communication come and go, but in order to stay connected in my chosen field of study I should stay on top of what it now. I perceive librarians as often being on the forefront of new forms of communication, hacking out missives in what ever new form comes along. And this is a good thing. These tools are just that, tools. They do not shape what we do, we shape what we do with them. I've found some of these tools to be very useful. I keep up with facets of the world through an RSS reader, I communicate via SMS, e-mail, and IM everyday. And doing 23 things has given me a reason to try some tools that I never felt I had a need for, like a blog or LibraryThing. It renewed my use of del.icio.us.
One tool that I find useful is Yahoo Pipes. This an aggregator and feed builder. It's good for mashing up content from all around the web. It's got an incredibility steep learning curve, and I'm not very handy with it yet, but the things that you can do with it are amazing. Things like this pipe, that creates an RSS feed out of a mashup of search engine results. It's a tool with a lot of uses.

Survey Monkey

For this blog entry we were asked to use Survey Monkey to make a survey. It seems like a powerful enough tool, and if I wanted to make a online survey I might use it. But I like paper surveys better. I think that I give more time and thought to my answers, and don't just enter what ever I am thinking about at that moment. I have to compose my answers before starting to write.
I could see this tool being useful for reaching a large group of people or a group that is geographically spread out, but interoffice mail work for me. I think the best thing about this is that you don't have to type up the responses by hand, but I think that's a really good way to get a feel for the data, and start to develop conclusions before you do any formal analysis.
I played with the tools, and found that they were powerful, but I didn't have anything that I wanted to ask. I don't think that this takes advantage of the medium that it is presented in. With a online survey you can have much more media rich prompts, most of these were text. And the answers are not just limited to text either, you could have people drag around product designs and arrange them by preference or really by anything. People could build their own logos, based on elements that you give them. There's a lot of things that you can do with online media.