Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, and More.
14 December 2012
I don't remember why I actually checked out the book Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, and More from the library, but I'm sure it had something to do with me trying to learn something, anything, about technology. Other than that I hate it, of course.
I think the subtitle is terrible: "Everything You Want to Know About Using Today's Internet but Are Afraid to Ask," but this is actually a very handy little guide for anyone seeking an intro primer to lots of online and tech services with which they're not familiar. Each subject is covered in about four to ten pages--just enough for an overview, a discussion of top tools, and a very briefly how-to on getting started in them. In alphabetical order, the subjects covered are:
Blogging, Bookmarks and Tagging, Cloud Storage, Communications, Design, E-Commerce, Education and Knowledge, Games and Virtual Worlds, Kids' Sites, Mapping, Music, News, Peer-to-peer Sharing, Personal Management Tools, Photographs and Videos, Podcasts, Portals, Security Issues, Search Engines, Social Networking, Web-based Office Software, and Wikis and Collaboration.
If you're a librarian training new reference staff, you could do worse things than assign this book to new hires as required reading. Sure, most new hires and youngsters today already know all this stuff, but everyone has their favorite service or platform (mine is blogging), as well as services they despise (for me, Twitter and Facebook). But love them or hate them, it's good to know a little bit about them, and this book is a nice quick little read (and is infinitely more helpful than the "For Dummies" guides on the same subjects).