Online Productivity - Truth or Oxymoron?

Google Docs do rock! If you don't have to worry about sharing private or sensitive information. I'm just saying.

Otherwise, I think it's just one more excellent tool of the many we've seen in this training. How fantastic to be able to collaborate with others from anywhere, anytime & not have to worry about who's got their thumb drive for the presentation. I'm also a big fan of using "alternative" & free software & services, so the idea of untethering my data from highly proprietary products (MS Office, I'm looking at you!) is very appealing. This is truly something I think the library should be behind, as it is just like us - providing free information & services to the masses, regardless of income, social status or technological savvy. Right now I am using it to do an inventory of our kitchen, because I am sick & tired of wondering if I have tomato paste or realizing that half my pantry expired a year ago! This way I can check my inventory via mobile device while I'm in the grocery store & shop accordingly.

Another really incredible tool for organizing yourself & your thoughts online is Evernote. It can be accessed via the web & mobile device (am I sounding like a broken record? C'mon, we have to admit there are millions of people using these devices.) & you can make notes on just about anything, it will even translate text from a photo! Want to remember how many calories were in that thing you ate from the convenience store? Take a picture of the nutritional info, upload it to Evernote & it will save the text in the picture as a note. "That's crazy talk!" you say? But wait, there's more! You can place Evernote on a thumb drive to use on different computers that don't have web access, email notes or even twitter them to your account. It can even help you remember where you parked. There are tons of uses for Evernote, check out some other user-suggested ideas, here & here.

Excuse me, your tag is showing

Oh, is that not the kind of "tag" you meant?

Tagging & social bookmarks have been on the scene for quite a while now (apparently I joined, and promptly forgot about, Delicious back in '06 & I think it was already old news by then!). They're supremely useful, especially due to the fact that you can make them work for you, using whatever quirky terms you like. For instance, you may have noticed I tag all my "Have You Seen This? Thursday" posts as "nonsense." I like having the "nonsense" tag to categorize posts that are just silly. This is also what can make social bookmarking a time-suck. Can you imagine what kinds of websites people might label as "nonsense?" As it turns out, Delicious has over 7800 sites tagged as such, including an Edward Lear page (we all know he was full of nonsense), a wikipedia entry for Jabberwocky & boingboing, which is definitely my favorite source for sense & nonsense. You could spend all day (and then some) trolling around looking at entries given a tag of interest to you, not that that's ever happened to me. No, definitely not.

Another social bookmarking-type site that I like to use is Clipmarks. Here you can save selected bits of a website, which you "clip" by highlighting. This clip is then saved to the Clipmarks site in your account. You can choose to share your clips or keep them private. You'll find all sorts of things being shared, I love to use it to keep track of recipes I want to try. It's very useful to not have to save an entire site, when what you need is only a paragraph or you want to remember a great idea, but don't want to scroll halfway down the page to get to it! You can title & tag your clips, so it is easy to remember why you saved something. I can see these tools being useful to the library, anything that can simplify searches & make them more member/patron/customer friendly is alright with me!

I like the idea of having a staff Delicious account, creating ones for the public to access (Adult/YA/kids?) could be great, too, as long as we have some sort of maintenance schedule set up so that old/bad links are removed & new ones are being added to keep the account up to date. I noticed that many of the libraries' Delicious accounts mentioned in the "Tags Make Libraries More Delicious" article (published in 09/2007) have not been updated in a year or more, with most adding to their account once a month.