week six: PAZOOOW!

Oh dear, I seem to have fallen behind a little! Too much reading CNN and Yarn Harlot on Bloglines, I think! :)

Social networks have been around as long as the Net has. I remember Fidonet, where to even respond to someone you posted a message which then was sent to a hub computer and passed along. It could be days before the intended person even saw it, and then you had to wait for a reply. Nowadays, people can just jot down anything in a manner of seconds.

I have always kept in touch with my friends through a journal/blog site called Livejournal. In fact, they know the entire story of my triumphant journey into the library system. They cheered me on everytime I posted that I got an interview and went crazy when I got the job :) I have blathered on about how wonderful my library is and all the nice and sometimes quirky patrons we have. So, in a way my friends have been getting their own personal view of the library system.

I started with this story because I have not had much to do with my Myspace account. I started it because the co workers at my other job were all into it, but I have had my LJ for so long it seemed superflous to post the same thing twice in different journals.

MySpace is a lot more user friendly than LJ; even with a blogging program I still often hand type HTML, while Myspace uses a very nice posting interface. The one thing that turns me off MySpace is all the ads. It makes it a bit cumbersome to read.But the ease of reading and being able to reply easily makes MySpace a better tool for communities. You can easily see who is writing and reply to them quickly. It would be easy to list Youth Services activities or post music from a local band you know. You could even post audio files of a welcome message, or librarians reading parts of books. I think the audio and visual parts of Myspace make it a great tool for widespread communication.

By the way, Tom's sign is Libra.


Gaming: I am a huge gamer. My husband and I have all sorts of old and new systems, we play multiplayer games, puzzle games, all sorts of games. Gaming is very popular and pretty prevelant with today's kids. And not just the shoot im up or violent games. There's a lot of games that have minimal fighting and teach good storytelling and reading skills (a lot of the roleplaying games, such as Final Fantasy, have a lot of reading and often use strategic planning for skill systems, have defined good/evil storylines, have strong female roles and characters, often have a hero who is likeable and honorable and willing to do whats right for his friends, a few have had little mini games within a game that used math and planning skills, etc)

You have games like Monster Rancher, Pokemon and Nintendogs, where you have to raise and take care of a creature or pet. In some of these games, you have fighting, but it's not violent and usually the game's focus is on collecting or raising your pet.

A lot of games are multiplayer too. My husband and I sometimes play an online game call World of Warcraft, a fantasy multiplayer game played by roughly 4 million people in the US alone. It's actually a great way to network with people and meet people from all over the world. Sometimes if I am wondering about a game or movie I just log on to get everyone's opinions. :)

Moderation in all these games are important of course! But I think libraries starting to have gaming days is wonderful. Most games are multiplayer and can introduce even shy kids to new friends.

My score on the billards was a miserable 4. I'm not very good at billards, haha. The title of my blog post comes from the noise I imagined the stick making when it hit the ball. So I guess I got sidetracked making sound effects for the game and that's probably why the computer beat me to a pulp. ;)