LibraryThing

LibraryThing calls itself "the world's biggest book club." It is a big and busy social cataloging web application for sharing and storing your personal library catalog and book lists. You add books to your catalog by searching either Amazon, The Library of Congress, or one of the other 250 sources the site provides. Once a book is selected, you can review, rate, summarize, and tag the book. Since the site is a huge social network based on books, your books become linked to other people's books who share the same books or tags.

A practical use would be to select books and tag them for different disciplines or classes (creating sets), then share the these sets with your students. So if you are teaching classes on "English Literature of the Enlightenment" and "Commonwealth Literature" you could have one LibraryThing account and different sets for each class, depending on how you tagged the books.

To use LIbraryThing:

1. Make an account.
2. Add and tag books.

You can also make a LibraryThing widget, as I have done on the right. Just login to your LibraryThing account and go to the widget maker. The widgets can be formatted different ways, I have formatted mine to just show the covers. While there take a look at all of the other interesting thing you can do with LibraryThing.

Flickr

Flickr is a social networking application that provides photo sharing and photo depository. Photos are categorized with user-generated tags and sorted into user-defined sets. More than just being a place to put your vacation photographs, Flickr can be used in creative ways. If you want to share with your students images your collection of rare Greek pottery or the dig you just finished in Kuaca Prieta, Flickr is a great place to do this. If you have a cameraphone, you can easily upload your photos to your Flickr account or blog (Flickr supports uploading to many blog sites). This is great, since you do not need a camera or computer, just your phone! The social aspects of Flickr allows users to find and link with other users' photos. You can develop a huge network of contacts this way, all based on user-defined commonality.

To get started with Flickr:

1. Create an account at Flickr. If you have a Yahoo account, you already have a Flickr account.
2. Upload photos. Flickr has very easy photo uploading tools. You can also upload via email or by mobile phone.
   
3. Title and tag your photos.

For your blog you might want to create a Flickr badge (widget), like you see on the top of this page. A badge can display photos from your entire collection, or be limited to certain tags.

Here is a quick video on Flickr.

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows people to post short (140 character) posts or tweets. You can send and receive posts via the web, text messaging, email, or instant messaging. If you subscribe to a service like Jott you can even phone in your post. Jott does a great job of speech-to-text conversion. You might use a service like Twitter to post what you are doing, like "eating Twinkies" or "watching bad horror movie." But its real value is in the immediacy of the information that is shared. You can follow the tweets of major news organizations like CNN or The New York Times. During major events, like the fires in California last year, one of the best ways to learn what was going on was through collaborative Twitter postings by people in the midst of the event. If you are at a conference or lecture, you can post what is happening and your thoughts. Some people post only links to things they find interesting. The amount of information and knowledge that can be easily shared via Twitter is amazing.

How to get started with Twitter:

1. Create an account.
2. Set up a device (instant messaging, mobile phone, or both).
3. Start tweeting.
4. Look for other Twitters and follow them

You can easily add a feed to your blog of your recent tweets, as I have done on the right.

I like this introduction to Twitter from Commoncraft: