Looking Back on Week 2

So week 2 was much easier for me than week 1. I had already been using the week 3 "Things" to some degree.

GoogleReader can be a great timesaver, depending on what you're following. I started using it over a year ago to follow my friend Susan's two blogs -- Cancer Banter and Open Mouth, Insert Fork. It was great -- I never missed a post.

But, as they say, it can be both a blessing and a curse. I added a few more items to my GoogleReader, among them Mashable and a library school colleague's aggregated job posting feed. Each of them was returning upwards of 100 posts a day, thus creating my own customized information deluge!

Delicious (and I'm sooo glad we can spell it the normal way now) is a fantastic tool. I've been using it for awhile to save and tag my bookmarks. I've found it to be kind of a "green" thing for me, because now I can just bookmark sites instead of printing out loads of information. I had not previously been using the "social" aspect of delicious, so I learned something new from the powerpoint presentation on the 21 Things blog.

Finally, I had never heard of SocialMention or Addictomatic, but I set up a GoogleAlert on "public library" over a year ago. As a library school student, I found it very helpful for getting the latest news on public libraries and monitoring trends. Initially, many stories reflected how library use was up due to the economic downturn (yay!); now, unfortunately, my daily email alert gives me story after story about library closures and cutbacks. As a 40-something lifelong Californian, I know that this recession, too, shall pass. But as a recent library school graduate, I'm hoping it will be soon!