Thing 21

I put a Ning badge on my blog and left comments for people. I thought about putting some photos in a slideshow, but I still haven't got my fall photos uploaded to SmugMug. SmugMug is a far better choice for me than Flickr, because I can have photos printed with decent color reproduction. My monitor at home is calibrated to Adobe RGB, and I need a photo printer whose printers are calibrated properly as well.

I read the Gather article, but I raise an eyebrow at their aspirations. I'm sure Gather has the potential to do for books what MySpace did for music. But . . . a survey of 17,000 people turned up 47% who read a fiction book in 2002, with numbers declining for a decade, while a survey of 5,000 adults in 2008 had 94% of them listening to the radio.

There are a lot more people listening to music out there. I'm just sayin'. And readers can be very picky about what they want. Reading a book takes time and concentration. Listening to a song takes three minutes. Readers aren't going to dig through the slush pile of offerings by unpublished authors that appears on Gather. They're most strongly influenced by recs from family members! They don't want to waste their mental energy.

Gather's idea to hold contests for genre works is a step in the right direction. And I was surprised when Paula pointed out their system of "rewards" for people posting content. I hadn't seen any other user-content website doing this. I know Amazon has a yearly dinner and award ceremony, but that's different.

The WebJunction article made some good points about how libraries can use new tech, but I suspect Pierce County might not be as busy as we are. The guy who wrote the article is their system trainer. They can has trainer? I bet he helped them with their 23 Things.