it's all 2 much

last week i got all confused when I had two copies of a melways street directory to consult. what if i chose the 'wrong' copy and took the wrong directions to my destination? my life would have been so much simpler if there was just one copy on the shelf.*

same applies to a lot of this 2.0 stuff. for example, on facebook there are about 10 book sharing/recommending [what librarians call reader development] applications. using them all is not practical. so which do i use? which do i recommend to patrons/friends?

i once recommended Shelfari to a patron who wanted to keep track of what she had read. i probably should also have told her about librarything. personally, i would be spewing if i had signed up to librarything then found out that all my friends were using shelfari. dammned if i am going to recatalogue all my books.

i guess what i am trying to say is that we should take some time when choosing what 2.0 tools libraries use and recommend to patrons. research. know your demographic and what they are using. have a plan. give informed options.

onto the actual question required from this post: library 2.0 is a nice term for the libraray profession to adopt and everything, but from an end user(our patron)point of view, what we [can] do in library 2.0 land is really no different from shopping on retail sites such as ebay or amazon.com. in my opinion it's web 2.0 hijacked and pimped up by us librarians. but having said that, it's semantics, and all good in the final outcome of what we are doing by using this stuff.

*in the end I chose the most thumbed through melways copy, thinking that if more people had read it it was probably more accurate than the other one.