The Job of Organizing

    The more I learn about Web 2.0 the more I love it! I think it's wonderful that there are sites available on the web like NetVibes, Protopage and PageFlakes that allow people to get organized.  I don't know anyone who couldn't use a Personal Information Space!  This tool can be changed and rearranged as the user's needs change. It allows the users to have all of their most important sites right at their fingertips. I think this will be a tool that librarians can use to help students and teacher- colleagues gather all of their resources into one place to make them more efficient at school.  Librarians will have to keep up with the newest technologies and websites in order to help those students and teachers stay on the cutting edge.  I can see "organization workshops" to get people started and notices on the librarian's blog or the library website to keep them updated. 
    The social bookmarking site Diigo would be an example of the type of channel a person could have on their information space. To me, the tags on Diigo are similar to keywords that help me to more easily categorize "bookmarked" Websites and to help others locate Websites that may possibly contain the information they are seeking.   I think the more familiar I become with Diigo, the better I will be at naming tags in a way that will help others to find Websites that match their needs.

About: The Machine is Us/ing Us By Michael Wesch

    As I viewed the YouTube video about Web 2.0 by Professor Michael Wesch, I thought, “Wow! There’s a lot of information here and it’s moving pretty quickly from one thought to another," a bit overwhelming, actually. So after watching it a few times I thought about the question- What was Wesch trying to say when he entitled it “The Machine is Us/ing Us”? Why did he give that name to his video?  I think he meant that the Web 2.0 tools that people all over the globe are using “is us” because it’s all about people connecting with each other and the world around them through the many social networking tools like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, to name a few.  It allows anyone to show their creative abilities and allows for self-expression through avenues like personal Web sites, blogs, Flickr, and Image Chef. It allows people to collaborate on projects when they aren’t even in the same room, city, or even country with tools like Wikis and Google Docs. It’s amazing how web 2.0 tools have brought the people of the world so much closer together-- “us”.

    The “using us” part was explained when he said that every time we make a new connection we are teaching the machine. Imagine millions of people are making millions of connections day after day! The machine needs us to change and grow, like a brain needs information flowing over neuropathways to function, learn, grow and cause change—The machine is “using us”.