Trials and Tribulations of Week 3 of MLA 2.0

I will admit that this week has not been fun at all in any sense. I enjoyed learning about blogs, RSS and wikis and even if my pages are not as indepth as others, at least I could see results. To answer the admin comments on my comments, yes I am using Internet Explorer and no I do not have Firefox...but neither does my hospital. I have spent about 12 hours on this assignment this week, not much fun for my family, and most of that rebooting my computer as Facebook continually kept freezing everything. I finally stopped trying to use my work email address and went to my yahoo one, at a public library to try it. (Facebook even froze that computer and had to reboot.) After another hour I had gone through the exercises. This week to finish I have been on four different computers, in four different locations trying just to do one assignment. Not much fun.
Yes, networking and sharing is part of our lives, but between Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpace, I would not give you a quarter for any. Linkedin, which my hospital will allow me to view, I find rather worthless and there are other job websites out there alot easier to use. MySpace is the best of the three, and that is sad in itself. I think of what we have learned in this course so far, I like the wikis to communicate within the library community. If you do not want to use your own email address, like yahoo, then tell everyone about your wiki.
So to the four questions at the end of the week:

• How can social networking be use by MLA to connect members - for upcoming events and changes in Mesh or such, yes it could be used. Should it be used with the three websites we were to explore, definitely not. Surely there can be a better way.
• Should your library have a Facebook or mySpace page? No, end of story.
• Are there privacy concerns for individuals when using social networking sites? Of course, there are privacy concerns for all of us. Being public servants our data is out there already. Just Google yourself and see what comes up. Try Ancestry.com and you may be surprised what is available.
• What did you like or not like about your experience with Facebook or MySpace. Well, I believe I have already answered that. It's all just a bad dream that I wish to forget.

The really sad part is that a few other of my colleagues have contacted me this week and are having as many problems as I have. One has even stated that she is also ready to quit also and so we may have started with over 700 of us, but how many will actually finish? Something to think about. We can only hope that the next weeks will be better.