A first post

A warning, first, that this blog is meant to be temporary. It's part of a class I'm taking through the Medical Library Association on Web 2.0 for Libraries.

So what is Web 2.0?

Well, of course I looked it up on Wikipedia. and found this definition:

Web 2.0 is a trend in World Wide Web technology, and web design, a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs. According to Tim O'Reilly:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

Since blogs are part of the Web 2.0 experience, part of our first assignment was to create one. Now, I'm no stranger to blogs. I've had one since 2001, at http://rabid-librarian.blogspot.com. But that's for my own personal musings with a little library-related stuff along the way. I'm interested in how to put blogs to use for reaching library users and in using other Web 2.0 components to do the same, hence the class. (Plus, it was free and worth 8 hours of continuing education credit.) :) So here you go, the first post. Yay.