Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Laughing All the Way

I'm getting pretty cavalier about signing up for everything that comes down the pike these days. At first Library Thing sounded like something I'd need about as much as a hole in the head. (Another one, that is...). But then it dawned on me: people are always asking what I'm reading or how I liked such-and-such book. And all too often, I draw a complete blank! Of course, I could "opt in" on the SPL website and start saving information about what I've read there. But this website looked like more fun -- so I joined! About an hour later, reading Megan's blog, I noticed something called Shelfari, and right away I coveted that, too. So now I belong to both. It wasn't quite as easy as it seemed at first, though. I got caught up in some weird death spiral and titles kept disappearing after they had been entered and saved. There are a dozen books on my Shelfari bookshelf, but only one of them was still alive by the time I moved the widget to my blog. Oh, well. It's a start.

Watching the tutorial for de.lici.ous, I started thinking about the concept of tagging and how it might be put to use for people who are losing their memory, whether due to the normal aging process or Alzheimer's or chemo brain or some combination thereof ( a subject of more than passing interest to me). Last night I attended a meeting of my writing group, all women in their sixties. We were laughing hysterically over one person's vain attempt to remember the title of a book. She knew the 1st word was "A" and the last word was "Wife." The 2nd word started with an "R"...or maybe an "M"...and it had 2 or 3 syllables. It was like playing Charades. We were all yelling out helpful guesses: "rambunctious?" "malignant?" "rodeo?"Yes, this is your future, Youngsters, so get ready! Your only choice is whether to laugh or cry about it. Might as well laugh....But just think, if she had put that book on Library Thing or Shelfari, all she'd have had to do was remember tags. Well, first she'd have had to remember the URL for the site, then her username and password, and THEN the tags. The question is, would that be easier than just remembering the title itself?

P.S. Here's my best Rollyo search engine for finding your ancestors. I had first created one for finding information about birds but somehow, that one didn't pass the usefulness test.

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