My office name plate

A continuation of the 8th Library Day in the Life Project (January 30 – February 5, 2012), a recurring project started by Bobbi Newman in July 2008 to encourage library professionals to share amongst each other the diverse work done in this rapidly evolving industry, and to educate the public about what the heck it is that librarians actually do.

I am the Systems Librarian and Communications Coordinator at the Pollak Library, California State University, Fullerton.

Friday, February 3, 2012

8:30am-9:00am: Checked and responded to email.

9:30am – 9:45am: Wrote my “Thursday” Library Day in the Life blog post.

9:45am – 10:00am: Chatted with our website redesign Web Content Coordinator about best process for inventorying content from our current/old website that needs to be checked and migrated into our new website.

10:00am – 11:10am: Perused my Google Reader RSS fees for work-related news, Twitter streams (mine, and the library account), checked and posted to the library’s Facebook Page.

11:10am  - 1200pm: Cleaned out a bunch of mass/listserv messages from my email inbox.

12:00pm – 1:00pm: Went out to lunch with one of our Biology professors.

1:00pm – 4:10pm: Finished manual clean-up on the Library’s SharePoint intranet from the server migration conducted by IT.

4:10pm – 4:30pm: Updated next week’s calendar with high priority items from my Task List.

4:30pm – 4:50pm: Read a few articles about Altmetrics.

4:50pm – 5:00pm: Wrote this blog post.

My office name plate

A continuation of the 8th Library Day in the Life Project (January 30 – February 5, 2012), a recurring project started by Bobbi Newman in July 2008 to encourage library professionals to share amongst each other the diverse work done in this rapidly evolving industry, and to educate the public about what the heck it is that librarians actually do.

I am the Systems Librarian and Communications Coordinator at the Pollak Library, California State University, Fullerton.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

8:30am – 9:00am: Checked and responded to critical emails and voicemails.

9:00am – 9:30am: Corresponded with a couple of Humanities professors about our plans, thus far, for hosting THATCamp SoCal 2012.

9:30am – 10am: Chatted with four of our librarians about future library blog post ideas.

10:30am – 11:00am: Checked the library’s Twitter stream and Facebook page wall and stream.

11:00am – 12:00pm: Watched “Before You Push Record”, the first segment in TechSoup’s digital storytelling webinar series.

12:00pm – 1:00pm: Lunch at the CSUF Weight Watchers At Work program meeting.

1:00pm – 1:30pm: Corresponded with Academic Technology about booking our venue facility for THATCamp SoCal 2012. Corresponded with the George Mason U THATCamp Coordinator, and two previous SoCal camp hosts about recommended number of rooms to book for our venue.

1:30pm – 4:00pm: Worked on library website redesign business requirements documentation.

4:00pm: Left work early, for an appointment.

Have you attended one or more THATCamps? If so, please help me share your feedback and (hopefully) enthusiasm for THATCamp with my campus and community colleagues, and with our students.  I’d love to use your THATCamp testimonials!

Since attending THATCamp SoCal in January 2011, I have been hooked big time, and have been chatting it up with my library, campus and community colleagues. When I found out that no host had yet signed up for the 2012 THATCamp SoCal, I started talking to our head of academic technology about Cal State Fullerton stepping up to host it. And, this past Monday, we took the plunge…committing ourselves by registering our campus as the host venue for THATCamp SoCal 2012 on Friday and Saturday September 28-29, 2012 (with a possible Workshop day on Thursday the 27th).

I will share more details about the 2012 camp in a future post, and will share my own THATCamp testimonial tomorrow or this weekend.

How to Share Your Feedback (aka “THATCamp Testimonial”)

Whether you’re a professor, teacher, librarian, archivist, student, heritage professional, or any other sort of THATCamper, help me sell your counterparts on why they should attend THATCamp SoCal!  And please share your biggest takeaways from past THATCamps!

I am happy to receive your feedback through one of these formats:

• Comments on this blog post
• Tweet me at @colleengreene
• Google+ posts or comments directed to http://gplus.to/colleengreene
• Emails sent to cgreene@fullerton.edu.

Have you already shared your THATCamp feedback and takeaways online? Do you prefer to record a quick AudioBoo? Feel free to send me a link if that’s more convenient than a message.

Thank you for your help, and I hope to see you at THATCamp SoCal 2012!

My office name plate

A continuation of the 8th Library Day in the Life Project (January 30 – February 5, 2012), a recurring project started by Bobbi Newman in July 2008 to encourage library professionals to share amongst each other the diverse work done in this rapidly evolving industry, and to educate the public about what the heck it is that librarians actually do.

I am the Systems Librarian and Communications Coordinator at the Pollak Library, California State University, Fullerton.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

8:30am – 9:00am: Checked and responded to emails.

9:30am – 10:00am: Perused Google Reader RSS feeds, Twitter stream (mine and the library account), Google Alerts for campus  and the library, Library Facebook page news stream.

10:00am – 10:30am: Started discussion and evaluation of GroupTweet as possible alternative to using CoTweet to manage the library’s Twitter account. The free version of CoTweet goes away mid-February, and it — along with Hootsuite and Buffer — charge fees to attach multiple editors to a single Twitter account.  Doesn’t look like GroupTweet will meet our needs, though, because it forces each contributor to have their own Twitter account, and some of our employees don’t want their own account.

10:30am – 11:00am: Met with campus employee from the University Learning Center to train her how to contribute posts in WordPress, so she can do a weekly guest blogger column on the library’s blog.

11:00am – 11:30am: Drafted my Project Manager notes for my weekly website redesign project meeting to updated our key stakeholders.

11:30am – 11:45am: Reviewed task force draft of our new “Library Exhibit Program Committee Charge”.

12:00pm – 1:00pm: Lunchtime CSUF Faculty & Staff Bible Study Fellowship meeting.

1:00pm – 1:15pm: Checked and respond to emails.

1:30pm – 3:00pm: Refined the landing page requirements on our library website redesign project requirements document.

3:00pm – 3:30pm: Conducted my standing weekly status update meeting with our library website redesign project stakeholders.

3:30pm – 6:00pm: Continued refining the landing page requirements on our library website redesign project requirements documents.

6:00pm – 6:10pm: Wrote this blog post.

My office name plate

A continuation of the 8th Library Day in the Life Project (January 30 – February 5, 2012), a recurring project started by Bobbi Newman in July 2008 to encourage library professionals to share amongst each other the diverse work done in this rapidly evolving industry, and to educate the public about what the heck it is that librarians actually do.

I am the Systems Librarian and Communications Coordinator at the Pollak Library, California State University, Fullerton.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

8:30am – 9:00am: Checked and responded to emails.

9:00am – 9:15am: Chatted with our web developer about posting an open position on the library website.

9:15am – 9:45am: Reviewed “Pending” posts submitted to the library blog (only managing editors can actually Publish, to ensure all links, images and SEO metadata are correctly included). Add images and meta information for eBooks blog post from our Collection Development Librarian, then publish post and cross-post on Facebook and Twitter.

9:45am – 10:00am: Organized documentation on SharePoint intranet for next 2 meetings.

10:00am – 11:00am: Met with Circulation Coordinator and Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Coordinator (guinea pig content team for website redesign “proof of concept” testing), and the Web Content Coordinator for our new (being redesigned) website to review process for compiling and organizing “proof of concept” content on SharePoint, until we have our new content management system (CMS) — OmniUpdate’s OUCampus — up and running enough for library content teams to use.

11:0am – 11:30am: Met with our Web Content Coordinator to go over process to inventory all content pages from our current website, so that we can next assign those pages to the appropriate unit head to determine if content 1) needs to be updated, 2) is current and “good to go”, or 3) needs to be completely deleted. This will help move us towards having our content ready as soon as back-end (admin end) of our new CMS is ready.

11:30am – 12:00am: Continued reviewing “Pending” posts from other librarians and staff, submitted to the library blog. Filled in SEO metadata and scheduled future publish dates.

12:00pm – 1:00pm: Checked email and responded to a few immediate ones.

1:00pm – 1:30pm: Checked RSS feeds on Google Reader, Twitter stream (mine and the library’s), library Google Alerts, and library Facebook page wall. Scheduled links to share via Buffer on library Facebook page and Twitter stream.

1:30pm – 2:30pm: Took a real lunch hour to run errands on campus and do some background research on Galatians for the 1st meeting of the semester (tomorrow) for the CSUF Faculty & Staff Bible Study Fellowship.

2:30pm -3:30pm: Worked on content templates, that will map to CMS “Library Content Page” template fields when our redesigned website is ready for the Web Content Team.

3:30pm – 4:00pm: Had an impromptu discussion with Campus IT about the Library’s OUCampus (CMS) templates, our ETA for having those functioning on a dev server and training our OUCampus administrators, how the Library will be (uniquely, on this campus) using re-purposable assets thorughout our templates and building our template fields out in an SEO-friendly and social-sharing-friendly manner.  Discussed me leading an SEO and template metadata training session in a couple months for campus developers. Argued over why  I feel the library needs to keep our WordPress multi-site instance on our own virtual server, running a full LAMP open source environment, instead of allowing IT to run it on their servers that use Windows IIS instead of Apache.

4:00pm – 4:40pm: Updated library website redesign Business Requirements documentation, based upon latest questions and and requests brought up last week by our designer.  Need to finish this up tomorrow.

4:40pm – 5:00pm: Wrote this blog post.

5:00pm – 5:30pm: Blocked out some time  in my calendar for tomorrow to finish manually migrating content from our old SharePoint server to the new one since Campus IT was unable to migrate it all via scripted tools. Also blocked out some time on Friday for some professional development training via Lynda.com.

My office name plate

Today marks the start of the 8th Library Day in the Life Project  (January 30 – February 5, 2012), a recurring project started by Bobbi Newman in July 2008 to encourage library professionals to share amongst each other the diverse work done in this rapidly evolving industry, and to educate the public about what the heck it is that librarians actually do.  Since I still encounter comments like “You must really like to read”, or “You must get to work with a lot of books”, when I meet new people who haven’t used a librarian in eons, I’ve tried to participate in the last couple #libday projects to provide folks with better insight into the nature of my job and my profession.  And because librarian job descriptions and duties vary so much across the profession, the #libday project is a great way to showcase the diverse skill sets and professional activities with my colleagues around the world, and with future librarians.

In the past, I simply Tweeted my #libday updates. This year, I’m committing to also contribute a blog updated at the end of each week day.

So, here goes…

Monday, January 30, 2012

Although my academic library is open late into the evenings Monday-Thursday, and is open on Saturdays (we had to cut our Sunday hours two years ago due to budget cuts), my position — the Systems Librarian and Communications Coordinator– is only expected to work during the traditional business week. I typically work Monday through Friday, from 8:30am to 5:30pm. I do occasionally put in evening or weekend hours for special activities, such as teaching a technology instruction class, presenting an evening workshop or attending/working at a conference.

Today is an unusually light meeting day for me, which means I should be able to get some key assignments done.

8:20am: Set off to work; I am fortunate to have a ridiculously short commute.

8:30am: Arrived at work. Checked for any voicemails or emails that require an immediate response, while drinking my coffee. Rescheduled a 10:00am meeting for tomorrow, because I’m trying to avoid any close contact with people while glued to my Kleenex box (that darn cold thing).

8:45am: Drafted the intro to this blog post.

8:50am – 9:45am: Scanned through my personal/professional Twitter stream, the @pollaklibrary Twitter stream, my Google Reader RSS feeds, Google Alerts for the Pollak Library (and the commonly misspelled Pollack Library), as well as Cal State Fullerton (and CSUF and California State University Fullerton), and the News Feed for the Pollak Library’s Facebook Page.

9:50am – 11am: Finalizing tentative” details to host #THATCamp SoCal 2012 at California State University, Fullerton this September. Running prospective dates by my THATCamp coordinating committee: Associate VP/IT & Academic Technology Officer, Director of Faculty Development Center & Professor, Elementary and Bilingual Education, and our Director of Distance Education/IT for University Extended Education. Brought University Librarian up to speed. Registered us on the THATCamp website.

11:00am-11:15am: Met with University Librarian to discuss the re-opened recruitment for the Head of Library Systems position.

11:30am – 11:45: Chatted with IT Project Management Officer about what help I will initially need from IT for THATCamp SoCal, in terms of logistics and logo design.   Set up a higher ed-licensed wiki on WikiSpaces to plan the event. Activated the THATCamp Southern California 2012 public site through THATCamp.

11:45am – 12:25pm: Searched online for examples of using Historypin and QR Codes, to help a colleague at Fullerton Community College come up with a solution for their 100th anniversary project.

12:30pm – 1:00pm: Short lunch, out for coffee.

1:00pm – 4:00pm: Worked on a Genealogy Research Guide for a class I’m teaching this afternoon, for a fellow librairan who is giving a tour of the library to the genealogy interest group from our campus’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

4:00pm – 5:30pm: Accompanied fellow librarian giving tour to or our microfilm/form newspaper holdings to our campus’s OLLI genealogy interest group (55 people present!). Moved the group up to our largest library instruction room, explained what services and resources OLLI members can/cannot access with a guest library card. Gave a quick 30-minute demo of 5 key genealogy resources they should be using, then spent another 30 minutes answering specific genealogy and technology questions.  They asked me to come back and teach a few topic-specific sessions.

5:30pm to 5:45pm: Back in my office to check email and update my To Do list with unfinished items from today before heading home.

Do you work with digital photo collections on behalf of a heritage institution? Are you a genealogist or historian that’s curated a personal collection of digitized photos that depict landmarks and landscapes over time?  Are you an educator interested in learning how to incorporate Historypin into your classroom curriculum or student assignments?

On behalf of the Orange County, California, Heritage Coordinating Council (HCC), I am teaching a FREE hands-on Historypin workshop next Tuesday, January 10th! If you live or work in or near Orange County, you are welcome to join us.

Following is the official HCC announcement, with reservation details. Space is limited.

The Heritage Coordinating Council is excited to offer this hands-on digital history workshop, for FREE, to the Orange County heritage community!

Historypin is an EXCELLENT way to generate more exposure and interest in your digital collections. Don’t have a fancy shmancy iPhone or Android mobile app for your heritage website? Historypin allows you to create virtual mobile tours for free.

About Historypin

Historypin is a new, free, easy to use location-based digital history archive. It “crowd sources” a particular location’s digital story by allowing heritage institutions and individuals to contribute their digital photos, videos and audio to the public archive, and “pinning” these digital objects to Google Maps. Members of the public can then contribute memories and historical details to these digital collections. Heritage institutions and individuals can also create and share “virtual tours” for others to follow.

Historypin exists as a website and as a mobile app for both Apple and Android devices – the free mobile apps make it an excellent low/no-cost way for heritage institutions to encourage the public to embark on virtual history tours throughout your local community and collections.

About the Workshop

• Date: Tuesday, January 10, 2012
• Time: 10:30 am to 12pm (immediately following our HCC meeting from 10am to 10:30am)
• Location: Pollak Library (PLN 303) at Cal State Fullerton

Workshop participants will learn how to use the public archive like a “regular person”, and how to also contribute items from your own collections. In order to get the most from your hands-on learning experience, we ask that you bring at least one dozen photos on a flash drive or CD/DVD that 1) you have the necessary rights to share, and 2) whose geographic locality you can easily identify on a map – if you aren’t sure of the exact location where the photo was taken, that photo is not a good candidate for this workshop.

Manny Escamilla, archivist at the Santa Ana Public Library’s (SAPL) Santa Ana History Room, will share about SAPL’s experience as the first (and so far, ONLY), Orange County heritage partner to get involved with this hot new exciting digital history project.

We can seat up to 60 people in this classroom, but we only have 30 computers (PCs) available. So, if you have your own laptop, we encourage you to bring it – Pollak Library has free wifi. And if you have an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android tablet, we encourage you to bring those as well if you’d like to also explore and demonstrate the mobile app and tours. You will be required to indicate on the RSVP form if you need a PC, or if you are bringing your own laptop.

Reservations Required: RSVP online by Friday.

Parking on Campus

Pollak Library is located in the center of campus, identified as PL on the campus map.

There should be plenty of parking on campus during Intersession.

Parking is identified in purple on the map, but I suggest you exit Nutwood Ave. from the 57 freeway. Turn west (you’ll pass the Fullerton Marriott) and turn immediately right onto Folino Drive. Stay right and park in the Eastside Parking Structure (EPS on the map). There’s a parking permit machine in the parking structure. $8/daily rate (exact change), although Park and Pay, campus’ pre-pay short-term parking is available for $2/hour (maximum 2 hours) on the ground level.

Daily permits may be purchased in Lots: A, G, S, Arts drive, and levels 2, 4, 6 in the State College and Eastside Structures during all hours in which permits are required. Daily permits are valid in all student lots and structures.

Additional Parking Information available here.

Still Have Questions?

If you have questions about parking, HCC or the January meeting, please contact:

Stephanie George, Archivist
Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton
(657) 278-3693 or sgeorge@fullerton.edu

If you have questions about the Historypin workshop curriculum, please contact:

Colleen Greene, Systems Librarian
Pollak Library, California State University Fullerton
(657) 278-3991 or cgreene@fullerton.edu

Do you use the super awesome Thesis theme framework for your self-hosted WordPress blog? Is your Thesis blog full of good visually appealing content? Then you should consider adding the Pinterest Pin It button to your site.

About Pinterest

Pintrest describes itself as a visual pinboard for organizing and sharing content — a social bookmarking site like Diigo or Delicious, but focused around images that link to a source article, website, recipe or original photo or graphics file. I classify it more as a visual viral discovery and curation engine. Think Stumbleupon meets Tumblr, but simpler.

I’ve been hooked on Pinterest for a couple of months — spending anywhere from 15 minutes to 1 hour on it every day, mainly perusing recipes, craft ideas and patterns, and home decor inspiration. I really did not want to branch out into yet another social networking site, however, my husband and I started noticing in our Google Analytics reports that Pinterest has (unsolicited by us) become the top traffic referer to our food blog since September, overtaking both Facebook and Google referrals. This post for pecan praline baked french toast has been so heavily Repinned that it forced us to up our PHP memory allocation on our virtual private server because of all the new Pinners hitting our site.

For me, Pinterest is strictly a fun personal social network (unless you count marketing my personal food and outdoors blogs as work). Visual content creators should definitely explore it for marketing purposes. But, contrary to suggestions from my colleagues Joe Murphy and Anna Laura Brown, I don’t see any real added-value use for it in my professional academic library work…yet.

If you are new to Pinterest, I recommend these articles from:

• ReadWriteWeb
• Mashable
• BlueGlass
• Communications Conversations
• TechCrunch

Adding the Pin It Button to Thesis

Like many similar web services, Pinterest provides some basic buttons and bookmarklets to allow web users to more easily share and drive content back to Pinterest. Pinterest provides a single-install Follow Button (so your blog readers can follow your own Pinterest profile), but its “Pin It” sharing button is really horrid — requiring website publishers to manually add it to every single post they want readers to be able to share (and only after a post, or permalink, is published). Unlike the Twitter button or the Facebook Share button, the Pinterest sharing button cannot be added to every single post through your blog template. Way too labor-intensive for me!

After researching and testing out a few solutions, I finally opted for this button-only method, written up by Chykalophia Design, which just uses the JavaScript code from the Pin It web browser bookmarklet. I also tried a method that displays the number of shares, but couldn’t get it to work (the number of shares never changes), so I’ll keep playing with that code.

This method incorporates the Pin it Javascript button into my existing set of social sharing icons displayed after the byline on every individual blog post.

Following is the code I added to the Thesis Byline Item hook in my my custom_functions.php file in order to get the button to appear on every individual blog post. I simply incorporated the Chykalophia Design tutorial into my existing set of social sharing buttons (which I originally borrowed from this excellent tutorial by Kikolani).

***START ADD CUSTOM SHARING BUTTONS TO BYLINE***/

add_action('thesis_hook_byline_item','custom_byline');

function custom_byline() {

if (is_single()) { ?>
<div class="social-single">
<div id="twitterbutton">
<div><a class="twitter-share-button" href="http://twitter.com/share">data-counturl="" data-text="" data-via="greeneadventurs" data-related="greeneadventurs"&gt;Tweet</a></div>
</div>
<div id="sharebutton" style="padding-top:1px;"><a name="fb_share" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php"></a>Share</div>
<div id="stumblebutton"></div>
<div id="pinitbutton"><a href="//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)%7D)());"><img style="margin:0 0 -5px;" src="http://www.greeneadventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/pinitbutton.png" alt="Pin It" /></a></div>
<div id="plusonebutton"></div>
</div>
&lt;?php }

}

/***END ADD CUSTOM SHARING BUTTONS TO BYLINE***/

After adding the PHP to your custom hooks, then you need to add some styling to the custom.css file.

/***START CUSTOM SHARING BUTTONS***/
.social-single {
margin: 17px 0 0 0;
}</code>

#twitterbutton, #likebutton, #stumblebutton, #sharebutton, #pinitbutton, #linkedinshare {
float: left;
display: block;
}

#sharebutton {
margin-left:0px;
margin-top:0px;
margin-right: 25px;
}

#stumblebutton {
margin-left: 15px;
margin-top: 1px;
margin-right: 25px;
}

#pinitbutton {
margin-left: 15px;
margin-top: -3px;
margin-right: 25px;
}

#plusonebutton {
margin-left: 25px;
margin-top: 1px;
}

/***END CUSTOM SHARING BUTTONS***/

I have never experienced any problems with Thesis, until this past weekend when making some routine code changes.  I was simply modifying my custom_functions.php and custom.css files to add new services to the social sharing icons on display on my food blog and outdoors blog posts. Piece of cake. I tinker with these files (always in an external editor, with the original files backed up) quite frequently.  The changes worked like a charm on my outdoors blog, but when I refreshed my browser after making the same exact changes on my food blog, I got this big ugly “Upgrade Thesis” message — which I have never seen before — on my Thesis Site Options admin panel.  It looks like a friendly one-click upgrade button, but it’s actually an error message.

This is actually an error message displayed on Thesis Site Options.

When I checked my food blog, the menus had disappeared, my fonts had all changed, my multimedia box reverted to the default image, my features box had disappeared, the text-based content in my main column and sidebars seemed to have disappeared as well (I found out later that the text was there, but was being displayed in a white font color on a white background), and my home page no longer displayed my custom excerpts.

I panicked. Well, sort of panicked. Because I backup my database daily, and also do regular backups of all custom files.  So, I knew my content was intact; it just wasn’t displaying correctly.

After Googling the above error message and searching through the DIYthemes support forums, I found quite a few people experiencing similar errors.  The consensus seems to involve a conflict between the W3 Total Cache (W3TC) plugin and the most current version of Thesis — and a recommendation to disable Object Cache in the plugin settings.  I opted to disable the entire cache plugin, and then reset my Thesis Design Options to the default settings (per the support forums’ advise).  Some folks in the help forums had to also reset their Thesis Site Options to the default settings — I only had to do so for Design Options.  And then I had the pleasure of manually configuring ALL of my Thesis Design Options setting again. Fortunately, the settings on my food blog are very similar (just different colors) to the Design Options I use on my outdoors blog, so I was able to somewhat quickly restore my food blog using the outdoors blog Design Options settings.

Lesson learned.

For now on, when I make changes to my Thesis “custom” files, upgrade my WordPress version, or upgrade my Thesis version, I will include two additional preventive steps to my routine pre-upgrade backup procedure (step #1 and step #5):

1. Deactivate any cacheing plugins.
2. Do a full backup of my WordPress database.
3. Do an FTP backup of all uploaded image files.
4. Do an FTP backup of my Thesis custom_functions.php and custom.css files.
5. From Thesis Manage Options, download a backup of my Site Options and Design Options.
6. Proceed with code changes or upgrades.
7. Restore Thesis Design or Site Options if needed after the upgrade or code change is successful.
8. Reactivate cacheing plugins (leaving Object Cache disabled if using W3TC).

Hopefully this precautionary warning and tip will help save even a few fellow Thesis bloggers a bit of frustration and panic.

Social Media Landscape by FredCavazza.net

Today’s announcement that Gowalla will be shutting down by the end of January, prompted me to delete my account this morning — I rarely used the service anyway, I’ve always preferred Foursquare and I also use Facebook Places more frequently than Gowalla.

Deleting that old stagnant account got me thinking about some of the other under-utilized social networking sites (SNS) that I’ve signed up for (and forgotten about) over the years, as well as the new ones I joined this year.  As year-end approaches, it just seems like a good time for a little belated social “spring cleaning” — don’t you agree?

Services I left already this year:

• BLIP.fm: I think I joined this social music site a couple of years ago, but it’s been ages since I’ve used it due to services I prefer more like Pandora, Spotify and now iCloud.
• Delicious: My de facto social bookmarking site for years and years, until that infamous slide got leaked last December about Yahoo discontinuing its support. I promptly exported my years’ worth of bookmarks and tags to Diigo then, and haven’t looked back. I migrated to the new Delicious platform, but continue to prefer the functionality of Diigo.
• FriendFeed: Back in the days before Twitter’s API turned it into a big gun for auto-sharing a single link across multiple networks, FriendFeed was the only tool that seemed to do this well. It just doesn’t offer any value to me anymore.
• Gowalla: Deleted my account today (see above).
• LibraryThing: I joined this service in mid-2009 and really wanted to like it, but the interface remains extremely clunky, and it just doesn’t provide a social enough experience for me.  So after a colleague persuaded me to try out Goodreads (see below), I ditched my LT account.
• MySpace: Ack! When the redesign happened recently, I finally remembered to delete my account since I hadn’t used it in over 2 years.

Services I plan to leave by year end:

• Diaspora: After hearing so much hype about this open source “anti-Facebook” SNS on Twitter all year, I was excited to finally be able to join its alpha launch in September. But, I continue to remain bored with the interface and networking, and will probably just delete my account this month since I don’t really need yet another regular SNS.
• Digg: I signed up for this service who knows when — sometime before I got married in August of 2009, since it’s still tied to my old email. I’ve never “dug” a single link and filed a support request for Digg to delete my account (there’s no way for a user to delete one’s account right now).
• Posterous: I’ve been on Posterous at least a couple of years and used to be a very heavy user, running multiple blogs and then groups.  But, I continue to grow more disillusioned with this service’s failure to support much in the way of widgets, and its lack of JavaScript support (yes, I know, it’s niche is clean simple no-fuss blogging).  I guess I just like fuss.  I also get very little social networking value out of it.  So, after  I finish copying and pasting (there’s no export tool) some of my old content into other notes apps this month, I plan to delete my account.

Services I joined or rejoined this year:

• Blogger: I used this blogging platform long before it was ever bought by Google, but switched to WordPress(.org) years ago for better customization, functionality and SEO. This blog post by social developer Jesse Stay convinced me to give Blogger another try this past spring, in hopes that recent improvements to Blogger — in addition to its ease of use — would encourage more community blog contributions in some of the group blogs I help manage (they’ve struggled with learning WordPress).
• GetGlue: I joined this entertainment-themed SNS early this year after seeing a few Twitter colleagues checking in to TV shows and movies.  It serves no real value for me, and it’s probably the only SNS that I continue to use strictly because it’s kind of fun.
• Goodreads: After hearing buzz about it for a while on Twitter, I finally gave Goodreads a try at the strong recommendation of several library colleagues (on a Google+ discussion, no less).  And I haven’t looked back. I love the interface, functionality, social networking and mobile apps.
• Google+: I, along with many of my equally geeky library and tech colleagues, rushed to Google+ after it first launched in beta mode this June. But, despite its continued growth, I maintain a love hate relationship with this SNS. Sometimes I go a week or more without using it, other times, I’m on there all day long conversing with colleagues.
• Pinterest: I really really really did NOT want to join yet another SNS, but I caved last month after I saw how much unsolicited traffic this service is generating to my food blog.  I am totally hooked on it, and can’t quite explain why — watch for a blog post about it soon.
• SCVNGR: I first got wind of this social geolocation game and app in June, after I came across colleges using it for freshman orientation, and immediately signed up for an account. While I haven’t spent any time on it personally, I plan to help a couple of our local heritage organizations learn how to use it to conduct fun educational local history scavenger hunts.
• Tumblr: Despite first trying it out and then dismissing it a couple of years ago, I opted to give Tumblr another go due to its massive growth this year. I like it for photo and video curation and sharing, and it’s great tool for reaching teen and young adult library patrons.
• WordPress.com: I very recently decided to give the hosted version of WordPress a try, and explained this in detail in my last blog post.

Note that what’s missing from this inventory is a list of social networking sites that I’ve used for quite a while, and continue to use on a regular basis. I’ll cover those in separate posts that discuss my personal/professional and our library’s existing social media toolboxes.

What services have you recently ditched, joined or rejoined?