Prologue

My experience of web 2.0 until now has been limited to personal use. It can be classified as follows (using the "Thing" classification system, certainly the most flexible in existence):

• Things I know, use and appreciate: pictures and video sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and online communities like Deviantart (where you can upload your artworks and comment on other people's). I even kept a blog with a silly name featuring film and book reviews and illustrations, twice. Unfortunately my intentions to update it at least weekly failed to be translated into practice (let us hope this blog will have a better fate).


• Things I know and used, but wished I hadn't, like Facebook.


• Things I know are useful and definitely should use more, amongst which, RSS feeds.


• Things I roughly know of, but never bothered enough to look into, such as twitter - although the word limit suggests interesting literary developments...


• Things I might vaguely have heard of, such as, well.
  

To be absolutely frank, my initial reaction to the 23 Things Cambridge was - that sounds interesting - but aren't some of those things a bit gimmicky? Well, some probably are, and others might turn out to be extremely useful in improving academic library services. The only way to know is to try, and this is a great incentive to do so.