Thing #19

I admit it. I have a Myspace. I resisted for years. I mocked it. I rolled my eyes. But when it came right down to it, when I needed a promotion tool, where did I go? Yeah, that's right. Hypocrite Mel.

I haven't done much in the way of spamming other's spaces to get friends. Most of my Myspace friends are my buds in real life. But there's a patron or two, some authors I really like and want to keep up with, and a couple of strangers. I'll do more with it someday. :-)

So, I went exploring. The first place I went was bookspoke. I read a little bit about it and discovered on their "if you're a writer" page, that they're also a vanity publisher. That made me think twice about joining because, chances are, their social networking site is a way to snare unpublished writers into using their services. Better to use Shelfari or LibraryThing.

I thought it was pretty spiffy that there were age-appropriate SN sites out there. I kind of wished for a thirty-something one. (Okay, I know I'm not quite there yet, but give me a few months!) Stereotypical teenagers got on my nerves back when I was one, and it's just gotten worse over the years. And so has the spelling. Gather has a more mature writing base, but a lot of people on there only post for points which can be redeemed for gift certificates and that can be just as annoying.

Facebook was interesting, but I don't know if it's really for me. I found a few high school classmates and lots of people who were at ISU when I was there who I didn't know. Facebook seemed a little cold to me, but it was refreshing not to have a bunch of ads shoved at me.

I thought it was interesting how many of the friends and comments on the library Myspace profiles came from published writers, intending, I suppose, to reach library patrons and readers through the library.

Surprisingly, I have a bit of a pessimistic streak when it comes to libraries and Myspace. I'm not too confident that we'll reach the army of teens using our computer lab to check their profiles. We have to hit a certain level of cool. Or, in other words, we have to be serving them adequately already for them to want to add us and keep track of us. I think we can do this other ways. Who I think we will reach are the non-teen Myspacers as well as local writers seeking to promote themselves to our patrons. Folks who already use us and love us. And that's something valuable. We can blog. We can post schedule changes and program announcements in bulletins. We can announce new releases and, maybe, link to ibistro.