Thing 10: Ning

I can honestly say that I had never even heard of Ning before this. I watched the video, and then went back to the site. I do love being able to view the networks and the posts without having to join a specific one. It is much easier to make a decision about a network if you can spend some time in it and decide if it is of interest. It seems that it is more of a social networking site that is geared toward more professional groups than Facebook. The number of participants in some of the sites was very small - with 20 or so members.

I decided to join Ning so that I could really see what it is all about. There were quite a few questions. I then went back to the networks and decided to join Library 2.0, since it pertained directly to what we were learning in this class. I read some of the posts, and it seemed that this network would be useful and allow me to bounce some ideas off fellow librarians interested in new technology.

This is one of the networks that has to approve your membership before you can join, so I had to enter the location and type of librarian position that I held. Then I had to wait for a response. It took a full day, but then I received an approval email and was able to go back to the site and introduce myself. There were fifteen other new members, so I imagine others thought this would be a good network to join as well. All in all, I don't think I will invest a lot of time on my Ning profile at this point, but I'm glad I know how it works and will check back with my Library 2.0 members.