Ning and Nang

I checked out Ning, declining to create my own account. I found it pretty intuitive and easy to navigate, although the wealth of information on the site is a bit mind-boggling.

My first search for a network was depression glass, as I wanted to see if I could find information about depression glass rather than site after site of sellers of depression glass. I got 289 hits, many of which were not relevant; interestingly, several networks related to careers and women, i.e. the glass ceiling thing, were included in the results. Depression Glass in quotations came up with zero hits, so clearly there's little out there just on depression glass.

Rather than click through pages and pages of network listings, I chose the first hit, The Vintage Village, because it had depression glass in its tags. But from what I could tell as a I surfed around, it was mainly pages of sellers of various types of vintage collectibles. I did find a couple of pages that discussed and posted pictures of vintage jewelry marks, and this would be very helpful for my vintage jewelry collecting. In one section, the only thing related to depression glass was a link to About.com, which I have found to be pretty useless in the past.

I then searched for networks connected to the city in which my farm sits, just to see what I would get. 377 hits, many of which were alumni associations for universities in Illinois. I did find a network of Illinois librarians listed, and clicked on that - it only had 24 members, so obviously not a very large group. Perhaps all the Illinois librarians are too busy to network! There was an alumni site for my undergrade university, with 2077 members - but wouldn't Facebook or LinkedIn be a better choice for business networking?

Then I tried drum corps, and found 475 networks, and clicked on the Drum Corps Historical Society, looking for information on the Santa Clara Vanguard, because a friend of mine used to travel with the corps in the summer. I wondered to myself why I would go through Ning to get to information on SCV, when I could easily just Google SCV and go to the source. Maybe someone doing research would like to access every single thing about a group or topic.

My conclusion - Ning is fun, could be useful for hobbies and such, and I like the 'folders within folders kind of ideology about the setup. But in terms of creating a presence on the web for your library, I think a page would get lost. Ning, to me, is like most of these social networking sites - a time sink. I am still searching for a good article on how to manage this stuff efficiently. So far Google Reader has been the most useful.