Thing 10 - NING

My thoughts after reading the ChartingStocks blog: Thanks for not making us create an account on NING. This brought home how much we trust our colleagues for recommendations and leads on websites and applications like this - and how vulnerable our privacy or that of our associates is. At NING I found a knitting community that I recognized - KnitPicks - from a catalog that I receive; a good one. Many of the others looked like 2-3 people conversing with each other. And there are communities from all over the world (knitting in Swedish, communities in Setswana from Botswana).
ALA's community is pretty good sized... But there are a lot of small ones too. I don't think I'm going to establish an account, but the tutorial video really gives a good sense of the variety of options and opportunitites (read: complexity) NING offers. Lots of choices, lots of "faces" to show the different sides of you that you choose to share. My sense is (from such a short exposure!) that unlike Facebook for example, this isn't something most everyone takes part in... But there are lots of interesting options. Appreciate the comment by one 23 things blogger about using it for their community and not getting any resulting spam - a real + today!
In the back of my mind I can't help recognizing that by now I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, and like most things in life, I will have to ration myself. I simply don't have time (or desire) to spend all my time online participating in these networks and communication options, so will have to choose... and knowing myself, I might use something more if there is a professional reason to. NING doesn't look like it will be a part of our library / hospital world anytime soon (searching hospitals returned many hospitality connections!), and I already have ways of keeping in touch with both colleagues individually and with the professional societies I usually track...
So, nice to know about this one, but probably won't keep up with it for now.