Saturday, October 24, 2009

Tags Galore

THING 13: DELICIOUS
I am a huge fan of this tool. I learned about it and opened an account last month for LIS 644. At first I wondered why this could be so great that it would be worth replacing Favorites and Bookmarks, but I am a complete convert. I tag a lot of sites and pages. Being able to categorize them with tags is the best thing that ever happened to my bookmarking ability, especially since I can assign multiple tags, then edit at will. The other great thing is that I can access my bookmarks from any computer, and since I use several computers, this is a boon. I haven't had the need to share bookmarks yet -- the social part of social bookmarking -- but if I do, that will only be icing on the cake.

THING 14: TECHNORATI
Things at Technorati have apparently changed quite a bit recently, or at least since the 23 Things site put in its links and such. It sounds like they have been busy making changes to deal with the overwhelming mass of blogged information and the faux stuff masquerading as information. An authority system has just been implemented that scans blogs and ranks them for trustworthiness as the real thing, not scams. The highest ranking one as of today is the Huffington Post. You can see the Top 100 blogs (I searched for Hendrik Hertzberg and KT Horning to see how that works, but the search function was temporarily out of order), scan the vast index of popular tags, and more. Well worth exploring further. I do not want to tag any of my blog posts; they are not worthy of anyone's attention other than instructors and personal relationships who read them to see what I am doing in the time that I am not with them...

One Hit, Two Misses

THING 10: IMAGE GENERATOR

The podcast and how-to information on the 23 Things page is not very helpful with this Thing. Sounds like a fun idea but how exactly do you do it? Do you google "image generator"? I went to one of the links (Generator Blog) but gave up--you have to know what you are doing. I went to another link (BigHuge Lab) and spent waaay too long trying to generate something and post it. I made a lame op-art montage of an old portrait photo, but all I could do was post a link to this blog, not the image. I tried to save it to my computer and then post it from there, but just got the eternal spinning wheel of doom. So all I've got here is a link. Diminishing returns...must move on to the next Thing. In my copious spare time I will return to this Thing and try again. When I have a real need for it.


THING 11: LIBRARY THING

Now THIS is addictive! I'm having great fun adding books to my library catalog, finding covers, discovering others who love the book I read 25 years ago and never forgot, discovering others who have put books I produced into their libraries. I've clued my 17-year-old librarian-in-the-making niece into it, so that we can share books and ideas in yet another way. When I have more time I will post comments (that time Thing again). I love reading comments from others. I can see this could be the Thing that I lose all track of time with.


THING 12: ROLLYO

Incredibly frustrating. I get the basic concept, but I can't get the site to work, to load anything. It might be fun to create a search engine for intellectual freedom or attention deficit disorder or college funding. If I could get Rollyo to respond.

BigHugeLabs: Do fun stuff with your photos

BigHugeLabs: Do fun stuff with your photos

Posted using ShareThis

Sunday, October 11, 2009

In the News



THING 8: RSS Feeds and Blogline Registration

Aha! Those NYT, BBC, NPR, and Madison weather headlines that display on my Google homepage must be RSS feeds. (Um... is that right?) Always good to find out what's behind the magic.

Anyway, I've created the Bloglines account and added the button to my Internet Explorer Favorites. The "using bloglines" tutorial was really helpful, with all the screenshots, and the thorough step-by-step instructions. Very clear, linear thinker, the author. His note at the top of his post says that now, in 2009, Google Reader would be his reader of choice, though. Must explore...


THING 9: Subscribe to Feeds

Feeds added: I added the whole library group, then unsubscribed to a couple of individual feeds. I am left with Resource Shelf and Shifted Librarian. I also subscribed to the Comments page feed of the New Yorker, using the orange button, so that I can keep up with the scribblings of some favorite political writers. I tried to add a blog by copying the URL (no orange box or other shortcut), and got through the two layers of "Subscribe" in Bloglines, but ultimately the subscription failed. The blog is not hosted by any of the usual folks (blogspot, etc.), so I'm wondering if there are blogs that aren't feedable? How does content get transformed into XML and made available?


I'm not going to subscribe to 10 feeds tonight, as the Library 2.0 site dictates. I'd rather add feeds that I really want, as they occur to me or as I find them. Otherwise, I will be inundated with stuff that I don't really care to know...