Sunday, March 29, 2009

Technorati "popular" feature

My first thought is: How is Jennifer Garner the number 4 most popular search? Honestly, what was the last movie she was in?

Second, if you're looking at the top 100 blogs by fan numbers, it seems rather tech-heavy. Whatever that means.

Third, I like the most popular news best out of all the most popular lists. As in, there were things on it I was interested in. So, I'll probably check that out again.

Delicious

I am beginning to see how exactly people spend so much time on the Internet. Now, not only can I read all the blogs I'm interested in at Bloglines, I can also refer to my favorite websites at any time, from any computer. This beats the heck out of that list of URL links to storytime sites I had saved to my flash drive when I was a children's librarian.

I also really like the tagging aspect--chalk up to the hidden cataloguer in me. A wonderful way to organize things. While working on this assignment, I began to wish we could tag the emails we receive at our work account. No more wondering what folder to put an email in, or later wondering what folder did I put that email in. Just tag it with whatever you might search for it later under.

Of course, I can see how this would be applicable in our jobs. For starters, it's a way to collect all the websites you frequently use to answer customer questions, and have them available to you at any computer with Internet access.

Rollyo

I decided to create a Readalikes search tool, as I could see this coming in handy at work. The next time a customer wants a list of authors like Janet Evanovich, or wants a book just like Twilight, I'll have plenty of resources at my fingertips beyond Novelist, without having to wade through the random entries brought up by a Google search.

I could see this having all kinds of applications in the library. Create a search tool consisting of other libraries' programming ideas, or trusted sites for homework help. Pretty cool.



Powered by Rollyo

Friday, March 27, 2009

Library Thing

I'm going to confess that I don't understand the great appeal of Library Thing. I have heard and read about how great it is and how the user communities are awesome, and (mostly) how horrible Shelfari is in comparison, and yet...I look at Library Thing and just think, "Meh."

I think the real barrier to my using LT is that pesky 200 book limit. Sure, I could shell out for unlimited space--it's not that expensive. But why would I do that when I can use another site and upload more books for free? Or start my own free blog, and blog about however many books I want to?

I think most people are drawn to the community--to having a space where they can talk about books, and who knows what else. This is probably where I lose interest. The message boards look sort of interesting, but I know I would never keep up with them. I don't have the time! I guess I'm lucky enough to get my fill of talking about books in the nonvirtual world.

I did set up my account--not sure how often I'll use it, though. I added the five books that are currently on my "To Be Read" shelf. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/reginalibris

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Image Generators


Wow. There is certainly a lot out there! It definitely took me more that 15-20 minutes to try out several image generators. Lots of broken links and confusing sites, too. I think I like the image I made on the Fake Magazine Generator the best, as I have complained before that you will never see a librarian on the cover of the Rolling Stone. Voila! The downside is that I have the Dr. Hook song stuck in my head.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

RSS Search Tools

Here's my thoughts on the search tools that we looked at:

Bloglines Search Tool: I liked that you could narrow this down to your feeds only. I can see myself using that when I'm looking for a blog post I've read before, as opposed to just scrolling down until I find it.

Syndic8.com: Probably my least favorite of the four. Showed a lot of irrelevant blogs when I searched.

Topix.net: I liked how this came up directly with Tulsa news and blogs on it, and also how you could search other locations (I did Charleston, WV, where my husband's family is from). Keyword search was okay, not great.

Technorati: The one I liked the best. The page is a little cluttered, but I feel like I got the best results on my seaches here.

I have to admit I didn't add any blogs to my Bloglines, because I have plenty.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Thing #8--RSS Feeds

Okay, since I've previously posted on my love for Bloglines, for Thing 8, I'll talk a little bit about how Bloglines helps me as a librarian. One of the things I use Bloglines for is to subscribe to sites that help with RA/collection development. Some of them are "professional" and geared specifically toward libraries and librarians (like Early Word: The Publisher/Librarian Connection) and some are just ordinary people who post reviews and comments on the books they read (Citizen Reader). These give me a chance to explore books and media I might not come across regularly. And reading the posts of someone who loves, say, Regency Romances, keeps me up to date in a genre that I don't read a whole lot of myself, making it easier to do RA.

I'd also like to point out that if you are a children's librarian or a teen librarian, there are a host of people out there blogging their ideas for children's and teens' programming. Plug them all into Bloglines, and you have a wonderful programming resource.

Oh.

Had I looked ahead, I would have realized that the next 23 Things project was about RSS feeds. And maybe I would have blogged about something different!

But I still love Bloglines!

Technology Blog--Bloglines!

My personal favorite bit of technology right now is Bloglines. I love it. Before I knew about Bloglines, I had all the blogs I read saved to my favorites list on my laptop, but that didn't really help me if I was trying to read them somewhere else. While I'm probably not exercising my memory as much now, since I don't have to recall the web addresses of several different blogs, I do love the fact I can just input a blog address into Bloglines, and it will keep track of it. Bloglines allows me to access the blogs I'm interested in all from one address (www.bloglines.com), and allows me to see right off the bat which blogs have new posts. The one problem I've had is that on a couple of blogs I've added, it only shows the first few lines of the blog post, and you have to click on it to read the rest. For most blogs, though, the entire entry is available on the Bloglines page.

I've been using Bloglines for about a year now, and I'm up to 47 (!) blogs. I could have never kept up with 47 blogs before! (Honestly, I can't keep up with them now, since I only check it twice a week, but the nice thing about Bloglines is it holds up to 200 posts new, so you can always go back and catch up.)