I.P. Morwenna

#13 (Week 6) Del.icio.us

2007-03-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

I can see that Del.icio.us seems to be suited for those with academic careers, or at least those doing a lot of research. The challenge for me using it, will be finding a subject that I will be using electronic resources more than print. There might be some use for it while researching activities for the Harry Potter program we are planning for the summer. hmmm....

When doing research for any sort of paper or for researching trends in the library world, or wherever, Del.icio.us (and other social bookmarking tools) provides pointers to works that will aid and, to a certain extent, will help you find more "creditable" sources. The latter pointer is based on the "# saved" at the bottom of the entry. I f 377 have saved one article, but only 25 have saved another, I would be inclined to start with the first, and then read the latter as time permitted. Obviously there would be other clues to the "worthiness" of an article, but that is a gut reaction that I think many of us would have.

While going through the library's list, I found tags for many articles that I might not have thought of otherwise. Sort of like running your fingers through the old card catalogs, you learn a lot from the items around the item that you are looking for.

Being a cataloger from not so long ago, I would prefer to see authoritative language being used. However, I do see an advantage to the "from the gut" tags - the language is more vibrant, closer to the point, more easily intuited on the spur of the moment. There will be a loss of information because of the lack of authoritative language, but given the sheer amount of information being processed, perhaps this is not as negative as it otherwise might be.

Libraries, Library of Congress, OCLC, etc. would do well to consider the tags being used by real users/searchers of information. Especially tags used by scholarly researchers have the potential for being the basis of new subject headings. I do not believe that it is hopeless to provide guidelines and authority to online information, but I do believe that the methods must be as easy to use as Del.icio.us, or else no one will use them.

#12 (Week 5)

2007-03-27T20:17:00.000-07:00

http://rollyo.com/i.p._morwenna/homework_help/

This is my Rollyo. I'm not sure that I've added it properly, but here it is anyway.
The Rollyo was peculiar. I went back a couple of times to do it, because the first time or times through, it didn't seem to stick. I only found my own rollyo, by backing out and then finding it under the recently added rollyos. Maybe I am miising something, but I did not see anything on the site that helps you search with your own rollyo after it is created. It took me three attempts before I could see that I was indded using my own rollyo to search. Again, this needs more practice to make it work well.

#11 (Week 5) Play Gyroball (from Arcaplay)

2007-03-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

I like the idea of having basic games available on a blog. These oldies but goodies are still fun (for me at any rate).

I chose the Games section from the Web 2.0 Awards site. There were only three sites listed (too few entered?) Arcaplay had a bunch of interesting games - but I liked the classics. I like the fact, too, that they were very up front about saying that we could use the games on our blogs and myspaces entries. Not only that, they gave us the proper html to paste in too. :) Great for folks in a time crunch or just not very handy.

Hope this all works...

ps. Click on the games, and use your arrow keys to guide the ball along the path. Good luck!
Free Online Games brought to you by Arcaplay

#10 (Week 5) ARRGGG!

2007-03-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

Well, it turned out that I had done all of the correct steps to get the first card here (which was a very cute picture of my cat), except to check the "I Accept" box to agree to the terms of usage. grrrr... So in all of the mucking about, I lost the chance to put the first trading card on Flickr so I can't recover it from work, so I made a new one, and had some help making sure that I actually got the thing posted correctly (thanks M!)

I'm not used to being such a nimrod about technology - but all of the little steps needed are tripping me up. Maybe when I have more experience, I'll stop tripping over the risers....

#10 (Week 5)

2007-03-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

My Daughter wants me to say, "Falcon is the best person ever," however, I am resisting the temptation because I don't want to stoke her over inflated ego... ;-) Yes, she IS looking over my shoulder!

It took me a couple of hours to figure out all of the things that I needed to do to make this assignment function. I played around with the two online image generators listed, and googled to find other image generators. Generator Blog had some interesting ideas (I liked being able to Elf my name, for instance), but I preferred using the Flickr Toys. I couldn't resist playing with the card generator. I'm hoping I did the grabbing right to put it on the blog, we will see.

Speaking of cats ... mine keeps on interrupting these study sessions. You may find cat hairs in the pixels ...

#9 (Week 4)

2007-03-25T20:11:00.000-07:00

Through Feedster, I found an interesting blog "SwordMaiden.com." Man, I wish that it had existed back when I was first fighting. However, I can take pride that I was fighting back before they even thought that females might need different training from the guys. Feedster was pretty easy to use, and in the long run, I think I like it the best of the feeders listed.

I'm not keen on the format of Topix.net. It presents news and blogs as equals on the homepage. It seems wrong to show news (hopefully reasonably unbiased) as equal value to blogs, among which was one seemingly promoting Anglo Americans' right to be racist because "minorities" can get away with calling whites racist, but not vice versa....

Technorati is just overwhelmingly "blog." The way it is set up, I just don't think that I would ever use it to look for anything meaningful. Perhaps I didn't give it enough of a chance, but it is just too "bloggy" for my tastes.

Enough of that for now. I'll revisit them before I get labeled a luddite ... :) Just not right now.

#8 (Week 4)

2007-03-24T23:12:00.000-07:00

After staring at the blog screen a little bit more I finally figured it out!!!! What I said earlier about blogs being multi-layered is still quite true. The reason why I have multiple entries after my initial attempt, stemmed from my not putting the coding into the correct area of the blog. I had set up an Edit Post screen, when I should have set up a Template screen. When I added the HTML string to the Template screen, suddenly you could see my bloglines sites everywhere I'd tried it before. Success!! An editing nightmare, but a success!!

???

2007-03-24T18:18:00.000-07:00

#8 (week 4) second time

2007-03-24T18:16:00.001-07:00

#8 (Week 4) Blog Roll

2007-03-24T18:04:00.000-07:00

well, here is my roll-a-blog. nothing very difficult. however, had my colleague not been here, I would never have known to hit the edit html button. well, i suppose i might have figured it out eventually, but that step was definitely not very intuitive. on the bloglines side too, i didn't know what was wanted in the two lower blanks. there are some things about creating the blog that are easier than others - it is a multi-level task, and i am still running on a single level most of the time. with time I will get used to adding in the different formats under different buttons, i mean it does make sense, it's just remembering to do it and when to do it.... sigh.

Well, Let see how it looks! :)

#8 (Week 4) RSS and all that ...

2007-03-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I think that it is a bit more information than I will ever make use of. However, in terms of finding information easily, this technology does seem to fit the bill. I had no trouble actually signing up for bloglines, and it had several blog sites that seemed interesting listed automatically, and I seemed to pick up the other blog feeds (did I use that correctly) alright. However, since I rarely go out to find these sites in everyday life, I feel somewhat disconnected from the use/practice of obtaining the info. I will monitor bloglines for a while and see if it grows on me. Practically speaking, tho, I spend a lot of time on the computer at work - so I spend very little on the computer at home. At work, I have to read library related material, job-related, you know - so the fun sites that I saw will probably be neglected. What do other people do?

#7 (Week 3)

2007-03-23T01:22:00.000-07:00

Digital cameras are the best. I love being able to get photos from anywhere, and then being able to either print them, save them, or ditch them. Not to mention, being able to take shot after shot, with the reasonable assurance that at least one of the photos will be a good one.

One step further ... I am looking forward to being able to use Flickr more easily, and being able to share photos with my family and all!

#6 (Week 3) Mash-Ups and other fun with pictures

2007-03-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

I like the idea of being able to create trading cards - that's fun technology. The other use that I found most intriguing, was the color wheel version (Flickr Color Pickr). As the daughter of artists, I can see the use of this for collages, and backgrounds, and a variety of other things... If there was more variety to the Mappr, I'd like it better. Perhaps I didn't mess with it enough. Certainly intriguing to map your travels this way... Now I have to go home to practice making trading cards for the family :)

# 5 (Week 3) If you ever wonder why I'm the way I am, it's probably because I'd rather be here ...

2007-03-21T17:56:00.000-07:00

taken from Twitchietai's SCA stuff

# 5 (Week 3) Flickr

2007-03-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

Flickr looks interesting. Has some nice potential for sharing our Library related photos - a good place to pick up photos for publicity. Will attempt photo attachment ...

Greetings

2007-02-28T12:18:00.000-08:00

Greetings All!

This is my attempt to enter the new age of electronic connectiveness. I like to learn new things, so I hope to make this a part of my life for a long time :)