#13 (Week 6) Del.icio.us

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)

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)

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!

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)

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)

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)

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!!