Is Tagging Del.icio.us? It's Downright Yummy!

The first thing that struck me after I successfully imported my Favorites to del.icio.us?

"Whoa!" I thought. "I have a lot of bookmarks."

I had to clean them up. That was work. Is work. Haven't really finished yet. Will make more public when I do. It'd be embarassing to put out dead links and stuff. It's good to clean house.
I will share many rare and wondrous things soon.

The only thing I don't like about del.icio.us is the appearance of one's bookmarks list; I like to see how many other people favorited the same sites I did, but who can read pale blue letters overlaid by pink highlighting? And who thought pale blue type in general a good idea? Gosh I have a lot of appearance issues with these sites, don't I? Anyway I'm fascinated to see how many sites I have that no one else, or only a few, have saved. (Oh, never mind, those are all QL Learning 2.0 blogs....)
The whole idea of tagging is to make things more accessible, and it puts me in mind of Hennepin County Library and Sanford Berman's Herculean efforts to revitalize and reform classification. That was something that got me excited over twenty years ago. At the same time, I loves me a good controlled vocabulary, so let's not get sloppy with tags. Remember my previous post about Technorati, (how could you forget?) when I was searching for movable books? There're so many ways to write the things you're looking for! Popupbooks, pop-up books, popup books, movables, on and on and on. I struggle with that. I don't want to tag every blog post here with "Library 2.0" but should I?

Technorati, the 14th Thing

Well that was a surprise. Technorati's front page looks like MSN.com.

I thought it would be a very tech-oriented site, but...Jessica Simpson's new movie, nude

photos of Melissa Joan Hart, "worst iPod accessories"....I feel like I'm in the supermarket checkout line.

I started the process of claiming this blog, just for the sake of trying it, but the "quick claim"

feature asked me for the username and password I use on Blogger. Huh. I asked the guy from Ken's Space about it and he said they didn't ask him that. I'm sure lots of people have done it without incident but for now I'll wait on the claiming thing.

I wasn't able to view the Technorati tour screencast; it just wouldn't start. I did perform the discovery exercise but results were puzzling and seemed different every time. At the Front Page I searched the phrase "movable books" first without the quotes (868 results, where the 4th hit was 2 videos of movable books- great! Even thought the other 867 results were almost all irrelevant, I was happy to see the video results.) Then I searched with the quotes, got just 9 results, all relevant, very nice....but no videos. But...the videos had been labelled "movable books." Why did they show up in a search using two keywords presumably "anded" together, but not in a search for the phrase with which they were labelled? Searching the Blog Directory for "Learning 2.0" brings up lots of relevant results, but more general topics bring up way too much. I can hardly believe that out of 110 million blogs, only 6 posts in English are tagged "movable books," and only 31 are tagged "popupbooks." There's more, as it turns out, if you really work the spacing: pop up books, popup books. But there are those videos again! and more of them this time. So, it's a puzzlement. The advanced search feature is something I want to explore when I have more time and fewer things to complete before deadline!

Just one more thing about Technorati: is there a graphic designer in the house? Because that page is hard to look at. The layout is busy, the ads are intrusive and the there's a lot of type smashed awfully close together. But I guess when you're the only blog-rankin' game in town, folks are coming for the info, not for your looks.

Just not my "Thing": No.11

I know lots of people like LibraryThing. After exploring it a little bit and entering a few titles in my own list, my reaction to the whole thing is...meh. Seems harmless. Seems like the kind of thing Amazon would feature on their site, the way they encourage you to compile wishlists and track the gifts you've given people. "If you're looking at this book, you might like to know that people who bought this book also bought etc.etc." Okay. So I know that a bazillion other people liked or read or own The Golden Compass. Okay, maybe I'd like to know what else those people read. But, probably not. Thinking of something else to read is not a problem for me. So, in terms of a library application, I guess it's a way to show people asking for reader's advisory that they...don't have to ask a librarian? They can go to LibraryThing, type in some of their favorite books, and see what other people, who've read those books, also liked. Okay, fair enough; it's kind of like a Pandora for books? It's fine. It just doesn't have a lot of value for me. Anyway, here's my fledgling Thing.

That's Not How I Roll

Okay, I hate to be like this, but again, this is not my idea of a killer app. I like that you can edit your searchroll after making it, naturally, so you can add sites you discover later. That's good.

The ads are a little intrusive, though, and the "celebrity searchrolls" don't inspire my confidence.

I can see a use for Rollyo, like that pointed out by Marion, who uses it to search multiple crafting sites at once, but I can't think of many cases in which I'd want to limit a search to "only sites I know" and there are other ways to limit searches to "sites I trust," like using Google to search only ".edu" sites for reliable content. There must be a good use for it...what am I missing? It does have a kickin' logo: simple, memorable, representational of its function, and it looks like candy!

I created a searchroll and was able to search all at once in many library blogs for instances where the new Amazon Kindle is mentioned, and word on Sirsi/Dynix/Horizon, and stuff like that. It's okay. I didn't see a way to link to my searchroll on the Rollyo site, but I added the searchroll as a page element, top left there, see?

I solemly vow to try my best to really really like the next Thing.

My Generation

Went to Generator Blog but didn't really see anything interesting enough to click on.

At BigHugeLabs I tried the LOLcat generator, using it to caption a photo which I have posted here without my cat's permission.

But okay, library app: can you use Rollyo to search a bunch of Image generators for a particular kind you'd like to use for your library's webpage, to promote a program or service? For instance, use the Chocolate Bar Generator to headline a blurb about a chocolate-themed Valentine's Day program? (Hint: NO NO NO!!! That would be really really cheesy!! See the image?)

And I'm afraid that's the problem with image generators: they make a site look kind of cheesy.

They're just something you impulsively click, construct and email to your friend in an idle moment, not something I see being useful at work. Although, I'm starting to grow attached to EmoFiona; I could see using something like that on a personal page.

Thing # 8 Just a Little Bit Late: RSS Feeds

Bloglines, where have you been all my life? I can't believe how easy you make it to keep up with eighty different sites without a lot of clicking and checking and waiting to load! You're easy to set up, you recognize me when I return without making me sign in, you don't have any ads.

I love you unconditionally! Your name could be more euphonious, but one can't have everything. (Where would you put it?)
I can make folders, you say? So my list of eighty-plus sites can be orderly.

And that's just a fraction of what Bloglines can do, it seems. There's a nifty search function that lets you search for words and phrases anywhere, or only in your own feeds, and it's sortable by date, so you can track the latest mention of, say, "Queens Library" in a host of library blogs.

And not to forget Thing Number 9: Some library-related blogs I find very informative, useful and enlightening include the incomparable Jessamyn West, and the Librarian in Black.

Freestyle Counting

I think I missed Thing #6, exploring Flickr mashups and the like. So let's see if I can do this spell-with-flickr thing:



There! Well that was a
!! In fact, it was so much fun I'm not sure I can


But I will for now.The nice thing about this application is the ease with which you can change the individual letters. Don't like this "p"? Click it and get another. That one is unbalanced with the sizes of the other letters? Click again and presto. I'm thrilled I don't get a field of letters to choose from, as that would suck time like a Dyson.

Photo Montager is another Flickr mashup I tried. Now there, I wish I'd had some choice of which photo would be montaged, but no, you pick a tag and some photo with that tag is chosen for you and "montaged", or roughly imitated, using many many flickr photos. Meh, I thought, but then I was charmed when I realized that, as your cursor passes over the montage, individual pictures pop out. That was a sweet little effect. I want to play with that some more using really unusual tags...