#14 Technorati trails

I had already stumbled across Technorati or rather it had stumbled over me (see 2 posts ago) but I was amazed to see how extensive the blogosphere was. Technorati seems to be a great tool for mining the wealth of other people's thoughts, knowledge and ideas.
I proudly claimed my blog. I carried out the comparison searching exercise on Library 2.0. The results seem consistent with any keyword vs. more targeted search but what a treasure trove of blogs I found! I restricted myself to adding feeds for only 2 of them but just fancy, quite coincidentally one of them was Helene Blowers. I looked at the adding of Technorati tags stuff but decided it wasn't strictly necessary as my blog had already been sourced on it.
Some great widgets under Tools. I added My Favorites above - you can even search it, and a button suggesting people (which people I'm not sure) add my blog to their "fave" list.
I will use this again when searching for the sort of discussion that you would find on a blog. I am most likely to search the Blog directory for the more dedicated blogs. Must go and add Technorati to my Delicious bookmarks.

#13 Delicious or not?

I was thinking maybe not so delicious. I had been looking forward to this exercise - bookmarks I could access from anywhere instead of sending them to all to my hotmail address and having to trawl through to find them, but I was initially disappointed and somewhat confused.
It did not seem not user friendly, maybe if I had looked at the PCML example first as suggested it would have been better but I assumed I understood the principle behind it. So my first mistake was to rush in and import all the bookmarks from my desktop at work.
Suddenly I had 10 pages of uncategorised bookmarks! I couldn't see how to delete them en masse so I had to delete my whole account.
Feeling really out of the loop I looked to vampgirl for guidance. I began to see what you might do with the concept of tags and bundles and then carefully imported some bookmarks folder by folder. By the second folder I realised it was sensible to change the "Imported" tag before importing.
It is still possible I am missing some crucial point of elucidation because the only way I can get it to work effectively for me is to give the tags the same name as the bundles - my tags.
I think I will find it very useful but only if used in a disciplined way. For me the 2 basic rules will be: only use it for sites that I will use when mobile, and tag each bookmark in an organised fashion. (Well, I used to be a cataloguer.)
I'm not convinced of the usefulness of the the networking angle so maybe I'll explore that when more time.
And I think it's possible we could use Delicious to enhance our reference work, if we put some work into creating an rationalised bundle.
I've added my Delicious links to my page on the right. I also added it to my Facebook profile but it doesn't show up there so it seems a bit pointless. In fact Facebook generally seems a bit pointless to me but more of that later.

#12 Rollyo - sounds like Rolo to me but I just love chocolate

Did I say last week that I was now a free spirit who was less addicted to her computer? Hmn....Perhaps before I started making searchrolls. I think these are great and would be useful from both a personal point of view and also on the library website.
I asked various members of my family what they might search for regularly. One suggested art works, and the other who is interested in health gave me some good medicines sites. And following the self-indulgent food theme, I made a recipe finder, just in case there was something I couldn't track down in one of my cookbooks! (142 on Library Thing at last count.)
The challenge, especially with the artworks, was to choose the right part of the site to locate the desired data eg. images, recipes, whatever, and not extraneous material. This perhaps goes against what the Rollyo site said about going to the top of the domain always, but I think it is more useful. You can do a test search yourself - see black link on the right.
Library websites could offer some of the customised searches for users - rather like the pathfinders that we learnt how to build in our library courses.

Self-indulgent sidetracks via StatCounter and Library Thing

In the pursuit of narcissism I installed StatCounter (thanks to the talented Jewinda ). In following the links of who had looked at my blog from Alabama, I discovered I had been included in a Technorati search on the term SirsiDynix. This repository could be very useful to me at work so I have now added this rss feed.
Getting sidetracked again, I saw that someone had clicked on my blog via Library Thing so I found that the perfect late night activity was to start looking at who else had many cookbooks in common with me. I found people who had really similar libraries to whatI had on my real shelves so this prompted another flurry of uploading my books. And to crown this timewasting self-indulgence, I have started editing the entries where Amazon couldn't find a cover to find the appropriate cover from other people who have scanned the image and uploaded it BUT I AM NOT GOING TO START SCANNING!

#8++Making life even simpler - integrating RSS with Email

Becoming even more streamlined - I have discovered I can import my RSS feeds from Bloglines into my Outlook account.(We are on Office 2007). I like being able to see any updates at a moment's notice. To do this, go into Bloglines, under Additional Features choose to export subscriptions and save the file. Then right-click on the RSS Feeds folder in Outlook and choose to import an OPML file. I can also add any new feeds directly into Outlook.

#11 Cooking up Library Thing

OK I've been having more fun, and following the theme of this blog it's been all about self-indulgence and addiction. I have to confess to owning nearly 400 cookbooks (out of a total library that runs to thousands) so I thought I would catalogue my favorite 50 or so. These are all cookbooks that I use - from the trusted friends that taught me to cook and which I have used constantly, to some shiny but very carefully chosen new ones. And I have to admit to being something of a cookbook snob. Yes it's nice to have pictures but the more enduring classics eg. Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden ,Elizabeth Luard, Marcella Hazan .... teach you about food in its context and how to really cook. For those other addicts among you you can see more of my collection at
library thing.
I don't really think though that I would use Library Thing much in relation to my personal collection but more as a bibliographic tool. And I would love to add tags to our library catalogue. I've emailed Library Thing to try and set up a test of this.

#10 Generating Bob

Yes, I can see why this is called play week. I made a movie clip! See Bob Dylan pushing Learning 2.0 and this is is how I did it. It's sooo easy and I had fun.
Dylan Message Generator