Sunday, August 12, 2007

Thing #15:
Read a few perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0 & the future of libraries

I'll come back to this one. My "thoughts on Library 2.0" are a more than a little disjointed at this time.
-J.

Update:

See Thoughts on Things for summarized thoughts, ponderings, and general philosophizing.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Thing #14:
Discover Technorati and learn how tags work with blogs

Ok, I spelunked around on Technorati a bit and claimed some of my various blogs. (Woohoo!- I have an authority of "1"!) I also tagged all my posts in this blog as "mdlearn2" and "23things."As I mentioned in Thing 9, I like Technorati's directory search for finding blogs. I imagine that if I were a more serious blogger looking for a large readership, Technorati would be more important to me. For now, though, I think I've pretty much reached the extent of its usefulness to me.

technorati

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Thing #13:
Tagging and Discover Del.icio.us

I'm all over this Thing. I've been using Del.icio.us since May, when I was introduced to it at an MLA pre-conference. I hop from computer to computer constantly, especially at work. I have my ready-reference, homework help, professional development, and readers' advisory websites tagged "Library" in my Del.icio.us account, and this lets me help patrons and/or work on any project from whatever desk I happen to land at. I even have the Del.icio.us bookmarks extension installed on my Firefox browser. Del.icio.us and I are friends.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Thing #12:
Roll your own search tool with Rollyo

I rolled a search on Rollyo called Jill's Animal Search, made up of animal-related sites from our Internet On-Ramp page and ALA's Great Web Sites for Kids.

Powered by Rollyo
At first, I was very excited about Rollyo, but now that I've played with it, I'm a little disappointed by its limitations. I thought I would be able to create a true federated search, but Rollyo doesn't seem to be able to search any search engines or databases, only flat websites. Furthermore, it seems to search the entire domain of any web address you give it. For example, if I asked it to search "http://kids.nationalgeographic.com," it searched everything on "http://nationalgeographic.com," not just the kids' site. So my search results, which were supposed to be drawing from sources appropriate for kids, were full of stuff for adults. These are serious drawbacks. Phooey.