Technorati

I've had a bit of a look at this Technorati business. I tried the search term "learning 2.0" - as a phrase and I got 317 results in blogs, and 315 under directory. The results looked pretty similar there to me. I got 543 under posts, I thought this would be more, and only 125 in tags. I'm not sure what all that means, except that it's a good idea to try a few different methods of searching in these sites with "user generated" content and tagging, as people will tag things by what is meaningful to them.


[kirstenstaggingtest]


The above is my failed mission to manually add a technorati tag to this post. The good news is that technorati seems to pick up the labels from blogger to use as tags. I searched for my first post which I labelled "silly greetings", and it came up in the results. Obviously some time is required for blogs to be "pinged" for results to appear. I guess I'll try searching for my test above in a couple of days to see if it gets picked up.

A tip on this front, make sure when you search in tags you select "any authority" (it defaults to "some authority" as I guess most of our blogs won't be bookmarked much, and therefore won't be in the authority ratings yet.

A note on Librarything

A little note for my colleagues who for some reason are actually reading this stuff!

If you'd like to try the LibraryThing website, you can click here, or look for the small print under the book pictures on my sidebar over yonder. If you click on the book pictures you'll probably find yourself at Amazon, and if you want to look at my library, click on the underlined "my library" on the sidebar yonder.

I've also discovered that if you click to peep into someone else's library while your logged in, it will tell you if you have any of the same books in your collections! Ooooo...

Del.icio.us

I managed to set up a Del.icio.us account a couple of weeks ago, and tag a couple of articles I found while doing the Bloglines exercise. That bit was easy enough, but I think I must be missing something here. I was just looking at the PCLMC2 delicious site, but I couldn't see any comments on the links. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong spot?

I like the sharing aspect of these tools. Yes you can bookmark a page just the same and keep it for yourself, but with this tool, you can share your bookmark with others. And unlike Google etc, these articles are here to be seen because someone has read it and wants to recommend it to others. The amount of people linking to pages is a good indication of usefulness, and once you find someone with simliar interests, you may find a lot of stuff you may not have necessarily have been looking for.

The tags also add an extra bit of oopmh to the average bookmark, in that they allow bookmarks to be categorised with a number of tags, instead of living hidden away in a folder. This should make the easier to find, especially where there are a number of people using them, like at the reference desk.

Rollyo - a work in progress

I can see how this could be useful for certain things, but I think you'd have to spend a bit of time fiddling with it to really take advantage of it, more time than I just have. I've created a searchroll:

http://rollyo.com/kirstentheblogger/this_and_that/

but the searchroll I would really like to create would search within databases, and I'm not sure if that is possible. I think I need to experiment more with this one.

Library Thing

This seems like a nifty thing. But it seems like it would take a while to get used to the navigation of it. It's not always obvious what it's doing. The recommendations are good. It was recommending things I already know I like. I couldn't help wishing it had an option for tagging books I want to read next. If I missed that could somebody please leave a comment for me? it would be much appreciated.

Good Ol' Bloglines!

Look what I just found. This is a really interesting idea. Maine State Library has created a "Library Use Calculator", which calculates the value of the items and services you (and patrons) use at the library each month. What a fantastic idea! My figure was $387 - in US Dollars of course. But it explains how the figures are calclulated, and has instructions for customising to your own library's needs. One for the to-do list!

http://www.maine.gov/msl/services/calculator.htm

South Park Me!

I think this is a pretty good likeness actually. I've seen people using these South Park pictures of themselves, and wondered how they were doing it. But I must admit it's not something I would have gone out looking for unless I really wanted it for something. So here's my excuse! Click on the picture to go to the webpage and try it out. Do you think I could pass for Kyle's older sister?

More RSS

I also looked at Gale onefile, it also has an RSS alert. I've used the email alerts from these databases before, but I like that these all go to the same place as the blog feeds, news feeds etc. Its very handy. I find it a bit cumbersome using bloglines, as you have to log in to check. Internet Explorer 7.0 which I use at home has a built in feedreader which is great - and you don't have to cut and paste the feed addresses. For the Explorer 7.0 blogfeed you have to click on the little orange XML button at the bottom of the screen:

RSS and Ebsco

I mangaed to create a feed from Ebsco for the Australian Library Journal. I had to search for the title using the keyword search to get the "create alert" option to show up. Just clicking on the publications tab doesn't work. I guess that makes sense. It's easy enough once you've done that. Once you get your search results the little orange button appears near the top of the screen. Nifty.

Searching for feeds

I liked the interface of Feedster - green is my favourite colour. But I didn't find the results I got very useful. I seemed to get a lot of results from the same blogs. I also found the text unecessarily small.

I found some interesting articles on Topix like this one on Bookmobiles. This is a big issue for us, being a small library in a large shire.

Google blog search was OK, it seemed to throw up relevant results, and it was clear which blogs the posts were from.

I think I liked Technorati the best, because you could search for posts or blogs, and the results were clearly different. I also thought it was useful to see how many subscribers the blogs had. It helps you to see which one might be the more interesting. I found some good links here. I quite like The Blogging Librarian, which I added to my Blog feeds. I found this great article on the Wyoming Libraries marketing campaign through this blog. This is one of their billboard ads.

This is pretty relevant to us here on the edge of Victoria. Plenty of sheep here!