Friday, March 30, 2007

Thing Twelve

I made a search roll for three sites I search often: Snopes, Wikipedia, and Onelook. The search worked and that's pretty cool, but I didn't like all of the ads that popped up before my search results. Also, the results were in a seemingly random order, and I wasn't given the option to reorder them. Again, I just don't think anything can improve on Google, at least for my own personal searches. I know how to manipulate a Google search to find the results I want. This just seems like an unnecessary addition to my life.

Thing Eleven

Ooh, fun. I picked Coverpop from the Books category. I can't say it's useful at all, but it is durn fun. Pick a category, like, say, purses, and the screen is filled with tiny purses in a million colors and styles. Hovering over or clicking on a purse will take you to the online store at which you can purchase it. Very cool. I liked the Flickr colorfields coverpop best because it covered a variety of photographed objects instead of just one category.

Thing Ten

From the Visual Poetry Generator:
Make Visual Poetry - ImageChef.com


From the Nerd Name Generator:
My nerd name is Griselda, the Java Magician. Whatever that means.

These tools were easy and fun. Not much to comment on.

Thing Nine

I couldn't hear the podcast; it was stuck on "loading," and refreshing didn't help.

I played with Technorati and Feedster. Technorati was up first. I found it difficult and confusing. I wanted blogs and news feeds, but separate searches for common terms turned up only pictures and videos. When I finally found a blog I wanted to read, it was totally unclear how to add a feed to that. I added it to my "favorites," but that doesn't help, because I probably won't be going back to Technorati.

Feedster was even worse. Narrowing my search to blogs only doesn't work; I still get product listings, etc. I'm totally disgruntled by these sites. I can't say I understand their use, either; I thought they were going to find feeds that I could add to my bloglines account or to a new account on Feedster or Technorati. Instead, they search for blog *posts*, not blogs, and I'm afraid I don't see how even their intended use could be better than Google.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Thing Eight

This was fun. I subscribed to thirteen feeds:

Accidental Hedonist
Bloglines | News
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
DogReader
The Lazy Vegetarian
Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week
NASA Breaking News
New Urban Legends
NYT Book Review
PETA Latest News
Salon
The Shifted Librarian
Vegan Blog: The (Eco) Logical Blog

I made my blogroll public.
Then I added feeds to Angie's and Mana's blogs as well as my own (why not?), and to Unshelved, Library 2.0, and the Merc-News police blotter. Sadly, I couldn't subscribe to Readers' Club because, according to bloglines, that site doesn't publish a feed.

I enjoyed this exercise. I confess I didn't really know what RSS was. I knew it was a reader that could consolidate all of your daily info in one place, but I didn't really get it and I never bothered practicing. Now I shall. Instead of having bookmarks I click on daily, I will use an RSS feed. I may even have one for home and one for work. YEAH.

Thing Seven

Yesss, it's freeform writing day.

I've been playing around with Wikipedia quite a bit. My feelings are mixed, like yours may be as well. On the one hand, I consult Wikipedia all the time when I want a description or history of something or someone, or when I want more than just a dictionary definition, or when I want to see how something fits into a big picture. On the other hand, when I was fact-checking children's nonfiction, I couldn't rely on Wikipedia as a definitive source. I still used it, but checked their sources, when they were given, so I could cite a, you know, real source.

I've played around only a little bit with editing in Wikipedia. I fiddled with a couple of pages about various libraries. I didn't really have the patience or focus to stick with one article and argue with other posters about the finer points of it.

To fulfill my comment requirement, I insulted Angie on her blog.

Thing Six

I made a trading card. My pic is kind of blurry, but perhaps that denotes my mental state.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Thing Five

I found one of gothmom's Flickr photos by using the Learning 2.0 tag:


banner2, originally uploaded by Gothmom.


which I love because the caption says, "Some art the kids did last year for Week of the Young Child," but I actually made the "art" in the shot. I have since received this work of "art" back from King and have proudly displayed it in the staff room here at EK.



I also created a Flickr account and uploaded a picture of myself in a lavender wig at Mardi Gras 2006, but apparently there's some kind of minimum picture upload as well as an approval process before my photos become public. Thus, I cannot link to it here. It's charming, though, I assure you.