week 6, thing 13: delicious

Delicious is a pretty interesting way to keep sets of links to articles, blogs, and recipes. I can see using it to get more information on hobbies or other recreational pursuits, for discovering sites you've never seen before.

Another interesting use of delicious mentioned in the tinyurl was the use of tags by a group. Everyone writes a post and then includes the same tag (alal2) on their post. That tag allows everyone to view each other's posts. This is easier than setting up a group on a site like Yahoo. With that, members of the group have to gain access to post on the group's sites by the moderator.

I did find serious fault with one of the Delicious marketing plugs. The site read, "Writing an article? ... Slaving away on your dissertation? Keep track of all the source materials and commentary that you find online." Now if you are just collecting sites for an article that you are going to write next Thursday, then bookmarking a list of sites does seem okay. But a dissertation? I hope that anyone who is writing a dissertation is aware that, in the time it takes to complete their work, online sources will change. Seems risky to save everything on delicious. Why not copy and paste into a disk file or a web-based email draft, or even a google doc (now that i know what one of those is and how it works) or save as an htm file? I did like the way that delicious allowed you to mark sites, highlight information, and make notes for later.

(I am adding this part later...) Now that I am more familiar with other sites that use tags, I'm slowly getting used to the concept. It's kind of like a basic cataloging system that is created by a community. I have come back and experimented with delicious a couple more times and some of the "popular" sites have really been a lot of fun.

week 8, things 18 and 19: google docs

a few haiku from the masters

In the spring rain,

All things grow beautiful

- Chiyo-Ni

Like the morning glory

How fleeting is my life

Today... and then...?

- Moritake

Without my journey,

And without the spring,

I would have missed this dawn.

- Shiki

At the ancient pond

A frog jumped

With a splash.

- Basho

If seen by day

A firefly

Is just a red-necked bug.

- Basho

All from "The Moon in the Pines: Zen Haiku." Johnathan Clements. Viking Studio; 2000.

I used Google docs to jot a few of these down, just to get familiar with sharing and posting. It was pretty interesting to be working in Googledocs, then to click on post and have it automatically published on my blog. Another one of the benefits when you have a wide array of online services - you give users the convenience of not having to do a lot of work to share their work within your partner services.

week 4, thing 9: merlin

I didn't have too much time to spend exploring Merlin, but I did subscribe to the Merlin feed. Seems like the Learning Links components are concise, clear definitions and examples of different web tools and sites.

I think that the importance of sites like this will be to help us keep up with our patrons. Not just the ones who come into the branch, but also the ones we serve online (while I am working on this, I am also monitoring askusnow). While it's not going to happen overnight, the public's skills with computers will rise and we're going to have to be at least familiar with navigation/operation of the tools they are using (who hasn't gotten used to myspace, whether they like it or not?).

look at this ill librarian strollin'! tha kid is chillin'!

week 4, thing 8: bloglines

I did not have any experience with rss before this exercise. My goodness, what a dream! I like that rss allows you to separate the wheat from the chaff. On news sites, it is possible to skim the headlines of news articles without looking through all the side banners and clicking to separate pages. On blogs, you don't have to get bombarded with all of the pictures and other images that sometimes accompany personal blogs.

I think that of all of the tools I have looked at so far in this program, this is the one I will continue to use.

Several months ago, CNN started pulling out the top details of each of their news stories on their site, so that you could get the main ideas without reading the whole article.

It was easy to locate the different feeds in my bloglines account, the icons help distinguish between different corporate feeds and blogs (blank page icons).

I also liked how if you had been away from your account for a couple of days, you have the option of marking all your items as read. This is even easier than clearing out your email inbox.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/illcommunication
(hopefully that will work and my mastery will be demonstrated)

week 5, thing 12: rollyo

Rollyo would be helpful if you were interested in particular subjects and wanted information or updates from sites or blogs that you trusted or wanted to limit your information to.

I see the primary benefit of rollyo (as with RSS) as saving users time. Instead of sifting through 10,000 Google results, or spending a half-hour typing and clicking on 20 different sites, this culls the information on your requested sites into one simple screen, just as bloglines does.

It seems like when the internet first exploded, people were interested in all of the information that was available. It is interesting to see all of these tools that are now helping people sift through and personalize the information they receive, as well as to save themselves unnecessary time navigating around on the net.

On rollyo, my search engine is titled "silver and black" and my profile is under sjsmith. I am pretty sure that I made it public. It's an Oakland Raiders search engine.

http://rollyo.com/sjsmith/silver_and_black/

week 5, thing 10: online image generator

For this exercise, I did the postcard generator. How much fun...

Here's the link, in case the image doesn't come through:
http://www.exilim-tours.com/ecard/?id=5adaacd4531b78ff8b5cedfe3f4d5212

week 3, thing 7: another techie thing - engines linking with partners

I had noticed it before, but with bloglines, it's definitely evident. Search engines seem to have partnered with our discovery sites.

yahoo = flickr
google = blogger
ask = bloglines

What is the point of this?

"About Ask Jeeves, Inc.

As the 6th largest global web property (ComScore Media Metrix, March 2005), Ask Jeeves Inc. delivers world-class information retrieval products through a diverse portfolio of Web sites, portals and downloadable applications. Ask Jeeves' search and search-based portal brands include: Ask Jeeves (Ask.com, Ask.co.uk and es.Ask.com), the Ask Jeeves Japan joint venture (Ask.jp), Ask Jeeves for Kids (AJKids.com), Bloglines (bloglines.com), Excite (excite.com), iWon (iwon.com), My Way (myway.com) and Fun Web Products (funwebproducts.com). Additionally, Ask Jeeves owns the differentiated search technology Teoma, as well as natural language processing, portal and ad-serving technologies. Ask Jeeves generates revenue from advertisers seeking to reach the company's broad-based online audience."
from http://www.irconnect.com/askj/pages/news_releases.html?d=80865

A similar statement came from yahoo: "Why is Yahoo! Photos closing?
For some time now we’ve supported two great photo sharing services, Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we’ve decided to focus all our efforts on Flickr – the award winning photo sharing site that Time Magazine has even called “completely addictive."
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/photos/photos3/closing/closing-01.html

Last week, I also saw that users of the photo service, Shutterfly, can now opt to pick their photos up at their local Target stores.


I suppose that, like other companies, search engines have to look at their audience's needs and try to meet them all. General information, specialized news, shopping, communicating with others, music, maps... little things, small things, these companies want to cast as wide a net as possible, so that you're using them (or one of their companies) for multiple tasks in your life.