Week 6, Thing 14: Technorati

An interesting thing about the Technorati search is that it's smarter than I thought. When searching for exact phrase "learning 2.0," Technorati searched for both "learning 2" and "learning t," as it knows that numbers can sometimes be spelled out. That's the kind of smart searching I like to see! Huge differences in searching for posts, tags, and in the directory--if searching for particular information, the post search is okay, but if looking for blogs to read, the directory is infinitely preferable. But the most linked to and most favorited blogs are very interesting--they're the kind of information that gets memed across the web in short order, especially Boing Boing. I'd love to be able to read Lifehacker and Engadget--I love tech toys and tools--but there's just way to many posts on those to keep up with. Very interesting that the tech blogs are leading the pack--it's kind of slanted toward the kind of folks who use Technorati and read a lot of blogs online, the technical type. But ooh, ooh, ICanHasCheezburger has moved up to 18 on the most linked list! Who doesn't love a lolcat? I found 5,325 blog posts about "23 things"--lots of people out there doing and talking about this program! Only 3,660 blog posts about "learning 2.0" by comparison.

Again, Technorati is okay, but I really get my blog feeds by reading other blogs and seeing what other people are reading. That way the blog is already previewed and vouched for by someone I'm already reading. Kind of like an author doing his or her own reader's advisory: "If you like my books, you'll also like to read...."

We'll see if this post gets linked under learning 2.0 on Technorati--I used both the HTML tag and Blogger's native tagging. Though if you don't already understand HTML, changing around the tag might not make sense. I also claimed my blog and we'll see what kind of links or favoriting I get. So far, I've only got an authority of 1, from the mention in St. Minutia's blog.


learning 2.0

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled program....

for the Internet phenomenon known as the LOLcat. Observe the atrocious spelling and grammar (known as leetspeak), which, when applied in a feline voice, is rendered adorable and hilarious.















According to the Wikipedia entry for lolcat:
"These images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black.[11] The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax,[11] (presumably how the cat might type, with typos and spelling errors) featuring "strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar."[12] These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin[11] or baby talk.[13] The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of snowclones in which nouns and verbs are replaced in a phrase.[13] Some phrases have a known source[14] while others seem to be specific to the lolcat form. Common themes include jokes of the form "Im in ur noun, verb-ing ur related noun."[6]. "I has a noun" pictures show a cat in possession of an object while "Invisible noun" show pictures of cats interacting with said invisible object.[6] "My noun, let me show you it/them" pictures are accompanied by cats apparently presenting or offering an object."

icanhascheezburger.com, a blog of lolcat images, is the 20th most popular blog on Technorati, with 8,974 unique links to it.

Back to our regularly scheduled program....

Week 6, Thing 13: Del.icio.us

Online bookmarks are great. I rarely use browser-based bookmarks anymore, except to put them into my bookmark toolbar in Firefox for quick access. Although I keep most of my bookmarks in Google Bookmark (I'm a Google girl, after all), I put together a set of bookmarks on del.icio.us earlier this year when I was preparing a talk on web 2.0 tools and the future of library services for the library staff day, so that staff and I could refer to the resources I used. Being able to tag bookmarks on the fly is lovely--easier than putting them in folders, I think, and easier to share them and use them for particular projects. Nice also to be able to add notes to the bookmarks, though I read today that there's a 255-word limit on the bookmark notes, not so useful for deep research. It is pretty fun to see how many people have bookmarked the same stuff as you, though, and see the tags they put on it (very useful to have some bookmarks pre-tagged for you, kind of like what LibraryThing can do).

My del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/amy_librarian

Revisiting my bookmarks, I was tickled to see that strangelibrarian has subscribed to my bookmarks! I know of this librarian from a Maryland library service (can't be too many librarians out there with the same handle) and am therefore flattered. :-)

Week 5, Thing 12: Custom search

Here's what I hate about Rollyo and other custom search engines: they only search web pages. What's the problem with that? The really good information on the web is in databases. Not just the research kind that the library buys for our patrons, but all kinds of databases: housing, books, music, news, health information, etc. A lot of these databases are free to search (think Amazon.com, WorldCat, Library of Congress). I think that Rollyo is a bit misleading, because people might think that they are harnessing the entire power of a website for their search when they aren't really. For example, if you create a Rollyo search for health information using medlineplus.gov and do a search for diabetes, you will come up with five results. If you use the search box at MedlinePlus, you will come up with 104 results just for diabetes, and even more results for diabetes combined with other health topics. What the web actually needs is a tool for combining the search boxes or search engines of different websites. That would be a really useful tool for serious research. Does anyone know of a tool like this? I'd LOVE to have it.

Of course, Rollyo is okay for websites that aren't database driven or have very transparent databases that are expressed in HTML (Amazon.com), but it doesn't necessarily search everything you think it's searching.

I set up a search for horse information from some of my favorite horse sites. Of course, not all my sites are available to use because of the formatting of the sites. One in particular, the user forum of Equinextion.com, is difficult to search because it's hosted by a popular user forum software company and every user forum is hosted at the same site. Rollyo doesn't allow for modifications to the URL that would allow me to search the section that belongs to Equinextion. Though Google Custom Search does, and I created a Google Custom Search for the same set of websites.

Here's my Rollyo search box:

Select Search Engine...horsesSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

Here's my Google search with the same sites:


For some reason, the Google search isn't working either. I have a separate custom Google Search just for Equinextion, using a URL pattern, and it works just fine. I don't get it. Grrr. You can see how very difficult it is to roll a search engine that actually searches for what you want it to search for. I'm a pretty advanced searcher and tech person, and I have a heck of a time getting a custom search to come out right. How about people who don't know how to evaluate the search engine they've just created? They'll think they're getting good information when they aren't, really. And that bugs me. Seems like false advertising, somehow.

Week 5, Thing 11: LibraryThing

I really like LibraryThing. I saw Tim Spalding at Computers in Libraries and ALA and the product he's come out with for libraries is very cool, which puts LibraryThing tags over top of the library catalog--pre-tagging, if you will. As social data on books goes, LibraryThing has a huge database and I think the tags are pretty valuable.

I've been wanting to catalog my whole personal library forever and I think I'll use LibraryThing....but I don't want to start without knowing that I'll be able to finish. :-) So I've never started. Because yes, I own that many books. They're double-stacked on my bookshelves and on the top of them and on the floor next to them. The library books don't even have a place--they're stacked next to the bed and the couch. Of course, I managed to catalog 15 books of my top favorite books in less than 15 minutes, so maybe if I took a whole weekend....

Other than Tim's product for libraries, I'm not really sure about a regular library's use of LibraryThing. Might be good for small or unusual collections, so that people who are on LibraryThing could find out who has those books. Might also be a good place for searching for unusual items such as small-run genealogy books and putting patrons in contact with the people who have them. Makes for an even larger library than WorldCat....

My LibraryThing (also in the sidebar):

Week 5, Thing 10: Images

I have a new avatar, see? ----->

I like the Dumpr.net sketch generator, even though I'm kinda sick of this picture:





















I made a neat button at My Cool Buttons, and you can click to subscribe to my blog:





And while we're on generators, even though these aren't image generators:

My Fortune Cookie told me: It is time to change the way you cast magic missile at your moose. Get a cookie from Miss Fortune

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Viscountess Amy the Ingenious of Fishbourne Sneething Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom is: Voldemort becomes a billionaire in the software market by clever use of the Goblet of Fire Get your Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom

Week 4, Thing 9: Blog search

Well, I tried searching for "dressage" in all the blog search engines. Bloglines was about useless. With Feedster I came up with a pretty good blog. Syndic8 and Topix were also useless. Technorati was okay. Blog search is very hit-or-miss. If it's a slightly more obscure topic like mine, I think it's particularly difficult to use a blog search. But I rarely come up with my blogs through blog search--I hear about them in other blogs or when looking for people I'm looking for info on.

Week 4, Thing 8: I hate Bloglines

I'm kinda surprised that as the MDLibrariesLearning project decided to use Bloglines instead of Google Reader. Everyone already had to have a Google account to set up blogs in Blogger, and it would work for Google Reader too. I hate that when you click on a feed in Bloglines to read it, all of them are immediately marked as read. What if you don't have time to read all the posts immediately? You have to go through and mark each one "Not read" one at a time. And so far I have found no way to change this setting. How ridiculous. I get feeds from eBay and Craigslist every day in my Google Reader--I may have 100 posts or more for those feeds in the morning, and there's no way I could scan them all at once. Anyway, you can see my blogroll to the right, and it will change as I add more blogs. I have a number of participant blogs already, Stephen Abrams' blog, and of course, two library comics.

However, I LOVE RSS. Love it. Love it. Love Google Reader. I have 75 feeds in my Google Reader, including all my library blogs, different comics and Cute Overload (also several lolcat RSS feeds), the library staff blog, customized eBay and Craigslist feeds, several Washington Post blogs, and dressage blogs so I can get my horse fix. I'd love to add more, except that's really my limit for reading. I like pretty in-depth feeds.

I definitely want my library to offer RSS feeds for different things--blogs for library news, technology training, children's programs; customizable feeds from the library catalog for notification of new things added to the collection; maybe a podcast or videocast to take advantage of the draw of visual media. It's a great technology--both for getting generalized info out to many people without getting caught in spam filters, and for creating specialized information streams without giving out any personal information (such as with eBay and Craigslist feeds).

Week 3, Thing 7: Anything goes redux

Neat article from Library Journal about IM and different services blending IM into other services, and how it can be used for library purposes: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6453427.html&

Chat has moved up in the world from the traditional IM formats to Meebo, where you can sign into multiple networks without installing software, Meebo Rooms and Gabbly, where you can have multiuser chat, Twitter, a microblogging platform with lots of options for sending and receiving info, and Tumblr and Meshly, which combine microblogging with other tools like social bookmarking and feed aggregation. I love what these tools can do....but I don't want to be available by IM all the time.

Week 3, Thing 7: Anything goes

I personally am excited about ultramobile PCs. Like I said, I edit when I'm not librarianing (there is no good verb for "doing a librarian's job"), and I really would love to have a small PC that I could haul around in a regular bag. I have a laptop that I use at home, but it's really not great for carrying everywhere as it's too big, and I have a PocketPC, which I love, but it's a completely different operating system and it doesn't have a keyboard. It's extremely useful and I use it every day, but I *have* to have the full version of Word at the very least in order to edit. Plus I'd like to have Internet access anywhere there's a hotspot, without paying wireless fees to access the web. I don't mind having different machines for different uses (MP3 player, digital camera, cell phone, PocketPC, laptop, UMPC), but if I could combine a few of them, I'd love that.

On the UMPC thought, I am very impressed by the $100 laptop project, especially the ability to make a ad-hoc local network for sharing files. Children's textbooks could be cheaply distributed by PDF, the children can create many kinds of files for projects, and as they would be run by human power, they wouldn't contribute to global warming. Brilliant. We all know that we are living in exponential times--see "Shift Happens" video below--and that information is changing so rapidly that soon, if we wait for a textbook to come out, it will be outdated by the time it is published. Technology, properly applied, may allow developing countries to participate in lifelong learning as well.

Week 3, Thing 6: Flickr mashups

deck1407069
Originally uploaded by starscrumble

Hee, hee, I'm on a trading card! I was tickled by Google-fu on Urban Dictionary and immediately had to use it in a sentence.

Oh, and as a Warhol painting, thanks to BigHugeLabs.com:

Week 3, Thing 5: Explore Flickr

Amy and Alex at ALA
Originally uploaded by starscrumble

When I'm not a librarian, I'm a freelance editor. I never meet the authors of my books--they're usually academics at universities around the country. Imagine my surprise when I walked by the IFLA booth at the ALA convention and there was Alex Byrne, head of the CAIFE committee of IFLA and author of The Politics of Promoting Freedom of Information and Expression in International Librarianship: The IFLA/FAIFE Project. I finished editing his book the week before the ALA conference. It was a treat for me to meet one of my authors, as editing is a pretty solitary occupation, and he sent me this picture his colleague took of us at ALA. I'm going to post the photo on my editing website too (not to worry, I have permission!)

It's nice to be able to tag photos and share them, but I really do very little public sharing of photos. Thanks, I like most of my photos to stay private, shared to friends by email. However, some of the things that can be done with Flickr are very cool--slideshows, easy blogging tools, etc.

Week 2, Thing 4: Register your blog and track our progress

I am all registered with E*Vents. I know a few of my other colleagues have created their blogs and registered them, so I'm hoping that they will be on the blogroll soon.

Week 2, Thing 3: voila, blog!

I had a defunct blog for a little while, but I created a new one for this project. I like being able to keep the theme of the blog consistent, as this one is. Though I'm not that fond of Blogger--I'd rather use WordPress or TypePad for the post categorization--it's a good and easy tool. And besides which, I am a Google girl, and I sign in once and have tabs for the blog, Gmail, Reader. . . .

Edited: Oops, I was wrong about post labeling--Google has added it since the last time I blogged!

Week 1, Thing 2: 7 1/2 habits

#1 Begin with the end in mind
#2 Accept responsibility for your own learning
#3 View problems as challenges
#4 Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner
#5 Create your own learning toolbox
#6 Use technology to your advantage
#7 Teach/mentor others
#7 1/2 Play!

The hardest, definitely, is to view problems as challenges. I like challenges, like figuring things out, but it can be stressful to have problems with patrons and other people; still, that's where I've done some of my best learning (even if I wasn't fond of the process at the time!). The easiest? Not sure, really, but possibly play, teach, use tech, or have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner--I am a product of my school system's gifted program, which gave me the ability to structure my own learning and be confident in making choices about my own learning process. It's really the way I think all K-12 learning (and lifelong learning) should be structured. I think that our current system of education is failing to provide students with the confidence and tools to tackle their lifelong learning. Instead, schools are often teaching to the test, as if test scores actually measured learning instead of memorization. As anyone who has seen Shift Happens knows, what students learn, especially in upper grades, will be outmoded a year and a half after they learn it. They will desperately need to have lifelong learning skills to learn the jobs that haven't been invented yet, as they will be changing jobs more often than any other generation in history. In Maryland, libraries are part of the education system by design, and libraries will have to step in to help foster those lifelong learning skills in students, because they're not necessarily learning them in school.

Shift Happens:

Week 1, Thing 1: Hooray for play!

Web 2.0 is a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to sharing the fun with my coworkers. Work doesn't have to be work all the time--it can have some play in it too, and that's how we can accomplish better results for our libraries.