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.