Thing 14 - Technorati

Technorati is a real time-eater. This morning at the Albrecht In-Service, Sandra said everyone should be able to complete Learning 2.0 in between 4 - 8 hours. Well, I just spent 2 hours wandering down the byways of Technorati and reading curiously interesting musings on topics ranging from the frivolous through the serious. I plugged 'Learning 2.0' into the search box, limiting the search to blog posts. Oops ... garbage appeared. Trying again with quotation marks created a better list of matches. The option of sorting further by relevance or authority was interesting, but I don't clearly see what the difference is.

Overall, I found Technorati to be unimpressive. Although I'm using Del.icio.us all the time now (all two weeks!) and love tagging and saving sites, I've learned that we all think differently and don't assign tags in the same way. It's fun to scan the Favorited and Popular blogs, but the Search feature generates a lot of irrelevant matches in my opinion.

Thing 13 - Del.icio.us

Only when I created my own del.icio.us account did I see the real power of tagging. Once I figured out that 'post to del.ici.us' link couldn't be added to our IE toolbar, it took a while to locate it under Favorites > Links > Post to del.icio.us. By leaving the Favorites window open in the left nav, I could easily select sites under interesting tags and post them to my del.icio.us account. Pretty soon I was developing an interesting word cloud of interesting topic-tags. And with a simple click, I can also delete articles that don't strike my fancy anymore. My major problem was booting myself out of del.icio.us if I clicked 'back' too many times.

I rapidly realized that I could cruise screen after screen of SJLibraryLearning2 entries, but that it was much easier to choose a tag from the right nav. I felt like an informational sheep because I was drawn to entries with the highest 'hit' counts ... and they usually were entries from well known, respected sources. Del.icio.us offers both public library customers and SJSU students a dynamic way of building a personalized database of web resources that is organized and 'speaks' to each person in the language/terms/tags/vocabulary that is most meaningful to themselves.

Thing 12 - Rollyo

Rollyo is somewhat similar to RSS feeds in that you select your favorite sources of information. In the case of RSS, you get any and all recent info posts from a site, whereas with Rollyo, you can specify and limit your retrieved data to the search terms of your choosing.

For this exercise I created an initial list of local and national websites for organizations in the fields of environmental protection and global warming . Try out my Rollyo Searchbox to the right.

Thing 11 - Web 2.0 Awards

I hoped to find fascinating possibilities in the Events category of Web 2.0 award winners. Instead, no clear winners were listed so I checked out the 5 Honorable Mentions sites. The first 2 were dead links. The 3rd option -- Eventful.com -- bills itself as the 'World's Largest Collection of Events.' My search for library events in the Learning, Education category turned up Tully Branch children's storytimes as well as SJSU's Job Fair Success Workshop. A nice feature is that you can sort events by date, venue, venue and distance ranges. The site has relatively little content and will have to work hard to beat Craigslist.org or Zvent.com for variety and sheer numbers of event listings.

Thing 10 - Image Generator

The Generator Blog offered lots of fun options, including the ticket generator site http://www.glassgiant.com/tickettaker/. I really preferred the image choices on www.imagechef.com, however I couldn't manage to copy any image to my blog. So you'll never get to see the Roman building with 'XXIII Things' over the columns that I originally planned.

Thing 9 - Library Related Feeds

My first attempt using Feedster was very frustrating. The number of matches was overwhelming. Sorting by relevance created a more manageable list of hits for my search of 'RFID and libraries.' TOPIX amd Technorati generated better hits. Using the 'a lot of authority' and 'blog' limiters in Technorati reduced my matches from 1014 to just 22. TOPIX produced the best results, principally because it reports news sources (go to the source!) rather than blogs.

Thing 8 - RSS feeds & Bloglines

RSS is my favorite 'Thing' so far. All the Discovery Sources were informative and offered tips and instruction in multiple media - video, audio, and text. Creating the 10+ feeds was easy, especially when I kept my Bloglines account open for easy cutting and pasting of Bloglines 'adds.' RSS sure beats subscribing to email alerts or creating a mess of Facoties in IE. Now the challenge is find the time to read the feeds ... I have over 200 unread CNN feeds!

You can view my news feeds from library, global warming and general news sources in the right column of my blog. >>>>>>>>>>

My home computer has IE7 and an RSS icon in the toolbar. A simple click on the icon immediately adds a site to my blog list. It's been very easy to create a comprehensive set of feeds from research and community organizations addressing the issue of global warming.