#12 Roll Your Own

Rollyo is interesting but my mind went blank as to what to create. Then I looked at what others had done and began to think it had all been done already. I was especially impressed by someone who had made a search for children's preschool programming resources.

I almost made a best price search, but it had been done before. Then I began to do a slang dictionary search even though there were a few of those, but decided it was too broad, so I limited it to Web slang and this is what I ended up with.
Annette's Web Speak Search Engine.

I could see staff making handy search tools on information desk computers for subjects often asked about. It could also be used to generate search boxes for our public using one or multiple tools. Can it be used for sites that usually have to be logged into, however? is there a way to set that up?

I'm going to try and add the search box to my Blog.
Okay--that worked. I put it under my zombie news feed for now.

# 11 It's a Library Thing

Well, I checked out Library Thing and set up an account. I was frustrated that I had to upload books by the same author one by one instead of being able to check the ones I wanted on the list and upload them all at the same time. Also, it was irksome determining different editions of the same book so all could be represented--it meant checking various sources and changing view on the display back and forth. If you want all your books to have pictures then you need to also check various sources or upload your own. And most of the other sources are academic libraries which narrows the choices for fiction readers considerably. Overall, while it was quicker than doing original cataloging it was still fiddly to enter all those subject headings and I didn't even want to get into writing reviews at this point. (Interesting that they make those reviews available other places on the web if you don't opt out.)

It's very clever all the things they do with the information up-loaded like those clouds, and very reassuring that there's such a booky site on the Web that's supposedly the death of book reading.

I found I had an author page on this site by virtue of having my books in the libraries of other people, so I uploaded a personal photo to it. I was amazed at how many people had my books in their libraries and how many were talking about them on the chat boards. I'm not sure if I want to announce myself as a Library Thing author and make all my books available for public scrutiny but it certainly is another venue for authors to network and promote their work, and maybe even give some insight into the reference materials that they use.

I think that the discussion groups could be very useful to libraries who want to have on-line discussions without having to set up their own software. The fact that you can create your own discussions group and limit the membership in various ways is very useful.

I found it very interesting how many public libraries are already using it as a supplement to their catalog. If this is the wave of the future, however, by importing information from the same sources, I see the potential for one mistake in cataloging to be perpetuated all over the universe forever. It's a good job one can edit the results once one has uploaded them.

I've added a Library Thing widget to the right, below my profile. It show the books in my library so far. Very self-centered aren't I?

Playing again

I used the chalkboard message generator for this.

#10

Here's my Yahoo avatar.

And I just realized that my previous post CORRUPTING POP CULTURE probably fits under #10 also as an image generator.

Shameless Self Interest Delayed Reaction

It suddenly dawned on me to search for myself on Technorati. Gulp! There were over 300 hits. I hope these people are kind.

Feeding the Feed

I think purposely looking for feeds can be overwhelming. Yes there is tons of stuff out there you can subscribe to but you can over do it. The better way is to be aware that feeds exist and when you come across something useful in your everyday pursuits you check to see if there is a feed available. That way you limit your feeds to the ones that are actually useful to you. They are handy if you want to be able to group and quickly skim work-related blogs for relevant information. But you can also get sucked into a black hole of trivia.
Syndic8 looks boring but utilitarian. The random suggestions on the main page are interesting, though, as are the top fives. I'm not sure I approve of them posting who has just registered, however. Privacy issues. Except some are obviously fake names. Hey! The Woodburn Public Library Teen Reads is one of the five most viewed feeds. Who would have thought? What is that library doing right to promore their RSS feed? Clicking on the link for that feed in Syndic8 takes you to a statistics page that has a preview and various options to grab the feed. In fact there are other links to all sorts of other mysterious technical statistics that are fairly unintelligible to most people. Who is it that reads this stuff? Yes, Syndic8 gets my vote for the most geeky of the feed finder sites. I added a science fiction podcast blog to my Bloglines. I also found a bunch of links when I did a search of children's books. Guess which library turned up again. Overall, I didn't have much luck searching most of my subjects. Browsing worked better.

CAN I HAS VIDEO?

Just seeing if I can embed another video using code.

CORRUPTING POP CULTURE

I made me a Mash Up.
Click to see.

Continuing Number 9

Well I added a couple of feeds to my Bloglines reader using the Bloglines search feature and Topix. The Topix feeds are news about the town I live in and the one I was born in. The others are about Meezers or Siamese cats.

AAAAACCCKKKKKK!

SpeechAgents make it sound like you get a minimum but reasonable amount of features for free--but when you sign up and give them your personal info you find you have to pay for anything beyond four character options and three backgrounds. And then they insert advertisements on your site!!! I thought I had read their agreement but I skimmed over it too fast and missed that detail. I had to delete and re-do two posts because after I linked to an animated speaking avatar made at their site all sorts of words and phrases were highlighted in green and created pop-up advertisements when I scrolled over them. MERLIN shouldn't include a link to that site without a warning. SpeechAgents is an opportunistic rip-off. That was a lesson to me to read more carefully.

THING 9

Okay--here's what I have learned:
Not all libraries should have My Space pages. My Space pages can be very monotonous unless you really do something different with the content and hurry people to links really fast. Also, I don't see much point in having My Space pages directed at anyone but teens and maybe twenty-somethings since most others won't find you or won't visit you. And the ones that do visit may think you are totally out of it, anyway, if you don't do it right. There's a certain geeky charm to some of the librarian generated content you can find through MERLIN, though.
Oh look, there's a link to Meez on the Gaming, Avatars, Virtual Worlds page. I guess I got there before my time. I've also dabbled in Second Life (I like flying) so maybe I'll check out Info Island when I get home. I can't do it here at work because you have to download software. I think it's pretty cool that some colleges are offering classes in Second Life. That means you could have a clothing malfunction in the middle of class sometimes. Gack! Nightmares revisited for virtual real. ROTFLMAO.
It's hard to watch YouTube video at work because of the bad connection. You have to keep on waiting for the video to buffer. This is annoying when time is of the essence.

I Know When You've Been Sleeping...

I'm tracking your blogs from my Bloglines account.

I added some library themed blogs and discovered how to make folders to stash things in. I like the way that you can see how many new posts are in a folder without opening the folder.
Grouping feeds into Bloglines is a good way to unclutter your browser of feeds you don't look at quite as much.

The method of sharing one's Bloglines account seems to have changed a little since the instructions were posted on Maryland Libraries Learning 2.0 and Bloglines doesn't make the procedure clear either. It took a lot of poking around and the help of a colleague before I figured out how to post a link to my feeds, but...

Here's my Bloglines page.

I Made a Feedster Widget

Look in the right-hand column.
Now I can get all the latest news and posts about ZOMBIES!
I've added a search bar, though, so you can search other subjects if you want.

[NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: It's now January, 2008 and Feedster is DEAD. I'm looking for another site that will make a news widget.]

[ANOTHER NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I found another way to make a news feed, that's why you see something different on the right]

Here's one of my favorite things I've found about Zombies.
A Zombie Pub Crawl.
Well, there's the link, but I'm trying to upload the video to my blog, too. It seems to have worked but I wonder if 24 megs are too big for my blog. How many megs to I get, anyway? Time to check.