Technorati - a mind boggler

Perusing Technorati is an interesting experience. I was surprised by the top 100 tags. The print size feature is an eye-opener, indicating the popularity. I would have thought that 'books' would have rated larger print size! How can there be 88,029 posts tagged 'Microsoft'? Is technology moving too fast for some of us? Via 'Blogger Central I searched 'Mashable'. The Ted Kennedy site brought up 30866 results. There are lots of people with lots to say on this one man. Some read a little like a confessional or a 'Dear Abby..' on a voyage of self-discovery.

In blog posts "Learning 2.0" brought up 2095 posts. There are some blogs here worth revisiting when time allows.
In 'tags' I had to drop the inverted comma's. This produced 545 posts. I haven't worked out why there is such a huge difference.
In the Blog directory, advanced - exact search - without the inverted commas, my search produced 2092 posts.

Technorati was a little mind boggling for me and I can't see how I will use it. More exploration may change my view. I need convincing.

Playing tag

Exploring this has been just like playing 'tag'. From one screen to the next to the next. I can see how useful this would be for research. The flexibility of being able to use any computer to access your list of sites for an assignment would make referencing and bibliographies a breeze. On a different note - under the travel tag in the Del.icio.us - PLCMCL2 account - I found something very interesting...has anyone been to the 'couch surfing' site? MMMMMmm, very interesting!!!!

Exercise 7.2

If you know the URL it seems easier to use bloglines' search tool. With the google blog search you know that you are accessing sites with RSS news feeds. Google news is an interesting site for world news. If you only want New Zealand sourced news you have the option to click on fewer stories, and alternatively you can access more stories as well, depending on what you want, and time constraints.

Exercise #7.1

This has been an interesting journey. RSS and newsreaders were foreign words before this exercise. I'm still not totally on top of it I keep straying from the path by following interesting links which has made it more time-consuming. I have subscribed to some interesting feeds including, Accidental Hedonist, which had some interesting trivia on 'beer'. The BBC news/ news front page world edition has interesting snippets I can follow up if I want to read the full article. Articles I would rarely see elsewhere. I have feeds to Film, news, Book news, fashion, food and new librarian websites, as well as subscribing to two co-workers' feeds. I can see this being useful to many of our information and computer literate patrons who want to keep up-to-date with their favourite topics. Librarians can open up a whole new information-source pathway to our patrons.

Technology - Exercise #6

I resisted digital cameras for a long time on the grounds that I prefer to have a film developed and have a hard copy to show family and friends. Now, I never go anywhere without my digital camera in my bag. I bring it out to give family and friends a 'slide' show. When I fly home I bore my family silly with photo after photo stored on my memory stick - aren't laptops wonderful? Keeping in touch has changed so much in a short time. It has gone from Sunday afternoon visiting to comunicating via landline and mobile phones to emails to facebook to sharing photo's on Flickr to face to face conversing on Skype - and the snowball keeps rolling!

Exploration exercise 5

Exploring Flickr mashups has been lots of fun. Bubblr for creating comic strips was particularly interesting. I created two and sent them to myself. Retrievr was pretty much a puzzle. How the random drawings that I did brought up the corresponding photo's is a real mystery. A few of the lines I drew curved the same way as some of the lines in the photo's... mmm...but... fairly random overall.

Exercise #4

Using Flickr has been very interesting. It gives a totally different view to storing and showing photos. I do find though, that I tend to show the photo's either straight from my camera or via a computer screen from my memory stick these days, so Flickr is not far removed from that. Hard copies are still my preferrence, trouble is with a digital camera you often don't get round to printing them off. I did a bit of exploring and found some interesting photographs. By keying in 'Grand Canyon' I got some beautiful shots with some spectacular lighting effects in the Getty collection. I do have a few problems finding screens that I've looked at before. There are so many links and trails to follow that I often can't find my way back. It's been an intereting exercise and I'll be exploring Flickr some more.