Week 7: Tagging, Technorati and del.icio.us

Technorati had ads leaping out at me from all over the place. I had a quick look, then retreated to somewhere a bit calmer (not that anywhere online is calm, that's what the garden's for). I looked at Twitterati - couldn't help myself and clicked on the tag Christ and got lots of entries by the same people, most notably two guys trying to convert heathen readers. I hot footed it out of there, tried the libraries tag and followed a couple of links that went to sites that didn't appear to have anything to do with libraries. I then found the top 101 artists blogs and had a look at a few of those. Felt quite relieved in the end to leave Technorati. I do feel like there is just too much stuff in the world and cyberspace is no exception.

Delicious on the other hand could be dangerous - there are a hell of a lot of knitting websites tagged by delicious users that I didn't know about, when will I ever get the time to explore them? I don't know when the novelty will wear off, but for the moment it's great to be able to explore websites on a theme. I like the idea of being able to access my favourites on any computer too (although there is quite a bit of work involved in setting them all up in Delicious).

Lolcat

hmm

Week 6: Fun Stuff

I love this one. Who needs a piano!

http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#2qQfq3/www.thevirtualpiano.com//

Flickr Mashups

Flickr Mashups appear to be set up for their entertainment value and I can't see a lot of use for them, except perhaps as a design tool. I spent more time than I care to remember playing with the Experimental colr pickr. For a while it was rather fun fiddling with the colour wheel, choosing colours I like and seeing which photos came up. I tried to group four photos together to publish here, but each photo wanted to go into a separate post. I got the four into a gallery, then only got the location text to post to my blog. I then got them into one post, but couldn't work out how to reduce the size so they all fitted. not sure if this was a good exercise in moving images around in Flickr or in time wasting - possibly both.

Week 5: Photos and images

The Art of Embellishment
Originally uploaded by cobalt123

Well, here goes with my show and tell for the week - it's much more fun showing as well as telling.

After a lovely surf around the endless photo possibilities in Flickr, I found this one. As with almost anything I try to do on the web, it took a lot of time and a lot of harrumphing: joining Flickr via Yahoo (yet another email account!), filling in the boxes, filling in the boxes again when it didn't like something I did, then finding my way back to the one little photo I wanted. Now I can't seem to move the photo around. It's not where I want it, but I've spent enough time trying. Maybe I can only select the format at the point where I imported the photo to my blog.

While I'm immediately seduced by this kind of Indian embroidery, I do wonder who the embroiderer is and what sort of life they have.

Week 4: RSS Feeds

I'm having trouble getting my head around RSS feeds. Following Preetam Rai's instructions left me very frustrated trying to find sites with feeds. Having wasted a lot of time on step 2, I went to the next step and found that when I copied and pasted the Vogue Knitting address, it worked. The next few I tried though, didn't, and when I looked at the VK feed, the most recent entry was from 2008. I can only assume they no longer offer feeds. I might be missing something, but if I can only access a small number of my favourite sites on Bloglines, I can't be bothered with it. I do think the concept is great though, and will persevere. I've added the sub with Bloglines shortcut to my bookmark toolbar and will try more sites later. I'm surprised the BOM site doesn't have feeds (or does it?) - quick weather updates would be great.

I still haven't found a lot of websites offering feeds, although all the blogs I tried worked. I did find a nice simple tutorial on the ABC website though, and feel more confident that I get what RSS is about, ie being able to go to one site for the latest updates on all selected blogs and websites. I set up a Google Reader account and didn't find it much different to Bloglines.

I like the idea of RSS feeds. I'd happily use it, but am disappointed in the number of sites I use that don't appear to have made feeds available.

Library applications? I assume borrowers use RSS to find out the latest library activities, etc. At our end, I'm not sure how we make sure that feeds are available - I'll let the tech heads take care of that! I don't think I would use RSS for the bibliographic sites I use for reader's advising and HLS selection, as I'm usually looking for specific bibliographic info, not necessarily the most recently added.