that techno beat (thing #14)

Spent some time on Technorati - looking over their advanced search features and putting a claim in for my own blog :)

Couple of things that jumped out at me that I appreciated;

1. user reviews - again a very useful feature in determining which sites will warrant investigation is the "authority" feature.

2. advanced searching features - the ability to search blogs by Boolean search strategies - or thru browsing how the blogs themselves have tagged their areas of coverage.

3. self tagging - really liked the way I could assign tags to my blog to bring users interested in particular issues (in my case libraries, information science, and internet technologies).

As for some of the results I obtained while searching - I found that using "learning 2.0" as a search term - even an exact term - didn't reveal that many hits from our blogging experiment. A tag search with the same term revealed a lot more hits - along with a revelation that there were some busy bees that have already finished the 23 things in an explosion of impressive effort ;)

And my own humble batgirl blog? Well let's just say that after sorting through pages of search results (with the optional authority limiter set to "any authority") I was still only able to find my blog using the "blog search" feature in advance search mode - and with the limiter of "fresh" blogs... I guess it has been a bit naughty - but still under visited! Hopefully registering in with Techorati will change that in the future. hehe

mucho del.icio.so (thing #13)

After poking around on the del.icio.us site for a while - I could see how it would be useful to have a tool like this at our disposal as librarians...

Part of the problem with search engines is that they use algorithms for ranking website relevance that may not be a true indication of a site's usefulness to certain audiences, or an accurate analysis of a site's content.

The reason for this is that sites which are very image rich - and may be sparse in meta tags - might still be very worthwhile - and search engines like Google would possibly miss them because they were looking for certain criteria (like target word occurence or other factors) and sites which have a big visual component may suffer in their rankings.

I did appreciate the democratic feel of user reviewed sites and links - and seeing the statistics regarding user bookmarks is definitely helpful in determining which sites are worthwile - because other people have taken the trouble to catalog and document their experiences at the web site or link.

All in all - del.icio.us is most helpful in adding a dimension of depth to a search engine's finding that would otherwise cost me valuable time in research myself :)

Roll the bones (thing #12)

Just popped over to Rollyo and created an account for my searching needs. When I tried to add Google as one of my sources though, I was told the results would only be from Google's corporate page because the website is limited to static (non-dynamic) search results.


[Edit 7.19.2024]

Another casualty of the information revolution. Rollyo is now defunct. Here's what it was - for the historians out there:

Rollyo was a Yahoo!- powered search engine which allowed users to register accounts and create personalized search engines. Each search engine could include up to 25 websites/blogs chosen by the user. Search results were limited to the sites included in a particular search engine. Additionally, users could share their "rolled" engines with other contributors or post a mini search box to the user's website using HTML. It was also possible to add each "searchroll" to the Mozilla Firefox search bar and to make Rollyo the default search engine for Firefox.

In other words - I could search Google's privacy policy because this doesnt change - but search results which are dynamically generated aren't browsable by Rollyo. This is a strange limitation for a metasearch engine (an engine which searches and obtains results from other engines).

Personally - I don't see it replacing Google anytime soon - because I found myself searching google for the links i was gonna use in my "roll". Considering you can also use google to search individual sites through the advanced search option - the usefulness of this product drops even more.

http://rollyo.com/secretsketcher/mesoamerican_art/

But for what it's worth - here's my lean and mean Mesoamerican page. Mostly art and manuscripts - with some general information and cultural sites thrown in for good measure. And to round it out - I threw in amazon for links to relevant books - which explodes the search results into the tens of thousands - because there is no intelligent filtering going on under rollyo, unfortunately. Enjoy!

It came from the library lagoon (thing #11)

Can I just say - I love Library Thing?

Previously - Amazon was my library thing - but this is much more efficient, user friendly, and customizable. I love that I can use it on my blog (it looks great as one of my page elements on the right hand side here) and it's probably gonna make its way onto my myspace page in a few more minutes here...

And actually - I'm seeing that Library Thing has a way of importing items from Amazon - but I haven't figured out how to do it yet... hmmm - more poking around will be required.

Ok - I think I got it - you open your Amazon wish list - copy the url - go to the "add books" link on Library Thing - import books - paste the url and click "grab"... The Thing will queue your books and add them to your library. My estimated wait time was between 30 and 50 minutes for 20 isbn numbers - so Im not sure if this will do the trick...

While we wait for the magic to work - you can browse my awesome titles of doom to the right...

mixing up the medicine (thing #10)

This post referers to a Bob Dylan messaging site that lets you create your own messages to Dylan's famous flip card video Subterranean Homesick Blues. There's a way to embed this video into a website - but the code expires every so often - so if you can get it to work in more than a simple email - kudos to you...

[Edit 7.19.2024]

The video generator is gone, but this is what the clips looked like and they were awesome. Sucks to not be in 2008 anymore... 

This week's foray into image generators turned up this gem on The Generator Blog and I must say I was pleased as punch to come across it. The autoplay feature now gives my blog a little musical edge to it - and you can still mute it if you find the musical note option in the upper left corner fast enough - but everyone could stand a little more "medicine" in their lives - so why would you want to?

Honorable mention should also go to the haiku generator  (found the link on the same page) which came up with this....

happily, egg rises
humbly, ducks hallucinate
tiredly, seagull speaks

[Edit 7.19.2024]

The haiku generator above is broken so I've included another here, with a haiku about homeless people in libraries:

haiku generator

Quiet refuge sought,  

Pages whisper stories warm—  

Hope in the margins.  

Oh - and there are 844 more generators where these 2 came from - so you should definitely stop by and take a peek. Go ahead - I'll wait...

Fed up, and down, and all around (thing #9)

So - having created an account in bloglines - I set out to explore some of the other rss search engines and see if I could find any diamonds amidst the roughage...

My first step was Feedster, and I have to say I was a little underwhelmed. The site does offer a cute widget option which you can post to your own blog page (which will update your feeds for you) - but most of the hits being returned for my searches were coming from the site Topix - which I'll review below. I will say the layout was a little more user-friendly than the others - with ads only taking up the right third and banner - but the results were kinda, meh...

What I liked about Topix.net is the combination of forums and rss feed results. There are polls, wire feed for the latest news on your topic, and the feeds themselves - but what I wasn't crazy about was the fact that almost 2/3 of the page on the right is ads and self promotion...

Technorati had a strong showing - with user ratings for feeds, videos, photos, and news articles about search topics. Very few ads and a user-friendly layout. They also had a sexy live update on their topics page - which spewed newly updated blogs in a constant stream.

And Syndic8.com... more ho hum... lots of useless stats - poor layout - didnt even bother to check search results after Technocrati - because it was anti-climactic...

So the clear winner is Technorati on all levels. Topix did seem to have a pretty robust user community - but it wasn't enough to tip the balance past the poor layout and annoying ads.

[Edit - 7.19.2024]

Here are six RSS Feed Readers or Aggregate Apps: From the RSS.com website. None of the original websites are still functional.

RSS Feed Reader Chrome Extension by Feeder.co
Feedly
Feeder
NewsBlur
Inoreader
Feedreader Online

Feed Me, See-More (thing #8)

What can I say about Bloglines except yummm!

RSS Feeds are like an information smoothie; you put in the raw web pages (with their flashing ads and diversionary tactics) - grind them up - extract the usable content - and present it in a clean format that saves you valuable search time.

They're faster than using a browser for surfing - easier to browse than the unfiltered internet - and personalized for the user (with options for blogging about news items or easy email forwarding for sharing news items with friends.)

The interface resembles a table of contents - and that's essentially what it is; the book in this case being a Frankenstein monster of my own informational needs ;)

My recipe for madness?

Take a healthy dose of library science, add some liberally slanted news, a dash of techie, some establishment propaganda (keep your enemies close - I'm looking at you CNN), a touch of finance news, and voila!!!

1. Queens Library Learning 2.0
2. batgirl was a librarian
3. The Shifted Librarian
4. Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week
5. NYT Book Review
6. Salon
7. Wired Top Stories
8. Lifehacker
9. CNN.com
10. Reuters: Top News
11. Guardian Unlimited home Guardian Unlimited
12. BBC News News Front Page World Edition
13. WSJ.com: Markets

enjoy!