Monday, November 17, 2008

#14 Not a Book by Dale Brown ...

technorati
I guess there's a need for Technorati, but it's very comprehensiveness, i.e., hoarding masses of swine amid a few pearls (too bad the URL "" was already taken ...), undermines its usefulness in finding reliable information. In fairness, though, at least they let you change the "level of authority" for the blogs included in a search.

As for searching "Library 2.0," when I finally figured out how to control the search (entire blog vs. tags only) for blogs with "a lot of authority" (a celebration is planned each year on 11/18@7:15am), I got 1,052 results for "search the entire post", and only 259 hits for "tags only"; the blog directory didn't get that specific -- "" is a close as you get, but I was surprised that it gets that close since the directory is limited to pretty broad headings. (I guess I'm too old-fashioned, but I wish they had a big index of suggested tags.)

TIP: The easiest way I could find to change between searching complete blogs to just tags is to:
1. Search your term using the SEARCH box on the Technorati home page, and then
2. Use the CHANGE link to set your parameters:



CLICK to enlarge

I was a little surprised by some of the popular searches because they include names of a few folks I've never heard of. But I had no real expectations so there were no big surprises with the "most popular" blogs, except that I would have expected more celebrity gossip than political news, but maybe everybody's still keyed up from the elections...

#13



The first thing I noticed is that the URL has changed to the more user-friendly http://delicious.com.

I'm so used to e-mailing myself URLs to include in the jplstaff Ready Ref pages and in my own Guide to the Best Internet Resources that it will take me a while to get used to the delicious-ness of this site. But I certainly see advantages to having a handy, universally accessible place to store favorites, and expect I will create an account of my own. It could also prove useful in group projects as a central place to store references.

Monday, November 10, 2008

#11 Pottery Barn

check out My Spelling Books

thing




(Library Thing might be useful if you could inventory DVDs & CDs...)

#10 : Tasteful saying ....

biteme
Recipes for fun at http://www.redkid.net/generator/soup/sign.php

Beauty secret ...


mona
Create a masterpiece at http://www.txt2pic.com/toons/4.htm

Monday, November 3, 2008

JPL 2.0 #9: Finding Feeds



Poster available from despair.com

This exercise was really quite depressing, and this despair.com poster pretty much sums up my experience.

Bloglines' Search Tool seems reasonable enough--I searched "classical music" and immediately added a feed from the New York Times, and will likely add others using this tool.

Feedster wouldn't load.

Topix.net really made me nervous -- FOX has set a terrible precedent by distributing unverified opinion as "news" and the political posts that dominated Topix "most popular" stories seem only too eager to join this bandwagon. I'll stick with Reuters and NPR for credible news.

The seemingly indiscriminate nature of sources included in both Syndic8 and Technorati has no appeal to me. I'd rather find sources with some degree of accountability, or at least some that come recommended by folks whose judgement can be respected (e.g., visit some of JPL's Recommended Websites of particular interest and look for newsfeeds on them). There is too much chaff with the wheat for me to find these other sites very useful.

This is America and I do believe that everybody is entitled to an opinion. But really. So many bloggers try mightliy to disprove this. (Op.cit despair.com)

JPL 2.0 exercise #8 : RSS & Newsfeeds

Why it's just like Christmas...

The initial set-up at Bloglines was a breeze (especially after viewing a couple of brief videoclips: RSS in Plain English and Adding Rss Feeds to Bloglines), and it was easy as pie to subscribe to blogs by whatever method presented itself.

But enabling the public sharing of my blogroll using the instructions included with both the JPL 2.0 post and from Bloglines was impossible for me on my own because there was never any mention that you must create a Bloglines user name separate from the email address used to sign in, or how to go about creating a Bloglines user name -- Refman Greg had to clue me into this or I never could have finished.

DO THIS: 1. Create your account at bloglines.com & login.
2. Once at http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs, click on Account in the top right corner of the screen.
3. Click on Blog Settings
4. Make up and type in a new, unique username.
5. Next to Show my Blogroll, choose Yes, publish my Blogroll
6. Click on Save Changes

After doing this, the formula http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME will work.

My blogroll may been seen at http://www.bloglines.com/public/EdLein.