Thing #14 Technorati

As I mentioned earlier, I don't think that technorati will be a site that I would personally use too often. I just don't spend that much time on the internet. It was interesting the extreme difference it made in the way that you searched for a topic on the site. By just searching blog posts for "learning 2.0" there were 12,576 hits. The tags only generated 851. The last one, the blog directory, was actually my favorite. It had 836 hits but it also gave a brief description and listed how many other people are subscribed to it. I liked that if I was going to use this site, I could help narrow down my results by choosing a more commonly read blog. Going on the assumption that all those other people wouldn't read it unless it was good...but then we have Mitch Album so we know that not everything is a safe bet ;) I was surprised by the fact that I didn't even recognize half of what the most popular searches were talking about. A couple of the key, common things jumped out at me but I had no clue what most of it was.

Thing #13 Del.icio.us

This was my first experience with delicious. I wish they would have had something like this when I was still in graduate school :) The possibilities for research and information sharing seem endless. Out of all of the exercises and applications, this one has seemed the most intimidating so far. On the surface, it seems to be fairly easy to grasp or manage but after playing around with it for a little while, you realize that there is just so much very cool stuff that you can do with it. The one Slacker website tutorial mention that it had just been taken over by yahoo. That, I suppose, could make it even more commonplace and easier to grasp...over time :)

As far as the library goes, I think that this could be a great reference tool. We have so many patrons and students that are studying the same topics and subjects. It may be beneficial to create popular subject tags. It would be nice to have some "ready-made" resources available.

Thing #12 Rollyo

http://www.rollyo.com/taknaangii/childrens_books/

This is the link to the children's book search roll I created. I could see how this type of search engine could be very beneficial if you were working on a specific topic or subject over an extended period of time. I have done research and have forgotten how and where I found specific information since google searches offer up such broad results bases on how you word your query. It would even be helpful to locate search rolls that other people have created for the same topic. It could cut your workload down considerably. On many of the quick search questions, however, I still think google or yahoo will be a much quicker way to search.

Thing #11 Library Thing

My Library Thing was started with ten books. I have used a similar application on facebook. You can search for book topic discussions or the application will generate a list of forums based upon your book list. I used this application a lot the few months leading up the the release of the 7th Harry Potter book. This is a great place for lively and fun book and character discussions!

Thing #10 Playing around with image generators

This has been my favorite exercise so far. I love playing with the pictures. I never realized how many cool things there were to do. I actually spent quite a bit of time playing with some pictures of my daughter and coming up with some neat relative-style gifts for them. I didn't post any of those because im anti using her picture on anything that has public internet access. All of the applications I used were very easy and not intimidating in any way.
I enjoyed the FD toys the most. I also bookmarked The Generator Blog so that I could play with it some more after these exercises are over. One of my best friends especially loved the Chimp-O-Matic that I sent him to check out.

Thing #9 Finding Feeds

Well, I checked out 3 of the 4 feed searching tools that were mentioned. I tried two different times to look at feedster but it kept saying that the page was unavailable so i skipped that one. Of the three, I think I liked Syndic8.com the best. It was pretty straight forward and didn't distract me with "shiny objects". Topix.net, however, could be very distracting. There is so much going on that I got sucked into reading half a dozen news stories before I started using the search engine. I don't even like the news!! If you do, however, want to flit around reading random interesting bits, topix.net would probably be the way to go. I don't really like reading lots of blogs on a regular basis. I read all the blogs that my friends write but maybe because of my lack of free time, I don't like to read random ones. I thought that all of the sites were pretty user-friendly and similar to each other in the way that you use them.

Thing #8 RSS

http://www.bloglines.com/public/taknaangii

This is the link to my public bloglines account. I had never used a blogline account before. This is the first exercise that has been completely new to me. I do really like the concept of the blogline. I do not spend much time at a computer for my day job right now but I can see how it will be very helpful and time saving for people who do. A year ago, i would have loved this. I used to spend the first hour or so at work just visiting the different sites getting caught up on everything. I like having everything grouped there together and it was a very easily navigated and manageable site. i will probably spend a bit more time fine tuning my subscriptions over the next little bit. As I said, i don't spend that much time on the computer anymore but it will be nice to link all my favorite sites into one stop.