Pooh sticks

So I feel like a bear with very little brain today - and meandering around Technorati has not helped. Can someone please explain the point of it all? I get that it ...

• helps you search through some of the 50 million blogs in the world
• allows to to add the 'coolest' blogs to your favourites
• enables you to check the 'ranking' of your own blog(s)
• see how many people are writing blogs about Paris Hilton

And my question to all of that is, why would you want to? Maybe I spend too much of my time reading books and not reading blogs? I don't think so.

Don't get me wrong, I mean, I love the idea that anyone can write their heart out and 'publish' it without going through some critical, opinionated, judgemental editorial/publishing process. But I know that these general ramblings of mine are just that - ramblings and probably of little or no interest to the general reading public or even the general non-reading public (maybe that's why I put pictures in?). I know that there are probably some major gems out there in blogland - really great, interesting writers who choose the blog as their medium - but the amount of dross means that even with Technorati and its brethren, you have about as much chance of finding them as winning lotto and the Booker Prize in the same week.

I did the required searched for Library 2.0 and my conclusion is that some people are cataloguers, some people can learn to be cataloguers and some people wouldn't know what a catalogue was if the entire AACR compendium dropped onto their foot.

Maybe if there was an easier way of finding out what tags you should use or that other people have used or whatever ... it justed seemed too random.

Maybe I should go into cataloguing ....

Delicious but ugly

If it's Thursday then it must be blog time ... and del.icio.us. Whoever designed this website needs to be taken out to the back paddock and given a good talking to. It has to be one of the most hideous websites out there. How much effort would it have taken to make it just a little more visually appealing? I'm not talking uber-stylely here ... just the odd bit of thought given to typography and AWS (aka aesthetic white space).

Any who (as a certain Mt Roskill librarian would say), I like that idea of tagging your bookmarks and being able to locate them linearly rather than using the strict standard hierarchical system. But then again, I'm a closet bookmarker from way back. I did set up my own del.icio.us account and imported my bookmarks into it. It said it may take "a while". I have just found out that "a while" in cyber terms means enough time to do a desk shift, have a cup of coffee, section part of the reference section and rearrange the pens in my top drawer. Told you I had a few bookmarks.

Found this tagging thing very useful for stuff like my family history sites - you're not limited to 'filing' (and therefore finding) a site under just one topic but can tag it all sorts of ways to locate it. So I can find the Cille Choirill churchyard site (picture above - last resting place of my g-g-g-g-grandfather) under scotland, lochaber, cemeteries, cameron, and lots of other tags.

Having a library background and being semi- au fait with subject headings does help though - as I found out when I saw some of the more 'interesting' ways other people had tagged some of my favourite websites. Either they didn't read or understand the instructions or the tagging concept did not reach the requisite part of their cerebral cortext.

BUT it takes one heck of a lot of work to 're-tag' all your bookmarks if you have a whole bunch to start with ... and I'm not sure when/if I'll run out of steam and go back to the old way.

Humble Pie & Raglan Cardigans?

This is a raglan cardigan ...




And this is a pie ...

because, of course, I ended up finding a great use for my rollyo knitting pattern search engine to locate a pattern for a knitted raglan sleeved cardigan for a one-year old girl.

Don't you hate it when that happens ...

Roll, roll, roll your search

Task #12 ... which means that if I do half of this, I've halfway through the 23 things:) Just to be pedantic.


I had a good play with Rollyo - and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread to start with. I mean, how cool is it to be able to make your own search engine!

I found a couple of 'pre-rolled' knitting pattern search engines and edited them to add my own stuff and delete the pages that I didn't like. I also put together another engine which put a whole lot of New Zealand shipping list sites together.

Well, the knitting pattern one worked OK - if you ignore (and it is a tad difficult considering the number of them!) all the ads sprinkled through the results. However there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason about what went first or last and many of the results on the list were the same pattern from different sites (which you would probably get on google as well, but, natch, I'm having a moan here!).


The shipping list one was a total bust - as most of the list pages have a separate search engine to search the list on that particular site - so the rollyo list only searched the main pages - not the embedded data. If I had read all the instructions maybe I would have found that out before I tried it ... but I thought this would be really great if this works and it didn't ... (and I never read all the instructions before I start anything ...which is why I once knitted a jersey with three sleeves)


As for browsing 'celebrity' search rolls ... I'm sorry but no.


So only 5/10 for Rollyo so far - although I like the principle and I'm sure I could find it useful in the future for particular tasks/searches. However, I'm more than happy to stick with Google for now - if it's not broke, then why fix it?

Styley Learning from Unshelved

Just had to share the latest Unshelved strip - for all of you out there who did the the On the Job training workshop and are still wondering about learning styles

If a picture's worth ...

OK - so task #10 - online image generators. Hmmmm. Had a play ... some worked, a lot didn't. I tried the Che Guevara generator - and the instructions were in French. My French is pretty bad - only time I've ever used it was to direct a taxi in Noumea and I ended up in the wrong place.

So I flipped onto the Delft plate generator. It worked but I couldn't save the image - just order a plate. I will admit to trying the fart generator but it didn't have an image I could put on my blog and my workmates kept giving me funny looks (I think the computer volume may have been a little on the loud side maybe?).

Ended up with the Dumbledore generator ... results below.

On the grand scale of things, I probably wouldn't use any of this again. Maybe OK to waste a few idle moments if you've got nothing better to do ...

Liked the mash-ups better as there was more creativity involved and they were generally easier to use.

So I came, I saw, I played ... and if a picture is worth a thousand words then I suppose an online image generator may have its uses ... I suppose it really depends of what the thousand words say.

Wild thing

Task #11 - Library Thing. I've been a good little blogger (that sounds ruder than it is probably) and set up my Librarything account and added my books and played around with the tags and added some ratings ... and thought that this rocked ... and then I read the bit about once you have 200 books on your shelf, they want your moola before you can add any more.

Arghhhhh. Sites like this annoy me. They tantalise and tease you, get you excited with all their cool widgets and stuff ... and then once you are really really hooked - they hit you with "Sorry it's not free anymore" but you can carry on for $$$$$! They have names for people that do things like that.




So the above picture sort of sums up my feelings about Librarything a little. It is a good idea and I like the way you can see what other people have thought of books and you can categorise what you've read and look for suggestions for future reading ... but, after you've invested a lot of time and effort and interest - it can be a tad on the peevish side to them realise that you must pay (a yearly sum) to carry on.

And mucho thanks to the Mad Hamster for the Good reads suggestion ... I'll give that one a try ...