Monday, August 27, 2007
Saturday, August 25, 2007
...and #9.
Verily do I venture forth into the bewilderingly vast expanse of the feed-o-verse and the bloggadimensions, attempting to chart a course using various feed-finding tools.
Just to get an idea of how these various tools worked, I did a general search for "childhood leukemia". The winners, in my mind, were the Bloglines search and Feedster. They both returned pertinent results with useful summaries, and I was able to narrow results to just feeds. Topix, frankly, sux- one of the results it returned concerned Giselle Bundchen's possible pregnancy by Tom Brady (woo hoo!), with nary a search term in sight. I appreciate the idea of Syndic8 (the user-submitted aspect), but my test search found nothing (although just "leukemia" returned many hits) It would appear that Syndic8's search tool does not allow word clusters; a search for "George Bush" (in quotes) returned nothing, while the same search without quotes returned numerous hits. Finally, Technorati was OK, but I prefer news feeds to blog posts.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Just to get an idea of how these various tools worked, I did a general search for "childhood leukemia". The winners, in my mind, were the Bloglines search and Feedster. They both returned pertinent results with useful summaries, and I was able to narrow results to just feeds. Topix, frankly, sux- one of the results it returned concerned Giselle Bundchen's possible pregnancy by Tom Brady (woo hoo!), with nary a search term in sight. I appreciate the idea of Syndic8 (the user-submitted aspect), but my test search found nothing (although just "leukemia" returned many hits) It would appear that Syndic8's search tool does not allow word clusters; a search for "George Bush" (in quotes) returned nothing, while the same search without quotes returned numerous hits. Finally, Technorati was OK, but I prefer news feeds to blog posts.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Thing #8...
Alright, I'm seein' if this'll woik:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/jdub5248
This link is to my very own bloglines account. I subscribed to more things than I'll ever actually read simply 'cause I could. Personally, I am not hooked on any particular news sources or blogs; the only feeds that I subscribed to that I might visit on a regular basis are YALSA, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and CNN, and in the case of the latter I'll sometimes go to MSNBC, NPR, Reuters, a foreign news site, etc. just to mix thangs up & get a different perspective. Apart from work use, I don't really have a routine approach to the web; I tend to use it to look up whatever has caught my fancy at any given time, or for email. I don't really have
That being said, I guess this sort of thing is a useful tool (although, for me, the same sort of purpose could be served by a "Favorites" folder in my browser). I could see RSS being used in a way similar to a listserv, where participants could post to a forum and one could be notified of new posts via RSS, with the advantage of not delivering stupid amounts of email to your account. In a sense, also, this kind of functionality offers another level of organization to the web, but, unlike portals or pages of links, allows the user to impose their own order web content, which of course seems to be the way things are going in terms of interactivity...
http://www.bloglines.com/public/jdub5248
This link is to my very own bloglines account. I subscribed to more things than I'll ever actually read simply 'cause I could. Personally, I am not hooked on any particular news sources or blogs; the only feeds that I subscribed to that I might visit on a regular basis are YALSA, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and CNN, and in the case of the latter I'll sometimes go to MSNBC, NPR, Reuters, a foreign news site, etc. just to mix thangs up & get a different perspective. Apart from work use, I don't really have a routine approach to the web; I tend to use it to look up whatever has caught my fancy at any given time, or for email. I don't really have
That being said, I guess this sort of thing is a useful tool (although, for me, the same sort of purpose could be served by a "Favorites" folder in my browser). I could see RSS being used in a way similar to a listserv, where participants could post to a forum and one could be notified of new posts via RSS, with the advantage of not delivering stupid amounts of email to your account. In a sense, also, this kind of functionality offers another level of organization to the web, but, unlike portals or pages of links, allows the user to impose their own order web content, which of course seems to be the way things are going in terms of interactivity...
Friday, August 3, 2007
Scary Things 5, 6 & 7
In retrospect, perhaps I got a little carried away with my introductory post...I have a tendency toward free association...
Anyway, Flickr is pretty sweet. TXT also has a Photobucket account, and between the two I think Flickr wins. I like the tags idea (the closest thing to this in Photobucket is the ability to change the title of an uploaded image-could probably use the terms in the title as keywords, though), and Flickr seems to encourage much more user interaction than the Bucket, especially in relation to mashups.
So...had a lil' Flickr fun & came up with the items to the right. That FD and his Flickr toys- makes me think ol' FD has a lot of time on his hands...but he comes up aith some neat stuff. The Bead Art mashup has a lot of potential- it would be nice to have some more stylistic options, though.
Mashups? Oh, I get it- cuz you mash 'em together! Aha! Who comes up with these terms? Makes me think of a toddler's potato dinner (Gerber's Cheddar-Vegetable Mashups), or a mud-bound demolition derby. Despite the name, though, I dig the democratic implications of the mashup, which sort of lend themselves to a vision of the Internet as a by-the-people, for-the-people affair. Which isn't exactly true, but stuff like this leans in that direction. This sort of thing is fascinating, because you can, in a sense, see the process of evolution involved- you know, A, B & C are useful sites, then Joe or Jolene Schmoe comes along, mashes them together and makes ABC, a site that's three times as useful while being three times as simple and Presto! A, B & C are T. Rex food while ABC passes along it's source code to the next generation (unless, of course, predators X & Y, also known as Microsoft and Google, gobble ABC up). The cool thing is the fact that anyone can do it, and this increase in interactivity- as characterized by the entire "Web 2.0" thing- seems, for now at least, to be a positive alternative to the one-way nature of the Internet prior to then.
Beats TV. At least until they start installing the brain jacks.
Anyway, Flickr is pretty sweet. TXT also has a Photobucket account, and between the two I think Flickr wins. I like the tags idea (the closest thing to this in Photobucket is the ability to change the title of an uploaded image-could probably use the terms in the title as keywords, though), and Flickr seems to encourage much more user interaction than the Bucket, especially in relation to mashups.
So...had a lil' Flickr fun & came up with the items to the right. That FD and his Flickr toys- makes me think ol' FD has a lot of time on his hands...but he comes up aith some neat stuff. The Bead Art mashup has a lot of potential- it would be nice to have some more stylistic options, though.
Mashups? Oh, I get it- cuz you mash 'em together! Aha! Who comes up with these terms? Makes me think of a toddler's potato dinner (Gerber's Cheddar-Vegetable Mashups), or a mud-bound demolition derby. Despite the name, though, I dig the democratic implications of the mashup, which sort of lend themselves to a vision of the Internet as a by-the-people, for-the-people affair. Which isn't exactly true, but stuff like this leans in that direction. This sort of thing is fascinating, because you can, in a sense, see the process of evolution involved- you know, A, B & C are useful sites, then Joe or Jolene Schmoe comes along, mashes them together and makes ABC, a site that's three times as useful while being three times as simple and Presto! A, B & C are T. Rex food while ABC passes along it's source code to the next generation (unless, of course, predators X & Y, also known as Microsoft and Google, gobble ABC up). The cool thing is the fact that anyone can do it, and this increase in interactivity- as characterized by the entire "Web 2.0" thing- seems, for now at least, to be a positive alternative to the one-way nature of the Internet prior to then.
Beats TV. At least until they start installing the brain jacks.
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