Lucky 13!

Okay, I'm not sure why it's lucky...but it is indisputably 13. And it is Del. icio.us.

I like the idea of remotely accessible bookmarks. I have a substantial number of bookmarks spread out over, like, five or six different computers, and many a time have I opened my favorites only to exclaim, "Damn! That's on the Struthers computer!" or something of that ilk. This has happened so often that occasionally I find myself memorizing the search terms that yielded a particular site so I can re-search for it (as in, "O.K., I typed these search terms in Vivisimo and the site I want is the seventh one down..."). But no more! So, that's a deucedly convenient tool, right there.

The idea of user-chosen tags is intriguing. If nothing else, they give the user a sense of control over web info, as opposed to being forced to use categories chosen by a random site administrator or portal site or whatever. The situation here is kind of analogous to, uh, patron reaction to the Dewey system (or LOC, for that matter). While the Dewey system is great for the minute cataloging necessary in a library, it is in reality useful only to librarians, not patrons. So, of course, we put Dewey numbers on the ends of our stacks; might as well have notes in bloody Klingon for all the good they do patrons. Wouldn't it make much more sense to have verbal desciptions on the ends of stacks? Like in bookstores? Accessibility is the key here, especially if the library wishes to remain relevant in the coming decades. We exist for the public, not the other way around. Then again, perhaps libraries use cataloging numbers simply to force people to have to ask us questions...

As to the utility of Del.icio.us (what's with that name, by the way?) as a search tool, I have mixed feelings. I have to assume that the search engine on the site searches only tags (rather than tags and site text), which seems to me to limit it's use, since the only text you have to go on are tags randomly ascribed by users. This is not to say that you can't turn up some good stuff that other people have already found, but in strict research terms I would prefer my search tool to be able to search the entire text of a document rather than terms that may or may not be the best ones for describing site content. And, personally, I like doing the work of digging stuff up and finding just the right search terms to deliver the goods. I have to dig it- how else can one be a fearless L-Space navigator? Sheesh.

Thing 12- Like a Rollyo Stone

"You can roll a Rollyo to your pal/it's chocolate covered caramel..."

Hmm, catchy. Rollyo is indeed a cool tool, in principle anyway; I had a bit of trouble getting it to work properly at first. My first attempt was a searchroll that would let me enter a title and simultaneously search YPL's catalog, Amazon, B&N and BIP. Alas, the Rollmaster would not search the catalog or BIP- likely due to the database-oriented structure of these sites. No prob with Amazon and B&N. While that limited my interest in the tool, I figgered I'd give it another shot, and made a searchroll for guitar tablature (with the witty name of Tabby). This worked, but then I realized that most of the sites that I had in the searchroll operated by searching other sites for tab, which in turn searched other sites, etc. (the guitar tab community is somewhat insular). So I reached the conclusion that such a searchroll was kinda, uh, redundant.

So, I finally settled for concocting a used book roll. Though hardly the height of creativity, I thought, "Well, Cohen, you read a lot of weird crap that's hard to find new, so maybe this thing will come in useful!" You can see the results of my mind-numbing labor on the right.

'Nuff said.

#11- Thing from the Library

LibraryThing rocks. Seriously. I wish I had known that such a bitchin' utility existed before. Now I can find even more reading selections to suit my oddball tastes.

This may be stretching things a bit, but this sort of thing kinda reminds me of co-citation analysis from liberry school (which, incidentally, is the same basic premise behind the Google engine, but they use links rather than citations- basically translating a textual technique to a hypertext environment). My point is that if I list a rockin' book, and Person X and Person Y also list that rockin' book, well, chances are that certain other books that X & Y have in common may also, verily, be rockin'.

This quality of literary rocking-ness makes LibraryThing, by extension, uh, rockin'.
Forsooth.

Oh yeah, check out the widgetmajig on the right. And here's a link to my liberry: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/jdub5248

#10: I've Been Simpsonized!

...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.

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...

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.