Thing # 14

Technorati is overwhelming. I had never thought about how much editing goes on by commercial websites or even news websites. I like the idea that everybody now has an opportunity to express themselves without filters. That video made me think. I did the keyword search for School Library Learning 2.0 and got 665 results. I looked at the tags and blog directory and results of each are different. My favorite was the directory. I did some searches of my subjects and there were many blogs. I think if I were to find favorites or opinions close to my own, tagging would be useful. The main drawback is that there is so much to read and so little time.

Thing # 13

This one is really fun. I have tagged some websites that I use for my classes. This way I won't have to go and look for them. I'm sure I'll use this for all three of my subjects. This is a great way to keep up with information without having to rely on memory for where it came from. I can't wait to add more stuff!

Thing # 12

This activity was hard for me. I read a number of blogs but had little to comment on most of them. I finally found five of the summer players to comment on. I was able to leave comments on a food network blog and a movie trailer blog. My biggest difficulty was that some of the blogs I wanted to comment on wanted me to register and I am not going to do that. I don't want any more junk e-mail. On to the nest thing.

Thing # 11

Librarything is amazing. I spent some time looking at the tabs and familiarizing myself with what this has to offer. I am thrilled to be able to see what others thought of books I would like to read. I'm in a book club so I immediately added the books for this year to my list. Later I can go back and see how many others have read it and their opinions. I might enjoy the books more if I have insights from others. It looks as thought the books my book club selected are widely read. I've just finished "A Thousand Splendid Suns". I'm going to read some of the comments on it and see if I can get some discussion questions for our meeting Monday by doing that.

Thing # 10

I have spent two days (translate that to about three hours) on this one. I looked at all of the suggested sites and some that came up when I googled image generators. I liked sparesomechange.com. I managed to make and copy one into my pictures folder and somehow got it onto my blog from there. These are fun and I think could be used to make Power Point slide shows more entertaining. I need more practice. I would also like to know how to move pictures around on the blog. My image generator picture is all the way at the bottom of the page!

Thing # 9

I am really impressed with Google Reader. I spent some time looking at my account and was amazed at what is there. After I read through thing 9 I visited the suggested sites. The School Library Blogs page was not available so it automatically is the least helpful. I liked Bloglines. The drop down menu was easy to use. I tried a couple of topics and got several hits for each.
Edublog was confusing. It appears to be a list of awards. I don't know how I would use that.
Topix and Technorati were more like newspaper pages and were comfortable and easy to use. The easiest way to get newsfeeds is to look for the orange icon.

Thing # 8

Google Reader is so big and there are so many options to explore, plus shortcuts. Yikes. I am not sure what I did but did create some folders and tried to subscribe to blogs. I do like the idea of streamlining information that I look for regularly. I subscribed to a couple of sites that could help me with new and innovative recipes for my Nutrition and Food Science class. I like to offer the classes opportunities to try new foods or presentations that they haven't tried. RSS could be used by libraries as repositories for information on almost any subject and tailored to the age groups served by the library whether it is a school or public library.