Swizzle

This entry is dedicated to Swizzle, our beautiful companion of almost 20 years. Her spirit was strong, her body increasingly frail. Yesterday she passed away. My heart feels so heavy now. I will always love my amazingly valiant and sweet "Sissie".

Blog search tool - Technorati

The Advanced search of Technorati is nice. I like the specificity it allows -- e.g., you can ask Technorati to find keywords in the tags of posts, or the actual text of posts, or look by subject heading, etc. This works similarly to the advanced searches in periodical databases that the library subscribes to, such as Proquest or OneFile (although of course the databases don't include users' tags).

At this point in my life, I just haven't caught the blog-reading bug. (Though I thoroughly enjoy tinkering around with my OWN blog!) I do really like to read newspaper editorials and columns. But blogs and blog postings are like a gazillion letters to the editor thrown in with a few good editorials. I guess this just highlights the necessity of a tool such as Technorati to help separate the grain from the enormous amount of online chaff. For now, though, in my personal life, I will admit that I don't often feel the need to seek news and opinion outside of traditional sources. And our internal work-related library blogs are already at my fingertips.

Delicious aka del.icio.us

Thoughts on del.icio.us (the website, not the pie):

1) Unfortunately, a permissions problem blocked my efforts to add the two delicious buttons to my toolbar in both Explorer and Firefox.

2) User Notes. Hmmm. What is their purpose? I suppose they're intended as the electronic equivalent of a yellow post-it. But with good tagging, many of the notes I saw today seemed pretty superfluous.

3) I can see delicious being helpful with projects I've had that involve creating lists of URLs on particular topics. I may try using delicious with an upcoming project, depending on how much time it takes me to figure out the particulars to do it right!

4) This is one 2.0 application that I need to practice when time allows. I want to be able to add & tag websites easily, when I have spare moments here and there.

Image generators

Some of the image generators are fun and easy to use. I tried several, including the Warning Sign Generator (see image above). Using the Add Letters website I also created a street sign with my husband's name on it, and some other silly stuff. I got nowhere with the Reflectionmaker tool; it didn't work with any of the images I provided, and I couldn't find a "help" feature or other guidance at the site, so I don't know what I was doing wrong.