It's Just One Thing that's got me thinking

(sung to Amerie's "It's Just One Thing").... about my favorite books. It's Library Thing.
Library Thing was great. It's so easy to use. The only thing was it took me a little while to post my list up on the actual web page but I finally got it. If at first you don't succeed try again.

But anyway this was a smart idea and a fun site because I was able to list some of my favorite books and some that I find interesting. I also got an opportunity to see who else shares my literature interests. The cross referencing to amazon.com is great as well.

Time is ticking away and I'm way behind. I'm on a roll now.... to rolling my own search engine.

IMAGE GENERATORS

Let the Fun Begin.
Oh what fun, it is to play, with image generators today. Yeah!
(Sung to jingle bells.)

Image generators are a blast. It gives you a lot of opportunity to express your creativity, and it seems that anything is possible in this part of web world.

I discovered doppelme and I created this avatar of myself using the website http://www.doppelme.com/. It was easy and it's pretty cool to use.


I especially like http://www.slide.com/arrange myspace's slide presentation generator. It is quite impressive. I created a slide show presentation but I experienced some difficulty with linking it separately to this blog.



I also created a neon-sign for my future music school, called "Harmony Music".
The website for the neon sign generator is http://www.neonmirrors.com/custom/












There is a wealth of image generators out there. Who knew all of this was available? I will surely pass on this info to my family and friends. Anyway this exercise was a thrill to discover.

On to the next exercise.

Library related newsfeeds.

I created the bloglines account and subscribed to several newsfeeds.


I subscribed to a School Library Journal and the articles and newfeeds here were great. School Library Journal has at least 30 newsfeeds. I subscribed to the book news.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/learnRss


I also discovered a great news feed feed called Library Technology Now.
http://librarytechnologynow.blogspot.com/


However, there did not seem to be a lot of library related news feeds. I had to use different news feed engines and create inventive keywords to find pertinent links. Perhaps you had better luck. If you did let me know some of great ones you found.

Anyway the ones I did find are useful and quite interesting.


Other interesting feeds are NY Observer Politics, the New York Times Media and Advertising, and for the entertainment fans there are several.

This technology is a great because it allows you have all your favorite websites in one place. Libraries can benefit from this technology by creating links for patrons that feature book reviews, technology reviews, movie reviews and other links that may be of interest to patrons.

In looking at all these news feeds and the amount of information on the web, it has caused me to ask these simple questions. Is there an information overload? How much information is too much information? Will the web ever run out of space? Is it simply infinite?

I wonder as I wander, as the web turns.........

Feeding Frenzy

How time flies. I have not been able to type in a post in a long time, even though I worked on several of the exercises. So today I will try to get caught up.

I love the concept of of newsreaders and news feeds. It's like a favorites file that you can access anywhere.
Anyway my favorite search tool was Technorati, simply because it is up to date and it gives you relevant hits for your requests. I love the page layout it is colorful and attractive. I searched for thanksgiving recipes and it provided several results. This even included several video links with chefs preparing various thanksgiving meals.

The worst is Syndic8.com. It's layout is not very attractive and it is all text. As a search tool it provided no results for a simple search for "children's library programs". I also searched for other library related searches and it provided rather poor results that were outdated and not approved by the website.

I also loved Topix.net. I searched for Queens NY related news posts and blogs, and I received great results. It was up to date and I loved the fact that you can get news and feeds that relates to your location. I also like the categorization of the various forums and polls and the interactive graph that illustrates the popularity of of your search query in the past year. The cohesiveness of the layout demonstrates that this is a wonderful search tool and because of this it provides a rather popular and active online community.

For news lover like me it is great to be caught up in the feeding frenzy.