Waves

Originally uploaded by Atook

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be surfing a big wave? I have. When I look at this picture, that's what I think about. Have you ever heard the quote, "A picture is worth a thousand words." That's what this picture is to me. As I look at it, it tells me a story about a surfer, and I begin to understand why this surfer has such passion for what he does.

Library Thing

When I first created my library thing account, I was really excited about having a list on the internet of the books that i have read. I had a lot of fun adding some books to my account and linking my library to my blogger page. My first thought was that this was a great site, but after a couple of days, I lost all interest in it. I didn't want to get on my account, and I didn't really care about adding more books to my library. I think that this site is a good idea, but it just didn't keep my interest. I would rather keep an excell spreadsheet. With excell I can sort or even filter to find an author or genre. For me excell is more effective.

Technorati

I first started this exercise a month ago. No, I didn't take a whole month to work on this exercise. Instead, I went on vacation, and when I got back, I had no motivation to finish the program.Today, the amazing "Paul Musser" convinced me to start working on the program again. As I glanced over the technorati site, I started remembering the first impression that I had last month.(I was intimidated because the site looks very busy. I almost felt like they were throwing stuff at me. It seems like they made it there goal to put as much information as they could on one page). I decided to start with a search. Library 2.0 seemed like a good choice. I was surprised to see how many hits there were, but then I realized that the site brought up anything that had those keywords in it. Some of the posts that I looked at had nothing to do with Library 2.0. I realize that this is typical in a keyword search, so I clicked on the blog tag. I found this to be much more useful.
It was kinda fun reading different people's opinions and thoughts. This has been the best blog search site that I have used. On the other hand, I do not think that this will be helpful for future library reference. Blogs are written by anyone, whether they are qualified or not to be writing about the subject.

Tagging for Learning Library 2.0

For the learning library 2.0 program at my work, I've been learning more about tagging. I began exploring the website del.ico.us. and found that it was very useful to be able to save a site by bookmarking it. At first, this was very exciting, but when I got to school and found a site that I wanted to bookmark, I couldn't because the computer that I was using didn't have the needed buttons. I was at a loss, because my school doesn't allow us to download anything.
Although it is very useful to have the bookmarks on my home computer, I found that the only websites that I visit frequently were e-mail related, and it was just as easy to type in the URL as it was to use the tagging button.

As for reference purposes, I found that it was not as effective as google, yahoo or msn. I tried searching for the official website of the twilight series. I typed twilight and on google, yahoo and msn it came up as one of the first four hits; but on del.ico.us. I had to search through a whole page before I found what I was looking for. In this case, del.ico.us. was not the most effective site to use.

I also tested out how sensitive the site was to mis-spellings. I typed in dinosors and came up with 0-results, whereas google had a link that said, "did you mean dinosaurs?" I clicked the link and it automatically changed the mis-spelling.

Overall, del.ico.us was not a very effective site.

Learning 2.0

At my work, we are doing a learning program. This program is aimed to teach everyone, on our staff, how to use the Internet. Creating an account on "blogger" is part of the program. Fortunately, I already have an account. I also needed to create a GMail account. I went to GMail.com and clicked the "sign up" link. I filled out all of the required information, found and available e-mail address and created a password. Since Gmail and Blogger are connected through google, I had to change my Blogger log-in information so that it matched my GMail account. This was done when a prompt came up notifying that the change needed to be made. I can sign in to blogger at blogger.com, and I can sign in to gmail at gmail.com, or I can sign in to both at google.com by clicking on the sign in link.

I am now forewarning any of my fellow co-workers who will read my blogs.

The blogs that I have previously posted can and probably will offend a few of you, especially those who may be voting for the democratic candidates. I will strive to keep my political oppinions to a minimum during the duration of this program.