I love library thing. I started entering in a few of my favorite books, then a bunch of picture books from my storytime books excel spreadsheet and now I want to enter in a billion more things. Every book I enter makes me think of 10 more books that I must have on my list.
So the first time I did this exercise, I took really precise notes. I wrote down number of hits, relevance, my favorites blog titles, really and truly the whole nine yards, super meticulous. Then i lost that paper. So rather than trying to replicate my first experience I'm just going to tell y'all how I feel about technorati (from the heart this time). Honestly when I look at technorati i just feel tired. There's information plastered all over the place 1,000,000 gems of knowledge just waiting to be unearthed and treasured, cherished even. I'm sure I could spend my entire life on technorati and find more interesting blogs than I could count. I would also find an even more unbelievably vast quantity of poorly written blogs, boring blogs, innane blogs, absolutely worthless blogs and even downright wrong blogs. The easiest way for me to envision technorati in the physical world is as a giant search-able bus station. That is to say, imagine if I could go to some vast public place and call out a string of keywords and by doing this summon forth all people who had anything at all they would like to say about my set of keywords. Useful? Perhaps. I might be lucky enough to summon forth a Nobel prize winning scientist who happened to be in my bus station that day, of course he might have been summoned by my desire to know what "the best movie of 2007" was, a question which he might not be any better suited to answer than I am. That is the biggest problem with blogs. There is no guarantee that the bloggers (the person writing the blog) have any real expertise in the subjects they are writing on. Technorati does try to alleviate this problem by showing a blog's "authority" and number of fans. Authority records the number of times a blog is referenced by other blogs and a blog's number of fans just shows how many people like the blog enough to self-describe themselves as fans of it. While blogs with high authority and larger numbers of fans do tend to be better written there is no guarantee that these blogs have more accurate information, only more popular information. I feel like Technorati (and to an extent wikipedia as well) represents a democratization of information, it represents a situation where popularity trumps legitimacy and where the sheer weight of public opinion can dictate truth. Imagine the 15th century's technorati or wikipedia the vast mass of the populous could assure you that the earth was flat, their voices drowning out the educated elite that knew the earth to be round.
I'm sorry technorati. I didn't intend for this to turn into a mean spirited tirade against you, I actually do like the premise of the site. I just get nervous that people will look at this as a research tool, just because the library wants us to learn about it. It's not a research tool, but it can be an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.
I thi.nk that the most us.ef.ul thing I lea.rned from del.icio.us is that i.t is ac.cep.tab.le to in.ser.t mul.ti.ple per.iod..s in.to a w.ord. Not only is this beh.avio.r c..ool, i.t is als.o us.ef.ul. I've ev.en co.nsid.ered inc.luding i.t in an emer.gent l.iter.acy hand.out, or us.ing it in sto.ry.tim.e. Seriously though, I didn't find del.icio.us to be that useful of a site. I don't go home to my computer lab each night and wonder which of my 12 computers has the link I'm looking for, in fact I can't remember the last time I saved a link per.iod. Google does a fine job of searching out which ever site I happen to be looking for and I feel like typing something into the google search bar in firefox is quicker that searching thru a bookmarks folder and it is definitely quicker than logging into del.icio.us and then searching my links for whatever it is I'm looking for.
As far as using del.icio.us to provide reference help, I'm not sure I'm sold. I speculated that google would once again be more effective. So I decided to test this hypothesis, by searching some tags in del.icio.us and then searching those same terms in google. I decided to search nature, orangutans, trees (no I can't explain why I chose those terms, but I did, so now we all have to li
ve w/ them) in del.icio.us and I immediately encountered a drawback to using del.icio.us, I can't spell, therefore, I certainly can't spell orangutans. My attempt ended up looking something like 'oragatang.' Del.icio.us was not impressed, it rewarded my search w/ 0 results and no suggestions on how i might find more. Google on the other hand actually found 31 results that other grievous mispellers of the web had posted and better still google, in it's infinite wisdom, asked me did you mean nature, orangutans, trees ? Yes. Yes I did google. Google then went on to show me some 36,000 sites that matched my criteria. I only looked at the first page, but most of the results looked relevant. I then took the correct spelling google had provided me and offered it to del.icio.us. Del.icio.us gave me one result, something about the origins of walking began in the trees. This was not what I had hoped to find. Google 1, Del.icio.us 0. I, being a kind a generous soul, decided to give deli.cio.us a second chance. Perhaps this one search was a fluke. I decided this time I would have a clearer objective when I searched (my triplet of only somewhat related terms may have been what caused del.icio.us fits). My objective became information on the movies of the 2006 sundance film festival. I phrased my search as: sundance, 2006, movies. Both google and del.icio.us provided me w/ many relevant links right on the first page, however del.cio.us actually provided me w/ the same link 6 times, 6 of the first seven links were to the sundance 2006 official website, which in a way is actually good, that's probably the most relevant site, but on the other hand suggesting it 6 times is a little over the top. Google provided a variety of sites w/ the information on the movies of sundance 2006 and since we're dealing w/ the reviews here I think at least a little bit of variety is important. Google 2, Del.icio.us 0. (Google also found the sundance 2006 official page).
Before I end I should clarify my opinions of del.icio.us. I'm not trying to say del.icio.us is a bad site, or a useless website, on the contrary, it seems to have plenty of great applications, but those applications are either not particularly relevant to my situation or those applications are redundant and my needs are better filled by another website (thanks google!). I should however give credit where credit is due and I must admit I did have one great success w/ del.icio.us. A few weeks ago, when the library 2.0 was still in its testing phase, I was previewing a few of the exercises at home and i decided to give del.icio.us a shot. I searched my favorite nba rumor site in delicious and then used the tags associated w/ it to try to find a similar site, I browsed long and hard and finally I stumbled across a website previously unknown to me http://heylarryhughespleasestoptakingsomanybadshots.com/ it was hillarious and it is updated frequently so I've visit it often since discovering it (thanks del.icio.us!) I can never remember the prohibitively long url though... so I always search larry hughes stop on google and it comes right up.
I checked out a couple of the wikis listed on the learning 2.0 website. I was generally impressed with the SJCPL wiki, especially the format they used. To start I clicked on biography and memoir, the page then displays definitions of various types of biographies followed by a listing of new biographies at the library, staff recommend biographies and best selling biographies. Pictures of the book cover are shown just like one would expect to see on amazon or barnes and noble's website and clicking on those pictures links you to the library catalog. On the downside the page has been updated since feb of last year, so the new books aren't exactly new anymore.... I then tried browsing by categories, hobbies and then travel. Travel had a similar lay-out w/ the books, but it also included an "in the news" link to a travel to Torino in 2006 website, once again very out of date. The travel section also included lists of travel magazines, links to travel websites, dewy numbers and info on language learning help. The other wiki i visited was iread the Iowa reader's advisory wiki. One probably I noticed was they had lots of categories to browse (e.g. children's -> Historical Fiction) w/ nothing, or very options recommended. The adult and teen genres seemed to have more options, but I was never overly impressed by the quantity of books recommended. One thing I did like is the convenient links the site had to add a delicious bookmark or RSS. The problem i noticed is that for wikis to be success for they need frequent contribution and updates. Wikis generally useful proportionate to the number of contributors they have. Wikipedia is so successful because it has millions of contributors worldwide. The wikis I looked at today are limited in what they can do, because they have a much smaller group of contributors. While wikipedia is used by internet users around the world, I doubt that the SJCPL wiki attracts many contributors outside of St Jospeh's County library users who also use the internet.
Step one complete! Personally I found week one's activities to be fairly easy. I already have a gmail account so I skipped that step. Blogger seems pretty straight forward, the only difficulty I encountered was when I, on a whim, went into settings and made the transliteration English to Hindi button active. Unless you can read Hindi I don't recommend it, it changed everything I typed directly into Hindi characters. I spent maybe a grand total of 45 minutes working this out and that includes numerous interruptions (i was on desk the whole time) and much agonizing over which template I would use.
