Thing 13 Del.icio.us

This was sort of interesting. I think people who would really need this to sort their bookmarks would have a lot of time on their hands. Many of the sites I look at on my home computer are online accounts - banking, credit cards, which I wouldn't want as favorites on another computer anyway. After random clicking on links, I found some interesting sites including art ones - learning how to draw different animals, and some music sites - one showing the position for guitar chords, and one with tuning forks which played musical notes. I enjoyed the links from the PLCMCL's site. Several were worth looking at. One link was a librarian's favorite / currently reading books.

Thing 12 Rollyo

This was not very useful; I didn't enjoy this task. I would have liked it more if the webpages of the searchrolls came up and not just the domain name. That would have made the list of sites much more enjoyable. I would have looked at many more of the sites if they had been more "exciting." I did a health searchroll and did check on a particular topic. I looked at the Mayo Clinic's website and the information was good but I'm sure they are listed on Google also. I was surprised to see what looked like "sponsored" websites on the list. I thought those would have been taken off - only "legitimate" sites listed.

Thing 11 Library Thing

This was very enjoyable. I added 7 books. The second day I tried again and could add the books to my blog. The next time I reviewed my blog, all the book covers showed up - although the one HP cover is different from the one I own. (Two of the other book covers are different editions from mine also but I wanted to be sure a cover showed up so didn't choose those versions in LibraryThing.) I liked the recommendations. For one of mine, I had read all of the "books with similar tags" part of the recommendations. I found, though, with the "unsuggester" that when I put in Harry Potter, it seemed to think I would not like a lot of religious-type books - that was interesting. I liked knowing how many people had "my" books on their lists - and how popular they were. One of mine said it had "53,000 more popular books than it" - !

Thing Ten

Trying out various generators was fun - one I liked in particular was the "acronym generator." I was reading "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" when doing this assignment, so I put in "goblet" - the acronym came out "General Omni-Binary Library Expansion Technology." I made up an avatar on Yahoo but couldn't figure out how to make it appear on my blog - I was very disappointed. I tried one on Meez but I didn't like the hair or face choices - and the lack of organization for the options didn't help. Later ... from putting my books from LibraryThing onto my blog, I realized it was the same process to add my avatar to my blog. Now they are both on my page, and it looks very good!

Thing 9 Merlin

I've just been viewing Merlin and checking out the links - it's fascinating! I had no idea about all of those things it listed. The Web Awards were interesting - it was fun looking at the top three sites for different categories. I didn't know there were so many social networking sites. I went on Myspace for YALSA and Ask Us Now - that was the first time I had been on it. I was interested in the books link but just was able to click on the Amazon link to the books, not any actual posts about the books - maybe I had to be a member to see more. I saw that there were authors on the Teen Lit link - that was pretty cool but I didn't see how to view the posts on that either. (I think authors' websites are very intriguing, too.) It was easier searching for feeds from the bloglines website. I noticed that the Washington Post book link hadn't had new posts for a long time - that was a disappointment.

Thing 8 Bloglines

I set up a bloglines account and added 11 feeds to it. I was more interested by the "news" ones than the library-related ones. It's all very well to have updates like this in one account, but I don't see myself using this too much. I don't have a lot of extra time for staring at computers. I tried to get the url to include my account in this post, but I didn't do something right so it didn't work out. (Also, my username includes my last name, and I didn't want that on here for all the "non-library" viewers.) I will check later to see if I can add any feed links to my blog.

Thing 7 - The Internet

I've been thinking about which technology I should write about, and I chose the internet. It is just amazing what we can do - and the fact that it wasn't around earlier. I am able to buy things, have bank accounts and credit card accounts online, order pizzas online, etc. You can job hunt or house hunt online, look up cars - and do the "side by side compare" so you know if you're making the right choice. Also, you can find people, phone numbers, buy airplane tickets, find out news and weather.