Playing Favorites

Here are my favorites. I'll add them to the 2.0 Sandbox.

Animals - Dog

Blogs- Likely Stories (blog.booklistonline.com), PostSecret (postsecret.blogspot.com)

Books- A Thousand Splendid Suns, There is No Me Without You, The Omnivore's Dilemma

Movies- Annie Hall, Amelie, Dan in Real Life

Activities- Umm, reading. Mountain biking, cooking, painting, taking pictures

Movie Stars-Jude Law???

Music- Badly Drawn Boy, Wilco, Michael Franti, Ozomatli,

Place in Santa Cruz County - Wilder Ranch, Beach between Sunny Cove and 26th Ave.

Restaurants- Nuevo, Pink Godzilla, Dharmas

Sports Stars- Used to be Marion Jones, before the steroids debacle.

Stores- Bookshop Santa Cruz, Best of Everything, New Leaf

TV Show- Six Feet Under, 30 Rock

Vacation Spots- Taos, Tahoe, Paris

Web tools- ScreenGrab, Pandora, all Google products

Websites- Epicurious, Facebook

Wikis-

wikis

I love wikis. I created a wiki for my bookclub. I created a wiki for my business. I've helped with wikis at work. I use wikipedia.

However, I have never used Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This looks like a good example of wikis can work well. Also, The Princeton Public Library Summer Reading wiki is a good example of a wiki working well. So much depends on those who are contributing to the wiki. If contributions follow a clear set of guidelines and the formatting stays the same throughout, then a wiki can be very useful. However, if if there is not a straight set of guidelines, a wiki can become a free-for-all.

Nancy Pearl's Booklust wiki has taken a turn for the better recently. For a few months, it was really a mess of contributions without formatting or proper organizations. It is now organized, and probably moderated, and no longer spinning out of control.

Kindle and the future of libraries

Several colleagues have sent emails about Amazon's new book device, the Kindle. It's an e-book reader with wireless access. Books, magazines, and some blogs can be downloaded from Amazon from almost anywhere using it's whispernet connection. Also, wikipedia can be accessed for more information while reading. There has been a lot of talk about the Kindle and the future of books and libraries. Will this change the library's role in society? My first thought when reading this Newsweek article was YES! We need to get ready! This is huge! But then I saw a picture of the Kindle on Amazon's website and started to change my mind. It is so ugly! And doesn't look that easy to use. And there are so many people who are resistant to technology that paper books will never go out of style! But then, the world is changing so rapidly, and the next generation is changing the way we seek for information. Why not change the book? Already, we have the ability to have almost instant access to information with the internet. Often when reading, I have to put down my book and pick up my computer to look something up. perhaps there is a cultural reference I didn't get, or the geography is unclear and I need a map to help me finish the chapter. Why not combine reading with this instant access to information? I do think that we are headed that direction, and in a couple of years, the Kindle will seem old and clunky and outdated, and we'll think "did we really think this was an alternative to the book?" But instead of returning to paper books, we will have something so snazzy and easy to use it will be comparing the new video ipod nanos to the first generation ipods. They have the same function, yet they are sooo different.

I checked Kindle on Google Trends and it didn't even register. People are more interested in Donda West's funeral and Oprah's favorite things, and I don't blame them.

Technorati - for real this time

I decided to stay clear of the most popular blogs when returning to Technorati today. Instead, I decided I'd like to know more about the Kindle and read some of the hubbub about it. I started with a basic search for "kindle," which brought up several recent (a few minutes ago) blog posts about it. I then tried the advanced search and searched blog posts with the tag "kindle." This brought up some of the same postings that the basic search did, but also some more posts that I hadn't seen, that were about the Kindle, rather than just mentioning it. That's part of the beauty of tags, I guess.

I really like that I can subscribe to a feed of my search, and keep current on whether or not the Kindle will really be the NBT.

Technorati is an enabler

I have a new addiction.


Thanks to Technorati.


It is called postsecret.


I was browsing the list of most popular blogs when I found it.


Now 15 minutes of my life have been sucked away.

del.icio.us is delicious

I've been using delicious for several months now to keep track of the websites that are really useful, fun, or that I want to come back to look at later. It's sooooo easy to use. I've seen magnolia, a similar bookmarking tool, and it is so beautiful that I almost forget about how it isn't very easy to use. Delicious is easy to use, but ugly. I guess you can't have everything.

I've added a badge to my blog.

Week 6 - Rollyo

I've started playing with Rollyo. I've heard much about it, but have never used. I somehow never found the occasion when I thought it would be helpful. Now I've done a search using someone else's food and dining search. I searched for lobster mushrooms, and the top search results seem to be recipes from epicurious. Now I like epicurious a lot, but this search wasn't really helpful because I would have just gone straight to their site if I had wanted lobster mushroom recipes and the search results would have been much easier to read with ratings and pictures.
So I've decided to do my own search to see if I can out roll a popular rollyo-er.

Hmm. What interests me?

I love my dog.

Dogs! A popular search!

I add five or so dog-related sites to my search, then create my search, then I search.

I type, "husky."

And... it takes what seems like forever, then...

Excellent! I get a variety of results from the American Kennel Club, Dogster, DogChannel, and a variety of sponsored links (which are NOT helpful). My search results are exactly what I was hoping for, though!

Here's my search: http://rollyo.com/search.html?q=husky&sid=325373

LibraryThing hearts me!

Someone from LibraryThing asked if they could use my previous blog posting on their www.librarything.com/buzz site! I said yes and they did!