Everything is connected

Has it really been over a month since my last post? Time flies when summer finally arrives. I took another, and longer, vacation and made it out of town this time. It was heaven to spend some time with an old, dear friend who lives on Cape Cod. Oh, to be at the ocean! But after spending a week mostly catching up on email and putting out some of the small fires that errupted while I was away, I’m getting back into the swing of things. I look forward to exploring the rest of the 23 Things.

In the meantime, I’ve been catching up with friends face-to-face. One friend, Monica, is on the verge of moving back to England. I envy and admire Monica because she has traveled extensively and lived all over the world. Last summer she visited Turkey for the first time. Turkey keeps coming up lately in books I’m reading, and I’ve added it to the long list of places I’d like to visit.

As I get back online by delving into some of the blogs I added to my RSS reader and catching up on Facebook, I’m reminded of the interconnectedness of it all. My old college friend Betsy posted something on Facebook about Catalog Choice, a website created by her husband Chuck Teller. I was familiar with Catalog Choice (which is pretty cool in its own right), but Betsy’s post prompted me to look into some of Chuck’s other projects. One of them is Word Count Journal, which allows you to create a blog in which you write one word the first day, two the second, three the third, etc., which amounts to 66,795 words in a year. While I was trying to decide whether this was a cool idea or an overly contrived gimmick (I landed on cool idea for writers, BTW), I started reading Melissa Maples’ journal. I kind of liked it so I looked further and learned that she’s also a musician and a photographer. Eventually I found my way to her website, and then to her Flickr photostream, which I absolutely love. This is the interconnected part: she lives in Turkey and one of her goals is to photograph what Turkey is really about – which is not the “tourist-bait pictures of whirling dervishes, hookah bars, and belly dancers.” Now that I’ve seen her gorgeous images, I don’t just want to visit Turkey. I want to live there!

 

The best blog ever

In another life I would have been an interior designer. I love buying flea market furniture and fixing it up, making my own pillows from vintage fabric, buying or making new art objects, and constantly plotting the next redesign of my apartment. At least I used to do these things before I started spending all my time on librarian things. Now I just spend too much money on design magazines to feed my habit, and I imagine how I would design my dream house if librarian salaries suddenly quadrupled and I could work part time and still make more money. So I was delighted when I came across design*sponge. What a terrific blog! It has all the interior design features I could want (before & after, featured homes, do-it-yourself projects), all with lots of gorgeous pictures. The flavor of most of the designs is right up my alley, and many of the homes and projects featured are in reach of someone who doesn’t make a half a million dollars a year. I can get inspired without also being vaguely discourage like I am reading high-end interior design magazines. And just think of all the money I’ll save on subscriptions!

 

Week 6, Thing #11 – Technorati and blog tagging

So I just created a Technorati account and claimed my blog. I’m increasing the chances of people finding me, if not the chances that I’ll actually have something interesting to say! So far, so good.

But I’m not clear on the whole category vs. tag thing. The Technorati help page on tags says that “categories will be read as tags.” Does that mean that the tags I’ve given my posts won’t be read as tags? If so, should I start using the categories the way I’ve been using the tags?

 

Week 6, Thing #10 – del.icio.us

It looks like I’m getting caught up!

I’ve been using del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks for a long time now. I can’t imagine going back to browser-based bookmarks though. I hated being bound to a hierarchical structure (unless I wanted to nest the same link in different sets of folders)  and it was a nightmare to try to manage my bookmarks on multiple computers.

But I haven’t really gotten into the social networking aspect of the site. I share most of my bookmarks, but I can’t say I’ve explored the sites other people have bookmarked. We created a del.icio.us account for our library, and one of the projects on my long to do list is to add the reference resources I’ve bookmarked on my own account to the library account so we can share them with our patrons more easily.

 

Week 5 – LibraryThing

I love the idea of LibraryThing, and I like its features better than the similar tools I’ve looked at (like Shelfari and Goodreads). I created my LibraryThing account a few years ago, and set about cataloging my entire personal library. But I ran out of steam and I haven’t been able to get back to it. For a while I was cataloging all the books I borrowed from the library, so I could have a record of what I’d read, what I wanted to purchase someday, etc. But after a while it just seemed so time consuming – probably in part because I was way more meticulous about cataloging the right edition and tagging consistently than most non-librarians would be. I do like that LibraryThing tags and similar books are now included in the C/W MARS libraries catalog.

 

Week 5 – more on Rollyo

The more I explore this tool, the more I see it’s relevance for our library. We have an online “Virtual Reference Center” that is now basically a collection of links to websites. We’d tried to create Google search boxes for each of the categories, but the coding was cumbersome and we never got it to work properly. Rollyo seems waaayyyy more user-friendly, and it seems you can have just one search box with a pull-down menu that allows you to select which “searchrolls” to search (I have to check on that), which would be a big improvement over the Google search we were trying to set up.

In searching for ways to link my del.icio.us bookmarks to Rollyo, I came across Addictomatic which also seems like a cool tool. It’s sort of a hybrid of an aggregate search engine like Dogpile (does anyone still use that?) and a feed reader, with results appearing in an easy-to-read layout. But I still want to know how to create a Rollyo searchroll from all of the urls I’ve given a particular dag in del.icio.us, without having to do it manually. Possible? Anyone?

 

Week 5 – Play Week!

OK, I just started looking at it, but so far I think Rollyo is the coolest thing! I often search specific sites on Google by typing searchtopic site:whatever.com. But to be able to do this with multiple sites at once, and to save that collection of sites is super cool. It also looks like there’s a lot of flexibility – I can add to or delete the websites listed in Rollyo’s existing categories, for example. I can totally see myself starting to use this instead of Google for certain searches that I do regularly.

Now if Rollyo could play with del.icio.us to allow me to search all the websites I’ve given a particular tag, I would be in search heaven. I can’t be the first person to have thought of this. Is it possible to do this already??

 

Week 4, Thing #9 – LIS blogs/newsfeeds

I’ve had several LIS blogs bookmarked in del.icio.us, but I rarely read them. Maybe I will now, once I add them all to Bloglines. I was a little overwhelmed by the process of searching for more LIS blogs.  Is it just me or have they multiplied like bunnies in the last few years? It seems every grad student/recent grad has a blog now….not to mention all the libraries that have blogs.

One of the most intriguing things I found  (through Technorati) is a blog listing LIS jobs in India. Hmmmm, I always wanted to work overseas at some point in my life!

 

Week 4, Thing #8 – RSS

I’ve been meaning to set up an RSS reader account forever, and now that I have I don’t know why I didn’t do it years ago! I guess I was waiting to find the “perfect” feed reader. I’m already a bit irritated with the bugs in Bloglines (couldn’t log in this morning, couldn’t access my clips after that, etc., etc.) But those irritations are outweighed by the incredible convenience of having all the blogs I want to read funneled to one place. I’m actually reading them now! I don’t know how long that will last though. Bloglines makes it more convenient, but reading all the blogs I’m interested in still takes an enourmous amount of time that I don’t really have. And I’m guessing that I won’t really find the time to get back to the clips I’ve saved to read later, especially as they start to accumulate over time.

I think the best use of Bloglines for me will be to make sure I’m not missing anything LIS related that I might want to think about for my library. I already emailed a couple stories to myself to remind me to add some websites to our Virtual Reference Center pages on our website.

 

Somewhere there is a blog….

…that links to an image that links to another blog that links to a YouTube video where there’s a poem….

I just had one of those serendipitous voyages across the interwebs and found this poem I really like, by a slam poet I’d never heard of: