Thursday, December 6, 2007

Thing #14 - The Technorati Thing

More fancy-schmancy icons to add to the blog!

Checked out the "popular" page on Technorati, had a quick browse at the listed top 100 favourite blogs...didn't recognise most of the names in the top searches (probably porn or sport!)

Was rapt to see "The Dark Knight" as being the second most popular movie, just wait until it gets released in 2008, number 1 all the way!

Most of the favorites seemed to be based on technology and money-making blogs. In the top 50 favorite blogs, did not see one celebrity name mentioned. Assuming from the search results that most Technorati users are looking for specific people/things rather than just browsing.

Re: Searching for Learning 2.0 on Technorati....12,248 blogs were found just by using the search box, only 849 were found in the blog directory. Guess most people are not doing the optional part of registering their blog with Technorati, not a surprising result.

Thing #13 - The del.icio.us Thing

A handy resource for reference use in that the most popular sites are most likely to be the most reliable (you'd hope!). Either everyone using and tagging that site for future use, are all right or all wrong about it!.

Reading the comments of other users that have saved the link, answers a lot of "what's that?!" questions too. I am all trusting in Librarians not wanting to misinform the greater population, where they tag, I will follow!

Using del.icio.us, at a more personal level, it is good for organsing all your favourite websites. Grouping related sites together on the same page. The comments and descriptions that you put in for each saved link, are handy to remind yourself why that link was saved in the first place!

In addition, you can take those favourite links/sites with you to any PC that has internet access rather than using the age old add 'favourites' and 'bookmark' buttons to the one computer you have saved them on to begin with.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Thing #12 - The Roll your own search engine with Rollyo Thing

Will hopefully get the chance to revisit this site another time to check out all the options.

For the purpose of this exercise, I just followed the steps outlined in the Learning 2.0 instructions. If there were no instructions to this one, I think that the naviagation in creating a Rollyo search engine would have been alot harder.

Transfering from that site and pasting a Rollyo to the blog was again the same as adding an online generator (Thing #10).

This is definately one of those 'trial and error' kind of sites if it's the first time you have been there and didn't have a list of instructions to follow.

Thing #11 - The All About LibraryThing, Thing...

Arrrrgggghhhhh! Had been trying for awhile to add page elements but I kept getting redirected to the bloggers homepage. Was able to edit current page elements but not allowed to add anything! Turns out pop-up windows from this site had to be allowed - just added this in case anyone else comes across the same issue! Opps.


The LibraryThing feature was easy to navigate around, add books to and create widgets for the blog.

Very much the same as creating online generators and pasting the code to an added page element. If you can get through Thing #10 of the Learning 2.0 program (and have pop up windows allowed from this site!), this exercise is pretty old hand.

A handy little jigga for those wanting to share their book preferences to the world of blogdom and to socialise with bookreaders around the globe.