Digg it

I searched for a bit and then took the option of joining Digg.

In order to test the search options, I chose a rather obscure subject to look for, the Bussard Fusion experiments that are ongoing. The most recent posting was from Feb.

To contrast, I went and looked for a more recent subject, Michael Jackson. The most Dugg pieces ranged from his appearence on the Simpsons to his first moonwalk.

All in all, I'd have to say that the results are somewhat "scattershot". Because this is content created by the general public, it has enormous potential. But, becaused it's content is created by the general public, it has the potential to get bogged down with inanities.

Task #14

I joined Delicious and I did skip step 2 and 3 in the process. I'm working off of someone else's computer and, as a result, I'm hesitant about adding features. I then searched for "Steampunk" and bookmarked three sites.

Steampunk refers to the literary genre of old masters like Jules Verne or H.G. Wells and more modern types like Neal Stephenson. It basically infuses the dawn of modern technology with the old-worls style of Victorian England.

Some people have taken the notions and have gone a step further, making steampunk toys, clothes and gizmos.

This is from one of the bookmarked sites: Datamancer.Net.

This guy is an artist who refinishes items, mostly computers in classic steampunk fashion.

There's some other good sites as well. Here the link to my delicious site:http://delicious.com/Fenriska

Tagging

Tagging could help users in finding the more obscure bits of information. For example, some guy mentions in his blog about an article on a chapter in an American History book that's relevant to Florida during the revolutionary war. Five years later, a search turns up the tag and a student able to snag the book for a report.

What I'm curious about are ways that you could modify searches for tags. Limit searches to published articles or for anything newer than five years? Or linking keywords together to create more precise searches? That would cut down on a lot of the confusion that the article mentions.

Twittering Away

Signing up for Twitter was a little bit more involved than the previous one. I had to provide my email password for this, which I'm still questioning. If we assist our patrons in signing up for this service, I anticipate that that will be a particular stumbling block for our more security-minded people.

Also, all the cool names were taken. A minor complaint, sure. But, again, it's something that we'll be hearing about from our patrons. Some nine-year-old wants to twitter under the name of "BobTheMighty", he'll be disaapointed when he finds out that it's gone.

For the record, I don't know if "BobTheMighty" is actually taken yet. After my first dozen choices were ruled invalid, I went with "Savateur10".

What is cool is some of the people on Twitter. One of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, is on Twitter and I've signed up to follow him. So is Amanda Fowler, who I've mentioned in a previous post and I've sent an invite to her.

Probably the biggest flaw with Twitter is me. As you may have noticed, I can get pretty wordy sometimes and limiting myself to 140 characters will be very difficult.

Task #11- IMing

This was educational, especially all the abbreviations and acronyms that exist in "IM shorthand". It's amazing how new languages pop up and I dare say that "l33t Speak" fits the criteria for at least a sub-dialect.

The IM service that I chose was Yahoo, under the name "Kelley_M_Anderson". This was mostly out of convenience's sake since I already use Yahoo for email. Once I logged in, the 1st person that I could think of to IM was my Nephew, Graham, since he's always texting messages. However, he's offline at the moment. And, it occurs to me that he may have already gone through his minutes for the month, since he's always texting messages.

Ning

First off, great name.

Second, I took the option of not signing up for this network. To start with, I don't have a camera or video recorder (Unless you count my cellphone), so I can't really upload anything onto the Ning networks.

Also, I have to say that I'm a little twitchy about posting too much information for the public to see. For years, we've all recieved warnings about internet safety and heared horror stories about identity theft. I know that if you're carefull, you've got nothing to worry about. Still, the thought of posting so much of myself online causes a bit of a twinge.

I looked through some of the networks. It seems to me that one of the biggest benefits to this from the video postings would be the realm of "How To". Actually seeing something being done speaks louder than the most detailed book on the subject. I typed in cooking and got access to recipes demonstrated online. Pretty nice.

More of Facebook

I've joined three groups. Two martial arts (Pa Kua and Savate) and one group for writers. And, I became a fan of an Aikido page (A rather large one, they had over twenty thousand fans)

There's a bit of a gap between the local and the global in terms of content on Facebook. The martial arts page that I'm a fan of and the groups that I've joined are all global. I tried searching on the Dallas/Ft. Worth selection and the results were somewhat skimpy. I then tried to widen the search to Texas in general, but I couldn't make that work.

I've also tried to hunt down old friends that I have not seen in a while. The problem there was that I'm not sure about the details enough to refine the search. For example, the last time I saw Amanda Fowler, she was married. Did she register on Facebook on her maiden name or her married one? Is she even still married? Most of the people that I have enough information to track down with are people that I still stay in touch with and don't need to track down.

Still, this is only the first day that I've tried this. Maybe it'll get easier as I go along.

Facebook

Was interesting, but felt a little old hat.

This probably due to the fact that the whole process of registering for Facebook felt a lot like signing up for an email account. There's the same customed information, access to groups, etc. The whole thing is more "me" oriented than "site" oriented (The way an email account would be) , but the similarity is unmistakable.

The article that was posted mentioned the use of Facebook to disseminate new software and apps, which struck me as cool. Hopefully, the more I explore Facebook, the more stuff will pop up.