Week 6 Thing 13

Spent lots of time exploring tagging and the Del.icio.us site this afternoon. It was really interesting to see the tags that have been used and the sites that others have bookmarked. It is certainly a benefit to be able to view your bookmarked sites from any computer. Using Del.icio.us while doing research would make it so easy to keep track of websites with pertinent information on your topic. Categorizing the sites with tags would help to organize your research sites. Also searching with tags would lead you to other sites on the same topic. While exploring, I found the unofficial tools (3rd party applications) in Del.icio.us. There are some really neat applications. I especially like Thumblicious. It shows thumbnail screenshots of popular bookmarks. I really enjoyed exploring Del.icio.us.

Week 5 Thing 12

Explored Rollyo and rolled my own search roll. After initially exploring Rollyo and creating my own search roll, I have had time to go back and work with it some more. You will find my Rollyo search box on the right side of the blog. Rollyo is really easy to use and I can see the benefit of using Rollyo.

Week 5 Thing 11

I took the tour of the LibraryThing and set up an account. I was amazed at the ease of adding books. Here is the link to my catalog of books at the LibraryThing:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lkclemen

Week 5 Thing 10

I explored online image generators and had lots of fun playing with several of the online image generators. I made Jack-0-Lanterns with scary faces with the Create Your Own Jack-O-Lantern generator. Since I love chocolate, I was excited about the Chocolate Bar Generator. Then one generator led me to another one on the same site (imagechef.com) and I found The Dog Ate My Homework generator! The dog was so cute that I had to put the image in my blog. The image is on the right side of my blog. I also found a Name In Lights generator. If you scroll to the bottom of my blog you will see my name in lights! The generators were really easy to use. I also explored Yahoo Avatars. It was fun creating my own avatar. I even got it to appear as a post in this blog! The difficult part when using the online image generators was getting them into my blog. But after several tries and some frustration, it finally worked.

My Avatar

Week 4 Thing 9

I have explored Merlin, signed up for an account and subscribed to their RSS feed. I also continued exploring Bloglines and the different search tools for finding feeds. Bloglines Search tool is very easy to use. I thought Topix was neat because you can search by city and get community news items. Feedsteer was more confusing for me, especially the mention of widgets. Widgets are a real mystery to me. What is a widget? I also found Technorati confusing. I went through the tutorial which seemed fairly stright forward. But when I went to the site it looked different from the tutorial. I need to pay around with it some more. Maybe I'll figure it out. I may have been confused by some of the search tools; but, at least I found out what search tools for finding feeds are out there.

Week4 Thing 8

I have spent a lot of time this week learning about RSS feeds and news readers. Read the discovery resources and now understand exactly what RSS feeds and newsreaders are all about. After reading Bloglines extensive tutorial, I signed up for an account. It was easy to get started with some RSS feeds by subscribing to some of Bloglines Top Picks. I have started noticing the RSS icon on many sites. It is so easy to subscribe to feeds by copying and pasting the URL/link into the subscribe field in Blogline's reader. I have subscribed to 10 or 12 news feeds. This is a real timesaver instead of going to each website. But I find that all of this Web 2.0 technology can be addictive and soon you find that time has gotten away from you.