Week 4, Thing 9: Merlin & other related blogs

I had no idea that a site like Merlin existed. After subsribing to the feed, I am thinking that maybe I can stay more up to date on the technology. Anyway, I went ahead and checked out the list of search tools. Out of the four, I really liked Topix.net. I found this the easiest to search and the yielded the best results, especially for news related stories. I really liked the interactive graph that allowed you to access news items from individual months-NYC, L.A and London keyword searches produced this graph. On the downside, I had a difficult time searching Feester and Technorati. By using a keyword search, I received feeds that did not relate to the topic and I found pages difficult to navigate and a bit overwhelming.

Week 4, Thing 8: RSS Feeds

I had often heard the term RSS but I never knew what it meant. So after an extensive reading and listening to the tutorials, (found the tutorials helpful for this discovery exercise) I feel I have a better understanding of this technology. Now, when I use the internet to catch up on my news, I generally search website to website. I have only 4-5 websites that I regularly search, so at first I couldn't really see making a large list of bloglines. But I find the more I look at my blogline account, the more I'm starting to like it. And by listing several professional feeds (Yalsa, shifted librarian, popgoesthelibrary) I think it will be easier to keep up on the library trends.

Week 3, Thing 7: Anything Technology

This past December I received an ipod which I had been wanting for some time. I usually don't spend a lot of money on technology, which is why I tend to be on the tale end of things, technology wise. But now that I have an ipod I absolutely love it! The best part is that you can pick and choose what songs you want to download. No longer do I have to buy a CD for only 1 or 2 songs. I even have the special armband so you can bring your ipod to the gym. And now when I go on long car trips, the ipod comes along too.

Week 3, Thing 6: Flickr Mashups

Colr Pickr is really neat! I could spend an hour just looking at all the pictures and editing the colors. I especially liked the textures and urban decay images. I liked Mapr too, but I noticed that if the group of pictures are located in the same location, ex. California it is very difficult to view the images because they are layered on top of each other.

Week 3, Thing 5: Explore Flickr

Hooray, it finally worked! It took a long, long time to figure this one out. I was able to upload photo into Flickr but then I couldn't figure out how to get the photo into Blogger. I tried using Flickr's blog tool and then I tried the URL upload in Blogger. The URL posted but the picture would not appear. I was using the URL directly from Flickr and I think that may have been the problem. I eventually ended up downloading the photo back from Flickr and uploading from the computer. Does any have any helpful hints or explanations on what I was doing wrong?

Anyway, this is Marmalade, our beloved cat. He used to be the number 1 cat in the house, he's now number 2, and he tends to drool when he's happy.