Week Six, Assignment #14

#14: Explore and learn how tags work with blog posts. Do a keyword search on “School Library Learning 2.0” in blog posts, tags, & the blog directory.

I found 5 hits on “School Library Learning 2.0” in Technorati when I searched blog posts. There were 7 hits on “School Library Learning 2.0” when I searched blogs. There were no hits on “School Library Learning 2.0” when I searched the blog directory. In the advanced search, I found no posts tagged with "School Library Learning 2.0". When I removed the quotation marks and searched again for posts tagged with those words, I found 4. Without the quotation marks, I found 5 blogs that had that exact phrase. (Remember, for comparison, I got 7 blogs about "School Library Learning 2.0" when I included the quotation marks.)

Next: Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

I'll come back and finish this in my next posting.

Week Six, Assignment #13

#13: Explore Del.icio.us. Watch the Santa Cruz Public Library tutorial. Check the SJLibraryLearning2 account. Set up my own account.

I watched the Del.icio.us tutorial and checked the bookmarks of the SJLibraryLearning2 account.

I've had a Del.icio.us account for several years under a different sign-in name than I'm using for this project. My library supervisor often posts bookmarks there that I find useful to share. The social bookmarking site is nice because it lets me find my favorite bookmarks no matter what computer I'm using.

There was a different social bookmarking site that I used in 2004 when I took an online Dreamweaver course through someone based at the University of Georgia, who was teaching through the auspices of Northern Virginia Community College. I forget his name and what bookmarking site he had us using. I'm afraid that information died when my computer's motherboard crashed. I know it wasn't one of the popular ones often posted on an online article that makes it so easy to bookmark something. I went to the SJLibraryLearning2 account and clicked on the tags for socialbookmarking and for bookmarking, but I didn't see anything that struck a chord of recognition.

I've created another account on Del.icio.us with the name joanneLMT2 so I could make a badge with the name I'm using on this blog.

Week Five, Assignment #12

#12: Roll your own search tool with Rollyo.

I tried the Chaos Kidsearch in Rollyo and typed in Internet safety as a search term. The results list includes a lot of links I recognize from the Internet safety initiatives in my school district. This link shows you what I found in Rollyo: http://rollyo.com/search.html?prevsid=475860&q=internet+safety&sid=475860. Rollyo is a site I plan to suggest to others. I've made a posting about it on my school library Web site. You can read it here.

Week Five, Assignment #11

#11. Explore Web 2.0 Award Winners and then blog about the sites I explored.

I visited yourminis, a widget site. I played with the BMI (body mass index) calculator, but I can't imagine wanting to place this on my blog.

While at yourminis I also looked at the Weather Channel widget. I have this on my computer's desktop, but I've noticed that I get a different temperature reading on it than my husband gets on his Weather Channel temperature gauge. The night we were checking for frost temperatures, my husband's listing was 29 degrees as a current temperature while my Weather Channel widget indicated it was 42 degrees. Consequently, I don't place a lot of stock in either of them being right.

Week Five, Assignment #10

#10. Play around with an online image generator.

I made this Word Cloud at http://www.wordle.net/:

This is cool. I'd been trying to find a word cloud generator for the past several days, and I hadn't come across one that I liked until I found this one. I could have typed in the specific words I wanted, but I chose to have the image generate itself based on what was on my Library Threads blogsite. I did check the links it shows, to make sure there was nothing I'd be embarrassed to have show up if someone typed in the addresses.

I made this campaign button on http://www.imagechef.com/:

This turned out to be a very satisfactory image creator, too.


Here's a cute library card I made at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/badge.php for our school mascot:

When I posted it to this blog, the default placement was at the top of the posting. I had to click on the "Edit Html" tab and cut the code from the top of the posting and relocate it where I wanted it.

Week Four, Assignment #9

#9. Locate a few useful library blogs or newsfeeds.

View my Blogroll and you'll see that I've found some good school library blogs. I've also subscribed to the American Libraries Direct weekly newsfeed. Just for fun, I added my own blog to my list: