Blogging the Line

What is so good about this excercise is the opportunity to explore some things that you hear about but never actually get a chance to look at. Bloglines is one such thing - I had heard of the site but never realized exactly what it does. It is straightforward to use; however I did have difficulty adding the CBC feed to Bloglines as they said they were unable to find the feed. Mashables was an easy one to add, though. I have not yet figured out how to add Bloglines to my blog but will keep attempting it. It is certainly a good quick way to keep in touch with things that are happening in the book and library world and I will keep looking at these ones; however the temptation is that this can be a real time wasting activity too. Somehow, you feel compelled to read each and every entry and feel guilty if you don't!

Google Eyed

Today was Google day and it was great to have the time to explore some of the changes and additions to Google beyond the basic tools used everyday like the search engine and image search.
I looked at the Directory, Google's attempt to catalogue the web, and through the Reference Category - Libraries I was delighted to find the website
You Are Not Alone (Maybe) Frequently asked reference questions, posted by the University of Michigan's Internet Public Library. This is very much like our old "Where to Look" file that we have in the Humanities Department and I was pleased to see some old favourites like Words ending in GRY - with a few other additions. It has World's All Time Best Selling Books and a nice entry on Genealogy for beginners.

The other product I explored was Orkut. I had no idea that Google had its own social networking site, apparently named after one of their employees who developed it. It seems to have many of the features of Facebook but not the applications and from the testimonials and fun facts, seems to be popular as a dating site. In trends, it looks like (no surprise) it is popular with the younger age demographic and very little use in Canada.

Facing Facebook

I do have a Facebook account that I originally set up (with my children's assistance!) to see what the fuss was all about and also because I learn best by doing. I rarely use it although I do play around with it from time to time when bored as it can certainly be a great time waster. I did upload a video and some pictures to see how it worked and I must confess, I did use it successfully to re-establish contact with an old friend from library school who is now living in San Francisco. Interestingly, rather than keep using Facebook to communicate, we exchanged phone numbers! I would not use it as the sole means of keeping in touch with people and frankly I'm not all that interested in what other people are watching on TV; however it can be useful to see what favourite authors (Lori!) and music groups are doing. You can also waste a lot of time trying to be witty at the expense of reading a good book! It can be awkward too in terms of protocol - do you ask your boss to be your friend? What if they say no? Is it considered public knowledge (despite the friends only limiters) if someone posts something sensitive?

My kids live on Facebook and it seems to be the main method of communication for that generation. They won't let me be their friend though! I have heard of a trend that is starting for some of them to get "off the grid". It will be interesting to see if in future the younger generation withdraws from it and the older computer savvy generation takes it over as a means for staying in touch with family.

Wicking with Wikipedia

What fun! It was certainly easy to find some corrections that needed to be made on the Calgary Public Library entry. I corrected the original opening date of the library as well as inserted a link to the Memorial Park entry in the Community Heritage and Family History Digital Library. The article could stand a bit more editing too and I hope to go back and do that. I'd like to add the link to the Digital Library in the references and the citation but the citation process seems complicated and will take a bit more time to figure out. I'd also like to create a whole new entry on the Community Heritage and Family History collection when I get a chance.

Tasty Times With Delicious

I have been using Delicious for a while now, both at work for Best Websites and at home for my personal use. In fact, it was through setting up my own Delicious account that I found one of my favourite websites that I now use all the time for travel: Tripit


I don't think that Delicious is the most user friendly site. As with any uncontrolled vocabulary, the tags may not be uniformly consistent. Some links have a lot of tags and some don't have many at all. Tagging could use some cataloguers! However, the advantage of Delicious is also the ability to customize. Of most benefit is the ability to search it from any computer.


Does anyone know if there are any other websites comparable to Delicious out there?