Thing 4—Flickr

Better use Scenario 1, as i don't have a digital camera...




Natural Bridges? Yes, but not Santa Cruz—it's the Durdle Door at Lulworth Cove in Dorset, on the south coast of England. Beautiful shot of a heartbreakingly beautiful place...


Being able to share photographs and comment on them could obviously be useful in an online photography class, but i can even think of a way i could have used this recently: in assisting a graduate student via e-mail to assemble some images for a lecture she was presenting. She had not been able to find images of a suitable level of quality, and rather than having to send separate messages containing several large image files (due to our wretched 10MB limit for attachments), i could have sent links to them all had i saved them in Flickr, where she could then view them in any number of sizes. This is very convenient for both finding images of suitable size and quality, as well as making it easy to use those not restricted by copyright.

Thing 3—Blogging 2

Surveying the blog search engines:

Technorati--good differentiation between search results obtained through keyword (searches all blog entries) and the Blog Directory Search (results based on major blog topics = subject headings!). Keyword and Tag searches seem to produce, unhelpfully, nearly identical results.
Fine for finding library-related blogs--i found Library Juice magazine's (progressive librarian journal), as well as over 100 others from various individual bloggers. Didn't like, though, the fact that using the back button erases entered search terms. Display of video and photo blogs didn't always work in Firefox; did in IE.

BlogScope--although it searches less blogs than Technorati, the popularity curves are genius, not only indicating when a topic was being searched by others but--with the GeoSearch (available from the zoomed version of the popularity curve)--where the the searches emanated. This would be useful information for any researcher. Why in March and April were there suddenly lots of queries about 'elections' and 'Turkmenistan'? Blogscope's highlighting of queries looks like a good starting point for further investigation of a topic.

Sphere--nothing fancy, no advanced searching for instance, with a specific purpose: to search blogs about news events. This is very timely as the line between traditional news media and blogging journalism blurs.

Ask Blogs--poor old Jeeves: a victim of the hipness of Web 2.0. Ask.com is obviously getting into Google territory, with not only blog searching but also images, video, news, maps, &c. It has to be said though that this incarnation of Ask is much more useful than Ask Jeeves ever was. I like that results can be sorted by relevance (default), recentness, or popularity--the latter two crucial in winnowing what could be an overwhelming number of results on a given search.

As far as searching library-related topics, i looked for 'library as place', both alone and combined with 'interior design'. Sphere, being news-oriented, was not of much use here, but the others all provided results. BlogScope out-shone the rest though, with far more results from which to choose.

on second thought...

I think i'll skip ahead and add some visual interest to this, courtesy YouTube and possibly Flickr.

RSS

Three weeks on and this blog's already getting dusty! Time for Thing 3 then. I've been looking forward to RSS, as i'd already begun looking into them to see how to add additional feeds to my BBC News scroll, which cleverly distracts and possibly annoys visitors to my office as they are mesmerised by its constant motion. Almost time for the first 23 Things drop-in though. I plan to have some additional feeds up sometime today though.