Thing #14~ Technorati

Well I've always been an organization type of person, hence why I like libraries. I find tagging to be very simple and useful. Mostly what I got out of exploring Technorati was just a bunch of neat websites that I'd never really explored and some that I visit all the time and apparently a lot of other people do as well. For example, I could probably spend all day bouncing around BoingBoing and a lot of my favorites like ICANHASCHEEZBURGER and PostSecret are amongst the top blogs on Technorati. There's also some really strange stuff like the Fake Steve Jobs blog. I found Helene Blowers' blog when I searched on Learning 2.0 and that was cool to read. Overall it was really interesting. It also put a bug in my ear about maybe taking up paid blogging for some extra money. Does anyone reading this have any experience with such things?

Thing #13~ De.li.cious

Being a big organizer, I'm big on tagging, as you can see from my tags on this blog. I found de.li.cious interesting but I guess I'm kind of just used to sending URLs around via email, blog, IM or some other means and I don't really see a huge need for social bookmarking. It may be a useful research tool for customers who are doing research on different topics to look at premade lists of bookmarks that other people interested in that subject found useful. As Jaye said, some of the "things" will really excite us, others won't really, and de.li.cious was one of the latter for me. Oh well, on to the next thing!

Thing #12~ Rollyo!

So I created a Rollyo for perfume which is basically like a mini search engine that you build yourself. I added a whole bunch of my favorite places to buy perfume and favorite blogs about fragrances and perfumes. The function of this Rollyo is to punch in the name of a perfume, or a note (such as vanilla or frankincense), or a concept or mood or theme of a perfume (i.e. Halloween, faeries) and come up with something to buy or something to check out. It doesn't work QUITE as well as I'd like because some of the sites it searches are so loaded with meta data that I get a bajillion hits from one site and it takes forever to get through them. Also all the ads are annoying but it's an interesting concept I'm glad I came across and learned about.

Select...Find-A-PerfumeSearch The Web

Thing #11~ Library Thing

So I added 25 random books to my LibraryThing and I put the covers on my blog too ::: points to the shinies :::: LibraryThing is really cool, I think I'll play with it some more when I have some time.

Just for fun.... another widget

Stolen from Beth T's blog :-)

Thing #10~ Image Generators

Meez is so juvenile it's actually fun :-)



And here I am as princess M&M


Fun timewasters/de-stressers :-)

widgets!!!!

Yay for widgets, and Heroes!

Get this widget!

Click in the middle and use the arrow keys to draw :-)

Get this widget!

Thing #9~ More on Bloglines and RSS

Thing #9 challenged us to find more sites to add to the bloglines reading account and the blogroll should we choose to have one. Frankly, I didn't find many of the search tools they suggested very useful. I merely visited a bunch of my favorite websites and looked to see if they had RSS feeds available and then I snatched them up. I found everything from Leaky Cauldron (one of the Net's biggest Harry Potter news sites) to the ever-LOL-inducing ICanHasCheezburger.com to a really cool children's and YA SF/fantasy blog called Wands and Worlds to Merlin, of course, so yes, while I do see the use for the search tools, I didn't have to really rely heavily on them this time. So check out my new and improved and longer blogroll :-)

Thing #8 ~ Bloglines, RSS, etc.

::Points to the right:::

Look at my shiny blogroll!!! I'm so proud of it!

Bloglines is definitely a good way to make your blog a one stop shopping destination for everything you might want to read about. The blogs and sites I selected reflect my wide range of interests from sci-fi to music to cooking to libraries, of course, and a few laughs thrown in, too, with Dilbert and Unshelved. I love that I can always add or take away feeds and add just about any syndicated site. I even added a few feeds from our very own catalog and a horoscope too. If you're so inclined you an add your Yahoo or Google groups to Bloglines, too, if you don't want your inbox crowded with list mail. Very cool.

I also have my labels, or tags like the rest of the world calls them, listed and clickable on my blog now. I wanted a tag cloud but couldn't find any easy way to make one. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thing #7 ~ Anything tech related!

Well as anyone who knows me knows, I enjoy shopping. I really enjoy shopping online because you can find such really unique things. It amazes me that nowadays anyone can have their own online store to sell pretty much anything they want. Of course there's eBay which now has stores but it's also so easy to build your own website with PayPal and a shopping cart. Those things used to be very expensive and hard to come by. One site I can browse for hours on end is Etsy, which is a huge site where people can hang out their shingle and sell just about any kind of homemade items from jewelry to soaps to clothing. I also enjoy immensely the perfumes of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab which is an almost exclusively Internet-based business. I don't know what exactly I spent my money on before the web :-) but I see my wide range of places to go broke as yet another example of the great things the net can bring us, and another way it's bringing us closer together.