Author Archive
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Thing 15: Rollyo
I rolled one. It didn’t work. It was intended to be an image searching roll, and at first it had four sites defined: flickr, altavista images, google images, and yahoo images. The first time I tried it, it pulled results only from Flickr. I deleted Flickr from the URL list and tried again. Then it [...]
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Sunday, March 8th, 2009
Thing 14: Online Productivity Tools
I had an iGoogle home page already and stuck with it; it had a ToDo gadget on it already and I’m happy with it so I didn’t try any others. And I was already using Google Calendar and am happy with that too, so I didn’t try any new ones. I was surprised that one [...]
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Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Thing 13: LibraryThing
I set up a new account at LibraryThing and added a dozen books. Two of them were incredibly popular (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell) but the rest weren’t nearly as popular (including The Complete Maus). Some of the reviews on show were brilliant, very perceptive [...]
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Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
Thing 12: Wikis
I started contributing to Wikipedia way back in 2001, when it was on much older crufty software and took up hardly any disk space at all; the rules then were still in flux and one of the ones you could trot out in a disagreement was “ignore all rules.” Somewhere along the line I lost [...]
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Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Thing X: Night of the Living Mashups
Now this is how mashups should be done: Purdue has taken Google Maps data and combined it with data on CO2 production. You can check absolute values and per capita, by state and by county. I don’t know much about maps but this is very interesting: a great way to visualize the data so that [...]
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Monday, February 23rd, 2009
Thing 11: Social Media
Digg: Went to digg. Clicked “most popular” then “last 30 days.” Top “story”: screengrabs of someone posting “IS THIS REAL LIFE?” then a response “Is this just fantasy?” followed by several posts giving the entirety of the lyrics (and some instrumentation) of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Huh. So what’s the second thing I most needed to know? [...]
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Friday, February 20th, 2009
Thing 10: Tagging and del.icio.us
I love tagging in general and think it usually works well enough even without a controlled vocabulary. Folksonomies have disadvantages, of course, especially in their imprecision–users might get both horses and cars under “mustang”–but the advantage in comparison to cataloging with a controlled vocabulary is that people tend to use terms that most other people [...]
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Thursday, February 19th, 2009
Thing 9: Sharing – slides, photos, databases (redux)
Erin found a site called Blist that lets you create and share databases, for free, online. I set up an account and tried it out (didn’t enter much data–just wanted some experience with it) and found it to have a very intuitive interface. I won’t continue with that database (allconsuming.net already does the same thing, [...]
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Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Thing 9: Sharing – slides, photos, databases
Create and Share Slideshows I imported a PowerPoint presentation I’d made earlier about graphic novels for teens and/or graphic novels that teens read. Importing the file was straightforward, certainly simpler than learning how to make a presentation using a new interface. Sharing Photos I might try this one later. I might not. I’m a tempeh [...]
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Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Thing 8: Communication – Web 2.0 Style
IM: I’ve been using IM for over 10 years: I had experience with AIM in 1998 and over the years have used Yahoo’s and Google’s chats as well as ICQ. Because of the number of accounts on different services, I switched to Trillian early on (back when AOL kept changing things to break the unauthorized [...]
