Tag clouds from del.icio.us

Searching on Tagged sites versus Search engines

This weeks exercise took me back to those days when I used to teach the following course at my previous job "How to search the Internet effectively" - much of the course revolved around comparing subject directories, search engines, meta search engines and more....
What surprised me was that I found that searching in del.icio.us gave me the most relevant search, not what I was expecting. I didn't spend lots of time refining search strategies - it was a very "lazy" search - but maybe this reflects how lots of our users search anyway?
It didn't find lots of search results but the ones it found were good sites - and I assume this is what you would expect - if someone has taken the time to tag it - then they also think its a good site.
With the search engines and meta search engines I wasn't really finding anything much else new except a couple on Zuula, though probably CiteULike and Connotea were a little too academic for my search - but could be useful in a research context. The search engines and meta searches did the usual of bringing back a lot of "noise" - so you definitely got more results, but had to wade through much more info to find what you needed.
The subject searching on the catalogue in my opinion is for Librarians who know how to structure these searches!
I didn't find so much on Kartoo - but did like the way it provided the inter-relationships between terms and the ability to refine your searches using these links. And its always nice to see something visually!
Scritty

i'm in love with image generators

My image generator

Picture of boxes

Back from leave

Back from leave and had 146 plus feeds waiting for me.
My aim was to just clear the feeds without reading, but I got caught up in them anyway.

Highlights included:
developing avatars that have the compatibility to move between virtual worlds - so that there is no need to develop a new avatar for each new virtual world you inhabit or visit.

Wildgoose as always - thoughtful and insightful (and her new look blog looks great).

Google - a number of posts by Stephen Abram on Google and how they track your information - again that big issue of privacy and how people's attitudes to privacy are changing. The really interesting article is the one he pointed to in the Times London called Google - who's looking at you by John Arlidge
I found the quote at the end scary - " As I walk out of the Googleplex, I notice ?a new feature by the exit. It’s a giant 3-D computer-generated image of the globe which has giant red lasers shooting up into the sky. Each laser represents the number of Google search queries made at that point on the Earth’s surface. The higher the spikes, the greater the number of queries. It is supposed to be a celebration of what Google has achieved so far. But it also highlights how much of the world it has already conquered and reveals how much it soon hopes to colonise. It is the perfect metaphor for where that simple little search box we use every day has come from and what its vaulting ambitions are. It does not simply want to be a good search engine on the web: it wants to be the web."

And Librarian Kathryn has given me a challenge for later - to create a tag roll.

And I think that's enough for today!

social networks

Hi everyone,
I really like one of my rss sites or feeds - as the guy links to really brief pieces of info and if they catch your attention you can then click on the original blog and read further.
The blog is called Library Stuff and the post that caught my attention on my last read was called There are friends and then there are non-meta friends
This links to an article called You are not my friend by Joel Stein and a blog entry about Facebook by Ballad in Plain E.
Both of these entries are talking about Social Networks - and issues to do with privacy, how we communicate online and the worth of joining things like Facebook. In particular I found it interesting to think about how people are calling these people "friends" but communicating without the same level of honesty or intimacy that a "real" or non-online friendship has. It is also talking about concepts of privacy - that what people see as private information is changing quite dramatically.
I have had a number of invitations to join various social networking sites and so far have resisted or joined and then never gone back again, so I think this part of the 23 Things project will be the most challenging for me - as it doesn't really sit with how I normally interact with people.
I find it scary when my friend's little girl sends me invites to these sites that are often for adults, but I'm sure she and her friends at school are all joining and "friending" each other - and her mum's friends!
Anyway I think these social networks pose a lot of questions about relating and communicating with people, privacy and security, and ways of interacting in both the professional arena and on a personal level with friends and family,
Lots to think about,
Scritty

zwinky - i'm getting a few multiple personalities here

Talk about timely

Well I was feeling guilty as that little Google Reader kept popping up saying that I had more feeds to read - so thought I better go there.
Never got past the first post - How to put your feeds on a diet!
Talk about timely...
Now whether I actually have time to follow its advice, well that's another matter!
Scritty