I was in love with image generators...

but then they all disappeared (except my comic strip one)

You Tube and online virtual worlds

Hi all - found a clip about online virtual worlds - was just interesting to look at an overview of 3 different online virtual worlds. There.com looks pretty kitch which always appeals to me! I love the fact that they can go surfing and have tacky bands playing....

Which tools seem the most useful so far?

I'm waiting for an update to install so thought I'd do a post (it seems to let me write and update at the same time).
So reflecting back on what we've done so far (nearly at the end too!!)

Well the software loaded and its now a weekend later.
Its a hard one - which will be most useful - some things are obviously useful - rss, blogs, wikis, delicious - others not so obviously so.
Second Life is the most fun - but maybe not so immediately useful - and then things that I would have dismissed straight away such as Twitter - I have actually found quite good in a work sense (though it needs to some how automatically refresh).

I think most things have potential uses and maybe learning about all the things combined is what is most useful - it means as you are doing something in the future you can think - "I wonder what would happen if I tried to use a xxxxxx for that?"
And the more you keep learning and trying the new tools - the more familiar some of them are becoming - which means that sometimes you may in fact been using them without thinking about it at all.....

As we approach social networks

Hi all,
as we approach the week on social network sites - I found the post from Fiona Bradley on Libraries.interact.info interesting - How to manage your online identity
She talks about not leaving your online identities behind as you decide to no longer use these tools - how many times in all this have we joined up to things and then promptly left it there in Cyberspace to be used never again.
Particularly with social networking sites she also talks about not leaving stale information behind if you decide to stop using that site or if you no longer want to have your details available for people.
Some sites are easier to disconnect from than others. And that old thing that keeps bugging me - privacy and how people new to these tools manages their online identity is also discussed,
Scritty

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