#13 Tagging and discover a Del.icio.us

Tagging is the process of assigning personal keywords (“tags”) to resources by users.  Tags have been used in  web pages since the beginning of Internet.  They provided a link from the web page to resources in another web site on information related to the current subject, or jump to a different section either up or downstream of the current page.  Recently, tagging has been used by del.icio.us, a social bookmarking web service for storing sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

In one of the web site about del.icio.us, it provided a list of libraries around the country arranged in alphabetical order that used the delicious bookmarking software.  It is interesting that MCPL was not in the list.  May be it is a partial list.

It is emphasized  that one person's delicious bookmarking can be viewed by other persons.  I am not sure why people want to share their private viewing experience with others.

#12 - Roll your own search tool with Rollyo

Rollyo seems to be designed for people that have some specific interest in certain areas such as shopping, political bloggers, sporting events, gardening, hobby … etc. and want to do frequent search on a number of favorable  web sites for new offers or updates.  They can use Rollyo to create their own search engine and searchroll to avoid going through lists of unknown or irrelevant web sites.  For most people that usually go to search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, for formation on a subject that occurs only once in a while like buying a car or read up on disasters like earthquake, a searchroll is not really worth creating.

#11 - LibraryThing

I had training for this exercise previously (in April, 2008).  This time I added five more titles to my previous selection. The link to my up-to-date catalog is shown below.  If you are interested in seeing it, just copy the following URL to your web browser.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/LIUIC10&deepsearch=

#10 - Online Image Generator

It is fun to play around with yahoo avatars. You can change costumes, background, hair color, etc.

#9 - Useful News Feeds Sites

Besides the two sites I mentioned in #8, there are other useful news feeds sites as listed below:
http://www.cnn.com/services/rss/
http://abcnews.go.com/Site/page?id=3520115

For library related blog sites, one is
http://www.achuka.co.uk/achockablog/archives/us/ (Events in US)

An easy way to obtain various news feeds sites or library related blogs is by using Google search: "RSS news feeds sites" or "library related blogs".

#8 - RSS Feeds and Setup Bloglines

Yahoo sold Bloglines to MerchantCircle last year. At the present time, Bloglines seems to have a limited capability for the creation of a news feed blog site. It is only good for local news feed in various cities of the country. It would not accept an URL if the URL submitted for listing could not be located in the selected city. For example, I cannot submit the (URL) washingtonpost.com/blog for listing to any city (Baltimore, for example) other than Washington DC. I discovered that RSS news feed is available in MyYahoo!, Google reader, CNN, NPR, BBC, etc. One will find top news, business news, arts, music, culture, science, people and places....of any area of interest one can imagine. Examples of two URLS for RSS news feed are shown below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494
http://www.npr.org/rss/

#7 - Interesting Technology

In learning the 23 things, I decided to create a Facebook account. I know Facebook for a long time but never find any reason to use it since it is mostly used by young people in social networking/communication. Now that I opened an account, I can read messages posted by my children and sometimes send comments to them. It is kind of fun and I realized why it is so popular. I guess the politicians discovered this and all started to have their own Facebook account to promote themselves.

#6 - Fkickr Mashups

Flickr mashups is a great way of combining data from different sources and showing the combined information in an integrated or aggregated form in a single layout. One example of this is the combination of a county map that has an icon like an arrow located at different sites on the map to show places where houses are for sale. Click on the arrow at a specific site and a detailed information of the house will appear in a window. The arrow can also show where the county's libraries are located. There are other mashups like music, photos, news, etc. There is special software for each of the mashups. It is a great invention in the internet age to present information in a fun and efficient way. A web site that shows how to create a photo mashups is http://pho.to/forum/viewtopic.php?id=232.

#4 - Register Blog

Created my own blog for this exercise and sent to our liaison for registration.

#5 - Flickr

This is a picture of sunset at the La Jolla Beach near San Diego taken by my daughter. I think it is an award winning picture. What do you think?

This picture was from my Flickr account. In there you can also see a couple of beautiful day-lily pictures taken from my backyard garden.

#3 - Create/Setup Blog

Successfully setup my blog and profile.  It took some effort to do it but finally got it done. I always wondered why everybody on earth is blogging like crazy except me, and now I am joining the crowd.  Hooray!

#2 - Life Long Learning

I think the easiest will be playing.  You learn by playing, there is no pressure involved.  It is fun and relaxing.    As time goes by, you will be surprised by how much you have learned.  The hardest will be using technology to your advantage.  Technology is great, but you need to study very hard and understand it thoroughly, so that you can use it to your advantage.

#1 - Techno

Technology has improved so fast and new gadgets come out every year if not sooner.  I really think that if you don't go forward and keep up with the time, you will really fall behind.   The technology changes so rapidly.  It makes me admire the people who come up with the new ideas and inventions.  A lot of inventions we thought were not possible before become reality now.  Can you imagine that you can send e-mail to people thousands of miles away in a second, find people you have lost contact for so many years, find a lot of information on the internet........