Okay maybe not quite done

I saw a post last week of someone else who was still working on their 23 things. Now that person is on vacation so I'm not sure if she will finish or not. She was up to #20 the last I saw. Overall, I think at one point there were 47 people listed on the Moodle site. Some never got started, some got started but didn't get far. Many got halfway through. Only a few made it to the end. I did a quick count last week and saw that 6 were done completely. Only 1 or 2 people I couldn't identify. "Smile4" is a mystery to me. I have no idea who that blogger is. Others were easier to spot, and probably weren't trying to be anonymous anyway.

Oh well. I hope I can remember some of what I learned. I was working on one of my other blogs the other day and trying to remember how to put an image into my blog.It took a few tries but I finally got it. That was something I learned here.

Probably the most useful thing for me is the RSS feeds. I am reading a lot about other libraries, books, things in the "business" etc. from these feeds. Definitely educational. I am also trying Twitter occasionally and I know I could do more with it. I'm getting better with Facebook too.

Week 6, Assignment 11- Technorati & tags

Bleh! There are a lot of numbers out there, aren't there? Personally, for the most part, I don't care if anyone is reading my blog. I'm not doing it for the money etc. However, if I was doing a blog for the library, or for a business, etc, I definitely WOULD care. It is definitely helpful for the reference and research librarians to know which sites are popular, and for the appropriate staff to know how to market our libraries, and engage our users. Outreach is essential for our organization or else we won't reach our patrons. So these statistics about how many hits libraries are getting, and learning about how to tag the posts, etc. are important from that point of view.

I did the Discovery exercise. My first time through I was very unimpressed by Technorati. It looked boring. IceRocket seemed much cooler, and drew me in faster. It took me a while to find what I was looking for on Yahoo and Google. In fact on Google, I never did find "Collaborative" and "Library and Information Science". I gave up after a while. After going through all of the material for this assignment, I did go back and go the Challenge. I signed up with Technorati, and submitted my blog to be claimed. I didn't set up a WatchList though.

One thing that is frustrating is that even with RSS feeds, there is still so many places and so many sites to use. Lots of resources, and some of them do different things, but there are some overlaps too. It wasn't mentioned, but I also like Google Analytics, and I think that might cover some of the same material that these sites had as well. At least with Google, all the different appls are under one account. I don't have to go from site to site, trying to remember user names and passwords for each one etc.

Numbers are really not my thing though, and although I'd love to make money at this stuff, I know it's not going to happen. I'm not writing a Disney blog, with paid sponsers, I'm not writing a booksellers blog and selling books. I'm just blogging here about these 23 things. Nothing commercial about it, and it really doesn't matter how many visitors I get or anything else.

Okay, enough. Onwards to a lighter assignment in #12 I think.

Week 4, Assignment #9 Useful blogs and feeds

1. Explore the search tools
2. Blog about it

Well there are a lot of ways to look for blogs! I used Bloglines and ended up with too many, and had to narrow it down. I used the Yahoo directory and that worked okay, but I kept going. The LIS Wiki Article was a little overwhelming. Too much! No way to get through them all. I totally did not understand the Open Directory Project, and gave up on that pretty quickly.

Moving on to the Google Blog Search I found an ISEL update blog, SCUA, and some cool kid stuff. This was definitely my favorite, and of course I can link these blogs to my Dashboard on Blogger, and follow them when I am in the mood to be posting to my own blog etc.

I checked out Syndic8.com, but again was overwhelmed. Way too much information for my purposes. Technorati looked well organized, but I already felt like I had found my comfort zone with Bloglines and Google Blog Search so I think I'm done with this now.

On an unrelated topic, I'm going to go back now and see if I can separate my personal blog from this work related blog.

Week 4, Assignment #8 RSS Feeds and Readers

This assignment seems like a big one. The Discovery Exercise has a dozen steps. So it's no surprise that I've been working on this thing all day.

The Common Craft video is the same one that was shown during the kick-off presentation so I didn't bother watching it again. I wasn't too impressed with Kevin Dixon's thing either. A slideshow with no audio doesn't hold my attention very well. Similarly, Helen Bowers audio thing wasn't effective for me because it lacked video. Moving onward I went to Bloglines. After dealing with some network glitches in my computer (thanks Luke!), I was finally able to register and set up my RSS feeds. I have done RSS feeds with iGoogle and Yahoo before, so I'm not in alien territory here. The hard part with RSS is that it's easy to subscribe to a lot of stuff, way more than I actually have time to read in a reasonable period of time. Weeding through everything took some time, and I hope that the ones I have left are manageable. I am familiar with the Readers, but I am not used to Clipping, and I've never used Bloglines before so these things are new to me at least. I have a few clips to post about. I'll do them in separate posts and see if it works. Hopefully I did it right.