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 6, Assignment #10 Delicious & Social Tagging

Watch video, read, explore, and blog....

Delicious could really be a great tool for doing research, especially if you were working on a book or a thesis or something, where you were working on it for a long period of time. Also very useful for a Reference Librarian. Setup the bookmarks while on your personal computer, and then when you are working the reference desk you would have them right there. Great! I saw some UMass library stuff in there already. I think for anyone who uses multiple computers this could be a great tool. You could also set up something that you were willing to share with the public so that the librarian could just give the student/researcher a link, and they would have instant access to all these sites that the librarians had already found. Very cool and useful.

I saw the Library of Congress Call Number System, Google News Archive, and many other helpful sites. I plugged in "Orlando" and saw several helpful trip planning sites. This is definitely one of the more useful and relevant sites I've seen so far.

On another tangent, my husband once set up his Christmas list this way. He tagged all the things on his wish list, and then told me his user name. All I had to do was look him up, and I could see all the expensive little things that he was hoping to get that year. I don't think he got any of them, but he certainly tried!

The downside to this site is that it does take a while to set everything up. The Optional assignment is to replace your traditional browser bookmarks with the Delicious links, and possibly add links to your blog. Great idea, but time consuming. I don't think I'll be doing that right now. Although it would be wonderful to have access to all of my bookmarks in one place, it would take forever to replicate them. It has taken me many years to build my lists of bookmarks that I have saved on my computer at work. I am not sure if I want to take the time to copy them all into Delicious, tag them all, etc, etc etc... that seems a bit overwhelming. Maybe someday, but not right now.