oh thank heaven

another thing i've done before! i've sat for hours watching 80s music videos on youtube. and cat videos. and alan davies talking about cats.

i love youtube. i can get lost in it, going from one thing to another, kind of like when i was a kid getting lost in the world book. i've seen lots of cool clips, sent by friends or the american libraries direct email, that sort of thing. and once i'm in, i may never get out. here's one i positively adored.



seems kcls could use this for a variety of things. live press releases. broadcasts of events like groundbreakings and building openings. clips of events like author readings. training modules for staff. i'd like to see them all. how soon can we start?

have it your way

i gave the kcls27things custom search engines a try. i did searches on locations, book groups, and crafts.

i preferred google because it doesn't integrate advertisements and presents a clean and uncluttered results list. i found rollyo's red anxiety inducing, and the results list messy. i'm glad they indicate what links are sponsored, and i understand that everyone needs funding, but it wasn't what i'm looking for in a results list.

so i guess google has taken yet another step toward world domination. and off i go to make my own. i'm going to do free video sites, because i can't get enough cat videos. but you can search for any sort of videos.

so cute

ordinarily i reserve my swoons for my cats alone, but this one just grabbed me.

tasty treat

ok so i'm learning all about del.icio.us. it strikes terror into my heart. my obsessive compulsive librarian mind will not allow me to be charmed by something so messy as a folksonomy. i have my books arranged by dewey classification at home, my personal files are structured by a strict controlled vocabulary, and i'm utterly paralyzed by the little box at the bottom of every blog entry inviting me to tag it. this might not be a problem if i had a copy of lcsh on my desk, but i don't so i can't.

that said, i'm supposed to be revising my worldview for the sake of all things 2.0, yes? ok then.

i would like for there to be a live and managed del.icio.us account (is that what it's even called now?) for librarians at a branch and in a system. a place to find the nearest notary public or public fax machine on the local level; a place to collect all those links we receive in informative emails from the government documents librarian on the organizational level. this would save us scrambling around asking the staff members who live nearby if they know, or deleting the pertinent message exactly two hours before a patron inquires about that specific item.

the key to the success of this is that it be maintained. delete dead links, find new ones, fix it when ins changes their name to cis. that sort of thing.

on a personal level, it will be nice to bookmark things from an email from a friend and be able to find it again whether i'm at work or at home. cat videos, online quizzes, articles about public toilets in europe.

whew. whenever i look at that blasted tag box i just want to type in "scooters, vacation, fall" like they suggest.

and again with the feeding, oy!

- Which method of finding feeds was easiest - going to your favorite sites or searching for them?

i found searching to be difficult, as the searches were keyworded and when i put in yoga i got any mention of yoga anywhere, same with cats and a few author names, so i kind of gave up on that tactic. i remembered a blog of an author i like and added that myself.

- Which Search tool was the easiest for you? Which was more confusing?

i used the bloglines search and the google blog search and feedster. they all seem easy enough to use, i'm just not that interested in their results list. i'm interested in news sites and "authoritative" sources rather than the random ramblings of the average joe. i'll follow blogs of my friends and other known quantities, but am not seeking the random serendipity of the blogosphere. (how many monkeys are out there typing now, anyway, and have they produced any new shakespeare plays?)

- What kind of unusual feeds did you find on your travels?

n/a