Image generators

Thing 14 before either Thing 12 or 13...

This is a clever piece of technology which has potential for application in information literacy or in enhancing web pages or WebCT.

It would be a really good method of catching a reader's attention or highlighting one aspect of a significant amount of information.

del.icio.us vs google...

This week's blog post will compare tagged sites with other sites. The task was to enter the same term into the search field of a range of sites and compare the results. The number of results retrieved was very different for each site.

The tagged sites brought up some duplicate sites and some unique sites. A search in a tagged site will only retrieve what has been tagged with that exact term, while other sites with a taxonomy will possibly achieve a wider recall. The number of hits may also depend on the number of users registered to use the site.

I particularly liked using Kartoo. This is a very different site which presented the results visually. It is very similar to the Visual Search option offered by EbscoHost databases.

I also like del.icio.us, it will be great to have a bookmarking facility which is not computer or browser dependent. I have already created an account and added some tags.

Here wiki, wiki, wiki

The latest tasks of the 23 Things project was to share a document with another participant using Google Documents and to create a wiki using PBwiki.

Both of these tasks were reasonably straight forward but the hardest thing I found was coming up with content that didn't bore me to tears, let alone my fellow participant s in the 23 Things project. I found myself creating and destroying different Pbwiki entries because they simply bored me stupid.

If you are interested you could check out my 'final' effort.

Things have changed just a little since the innovations of 1946...

Cute and cuddly...not quite

I wanted to practice adding images to my blog so I had a quick look at my fellow Participants blogs - there are an awful lot of furry friends represented on our blogs. Now those of you who have established my identity will know that I am usually not a fan of the cute and cuddly - there will be no fluffy kittens or puppies on my blog! So in keeping with the established trend, the image above will be the only thing cute and cuddly to ever be included In Black and White.

Feeds on a diet or diet of feeds?

I had to giggle when I opened Google Reader and like Scritty found Fiona Bradley's post on librariesinteract.info entitled How to: Put your feeds on a diet. What amused me so much wasn't the feeds she suggested should be cut shamelessly but more the feeds she suggested keeping:

• Blogs with few subscribers - because you won’t be rereading their comments on everyone else’s blog

(okay, so there's hope for my blog and the wiki for the Stapler Liberation Front yet!)

• Analytical, thoughtful blogs - they’re worth the time

(Flybrarian, this means your blog is OK?)

• Blogs outside librarianship, or with a higher ratio of original content

(yay! I can keep reading those strange news items from the ABC News Offbeat feeds - like the one about the guy who rolled his car inside the KFC drive through)

• Feeds you actually read, if you use Google Reader use the statistics feature to work out which you read the most

(this would limit my feeds to precisely... 3)

I guess ultimately putting my feeds on a diet is better than a diet of feeds