Technorati

This one was frustrating. I get that it's purpose is to search blogs and find out what the popular conversations out there are. I did the search exercise searching "learning 2.0" in blogs and tags. Couldn't for the life of me figure out how to search the blog directory. The main difference was that retrieval in the tags was more precise, and therefore much smaller (336 posts compared with 2823 posts. Soo...I get that tagging your blog posts is a good thing. Maybe this would be a good way to find blog feeds you want to subscribe to. Or just find out what people are saying about a particular topic.

del.icio.us 13

As always, our Netserv team came thru and helped me get set up with del.icio.us. I even learned how to put my existing favorites in folders. I got off on a tangent when exploring a couple our Best of the Web links and wound up in Zillow looking at depressing news about Lincoln home values. It would be easy to get lost in a maze of exploring sites others have tagged. Lisa blogged something similar. I may use it to access my home & work favorites.

Rollyo

I set up a goofy search with web sites about fish--not too successful. Not sure I will use this much.

Library Thing

This is definitely something I will come back to. I added two of my favorite novels
Delicate Storm by Giles Blunt and Cold Lake by Mary Lawson. Delicate Storm was already in there and Cold Lake wasn't. When I've got more time I will explore more with tagging & commenting & such.

Week 5 image generators

I didn't spend too much time on this one but had fun checking out a couple of image generators. One converted any word you supplied into nightengale song. Another translated into Parseltongue. Would you believe there is one that creates a Dublin Core record for something you supply? I checked out some totems too. The magazine covers looked a little too daring for me--maybe next week.

Searching for new feeds

I tried the Blogline search and found one on Shelties. Postings included how to get them to stop barking...good luck with that. Maybe I'll get a few (nonlethal) tips.

Blogline

OK, after 4 weeks of procrastination, I got Week 4 taken care of. I already subscribed to some RSS feeds, mostly news, Jenny Levine, Michael Stevens, and some other stuff. Susan had told me about using Bloglines and it looked like a neat way to organize them.

I'm a trial and error type, to put it mildly. Remember your teacher telling you to read the instructions all the way through before starting on the test? Nah. So I spent an inordinate amount of time laboriously adding blogs from fellow NLC folks. Then I read down a line in the Learning 2.0 instructions and there it was-- "Do you want to subscribe to all of your co-works' feeds? There is an easy way to do this. See the Extra Stuff section below to learn how."

I also managed to name my blog Beth's Blog instead of what I really wanted to call it--Albertarose to match my Flickr name. I was convinced you can't change the name and even went so far as to set up another blog to use after Learning 2.0 is over. And there is was again--in the settings. Yes you CAN change the name of your blog.

Ah well...it's a learning exercise, right? And will this stop me from doing the trial and error thing? Nah.

I've got around 20 feeds now. I really like Bloglines being able to organize them in folders (does this sound like a librarian or what?). And helpful Susan again came to the rescue and figured out how to edit blog names. I probably won't get to them all every day, much less every week. But it's great fun to learn how to do new things, and this one was really fun!