Numero Nueve!

Thing number nine in week four. explore merlin, a site for maryland library staff to learn about technology. It seems to be a great resource for librarians to keep up to speed with what patrons are interested in doing nowadays. There are endless mazes of links to information on the learning links section of the site. One topic that piqued my interest was web design. It gives a list of webpages with site building tools, html guides, design tips, ect. Merlin also has forums for members to discuss topics, and ask questions of each other. I discovered some library related blogs through merlin. I added library garden blog and the shifted librarian blog to my bloglines account! Today I also browsed around some newsfeed search sites. I used technorati to view some interesting feeds on birds! (because I count bird watching as a hobby of mine) I searched on syndic8.com for a newsfeed on one of my favorite bands, evanescence. It led me to a feed from topix.net which had lots of current news on the band. I added that one to my bloglines account as well! These search tools are very handy for finding information on subjects of interest. While they might not always lead to "reliable" information, it can help to narrow down a field of research or create more points of discussion.

Really Simple!

On to Thing #8! I set up an account with bloglines, and added 10 feeds. Here is my public bloglines page. At first I really didn't think a newsreader was something I'd ever use. After exploring bloglines.com for a while, I actually think it's pretty cool. When I heard the term "newsreader", I was just thinking like fox news, local news, blahblahblah. But you can subscribe to any website that offers rss publication. I discovered a lot of little blogs that looked interesting. They aren't sites I'd go out of my way to visit individually, but are fun to scan. These types of sites are perfect to add to a newsreader. You can easily browse through tons of feeds you have subscribed to, and read which posts you want to all on one website. A few notable blogs I found on bloglines are double tongued dictionary "A growing lexicon of slang, jargon, and new words from the fringes of English", and yarn harlot "Stephanie Pearl-McPhee goes on (and on) about knitting". (stephanie pearl-mcphee is one of my favorite humor writers, plus, she writes about knitting!) So, this session of learning 2.0 was enlightening. =) I had fun, and learned that setting up a newsreader isn't as boring as it sounds. hehe!