Blogging Thing #8 & #9

Having been a big fan of Bloglines (& MyYahoo earlier) & RSS feeds, ever since Fiona the N.O. Librarian took us through it last year, the #8 exercise was quite easy. I did however take a bit of time in setting up a new account from scratch - that kind of thing stretches the old memory-banks. The second exercise was great and again I wiled away hours looking through all the different types of feeds available. The layout of Technorati and Topix was good and easy to browse around, their search was effective (not much on Australian tax law though!). Syndic8 is sooo ugly and rather cumbersome to navigate, don't think I'll bother with it again. Feedster was broken so I'll look at it later.

The thing I'm mindful of is that you can quickly become overloaded and bogged down in information. Information and time management need to be in synch with these tools. I use Bloglines to view those websites, ABC radio podcasts and blogs I look at most often and there are no more than 10. I couldn't cope with more but I do change my feeds around often and drop the ones that supply more info than I want.

Blogging Thing #5, #6 & #7

Flickr is a great photo sharing tool, we do not live close to most of our family so it is a really easy way to demonstrate how much the grandchildren have grown. The Librarian in me adores the labels, tags and 'cataloguing' possibilities. Although I have often morned the passing of the tactile photograph. Nobody prints digital photos. We even have a Harry-Potter-like picture frame that scrolls through our holiday snaps. 

My favourite mashup is Spell with Flickr and I played with it for far too long but it was fun. Montager was good too but it did take a long time to load AND I really, really like Trip Planner - just need a reason to use it!! Colr Pickr was another one I played with for a long time and found intriguing, not too sure how you use it but it was pretty.

Not being a particularly technically minded person (my eyes completely glaze over when someone merely mentions how many gigabytes are in their hard drive) means that I am so very glad & grateful that computer nerds have come up with all these wonderful tools had the good grace to hide all the ugly technical bits in the underbelly. All these programmes look so pretty and inviting - even the ones I can't use or have no idea what they're used for. I am a big fan of Web 2.0!