Archive for November 2008
Technorati
Posted on: November 27, 2008
I was surprised how different the results were depending on what type of search I did on Technorati. Most of the blogs I found on Huddersfield were (predictably?) about either football or beer. In many cases I couldn’t tell what the Huddersfield connection was at all, maybe there was just some passing reference to Huddersfield in a long-ago post. Technorati Search definitely provided the best results. I thought that the tag search should be pretty reliable, but I got some very odd results with it.
My favourite bit was the “Top 100 Blogs” in Blogger Central, where I came across some great Blogs including Boing Boing, which claims to be the most popular Blog in the world, and Lifehacker which I had heard of but never taken time to look at before.
Technorati is obviously one of the best places to go to find blogs and I would use it again, but in my experience you need to be prepared to wade through lots of dross to find high quality blogs.
To tag or not to tag…
Posted on: November 27, 2008
I like the idea behind del.icio.us and can see how it works for some people but the fact is I don’t have enough favourite sites to make full use of it! I can see the advantage of having your favourites stored in a “mobile” format so that you can access them wherever you are working, but again I don’t think realistically that I would make enough use of this.
I think I would use del.icio.us more as part of a search strategy if I were looking for a “hard to find” website for a particular project or enquiry. I enjoyed searching for sites on del.icio.us and then checking out the other sites bookmarked by those people – I can see myself using this as a 2nd port of call after Google.
I have a history of signing up to news services on various topics and vowing to read them regularly and keep up to date, then gradually getting out of the habit of checking them and eventually chucking them altogether. So I wasn’t that keen on investigating RSS feeds, to be honest, because I had a sinking feeling that this would lead to more good intentions which would quickly come to nothing. Maybe that will be the case, but it’s still been fun looking at Bloglines and Google Mail and setting up some feeds. I had no idea there were so many out there!
I already had a Bloglines account, so have just added a few feeds to that. I set up a Google Reader account too and found searching for feeds much easier here than on Bloglines. I think that the search engine is just better than the Bloglines one – I ran some of the same searches in both readers and found that better results came up in Google. I also had a look at Topix.net and thought it was good if you were looking for suggestions (the front page has links to lots of feeds on different subjects) but again the search engine for feeds wasn’t very good.
Anyway, I now have a selection of general news, professional and interest feeds set up (e.g. parenting ones) and I will try to keep up to date with them, honest!
Mashups
Posted on: November 16, 2008
- In: Flickr | Mashups
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I think these are fab and would really like to try more of these tools out properly but not much time now. My favourites so far are the colour pickr and the montager (though you do have to squint a bit to see what the images really are). I like the fact that when you hover over individual small pictures in a montager image, you can see a small popup of that image – you could look at one of these for hours!
I’ve really enjoyed this week of 25 things and will definitely use my Flickr account more and upload some of our billions of photos to share with people, as well as have a further play with mashups. My main frustration this week is that there is a lot to explore with Flickr and it’s been a busy week so I haven’t managed to spend as long on it as I would have liked.
- In: Flickr | Yorkshire
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The YSP is a favourite day out for us and my daughter Anna often makes a beeline for this huge sculpture of wrestling men. You can’t see it in this photo, but there are actually 3 men. They are massive and do give you a bit of a turn when you first see them. I like the photo but wish I’d got them in the centre – will have to take a better one next time we go!
Exploring Flickr
Posted on: November 16, 2008
- In: Flickr | Travel
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I’d never used Flickr before though I’ve looked at other people’s photos, so I was keen to get going with this one. I’ve chosen a photograph of one of the Fjords in Norway to put on my Blog. I had a brilliant holiday there in 2000 with my husband, staying in the wacky Kvikne’s Hotel on Sognefjord. It was a wonderful, relaxing week and we came back feeling healthier than before the holiday due to the number of mountains we had climbed, the amount of healthy Norwegian smoked salmon we had consumed and the fact that booze was so expensive we had had a practically dry week! One of the fun things about the hotel was that there was a trampoline in the garden – trampolining overlooking the fjord first thing in the morning was a slightly surreal but fabulous experience.
Oooer, what do I do now?
Posted on: November 7, 2008
- In: Waffle
- 4 Comments
My first ever blog posting and I feel a bit self-conscious and exposed to tell the truth! I have heard people say that technology can make you feel less inhibited (hence the tendancy to “flame” others in email correspondence) but I’m not feeling it yet. I’m just not used to writing for an unknown audience, I don’t think I’ve ever written anything before and not known exactly who is going to read it. I’ve called it My Wobbly Weblog partly because I like the sound of it and partly because I do feel wobbly at the moment, a bit like my daughter Sara who has just learnt to walk and manages a few steps before she has to sit down hard on the floor again.
Anyway, time to stop agonising and get on with recording my experiences of the first week of 25 things. Apart from the reservations above, I’ve found it surprisingly easy to set up my blog (and I’m sure I’ll warm up to actually posting things on it!) Liked the vid. and quickly set up my two email accounts, so it was a nice easy week. I’m going to have another play with some themes now – my husband thinks it’s hilarious that I spent half an hour trying out different ones before I’d even written anything.
Later…yes, I know I’ve picked a really girly theme.
My Wobbly Weblog 