Del.icio.us/Portability of Bookmarks

Given that I can think of many times I've wished I had my computer with me so that I could show someone a site that I had bookmarked at home, but now I have to wait to go home to email it to them, I can see an advantage of these social bookmarking sites.

But using these bookmarks to help "“less tech-savvy librarians have an equal voice in the collection,” instead of having one or two librarians editing a static web page."? Don't you have to be rather tech-savvy to feel comfortable using the bookmarks to begin with?

I don't particularly like Internet Explorer, and I much prefer my Firefox browser at home. Del.icio.us looks like it's intended to be used only with IE which I resent. What about people who are using older computers that don't work well with IE? What about people using linux to avoid the Microsoft issue altogether. Why is IE necessary?

Informal tagging Thing #13 A First Judgement

I like a formal vocabulary. I like having standarized search terms. I really like having an index where I can discover what search terms are being used. Therefore my automatic judgement of information tagging is that it's not terribly useful from a professional standpoint. I remember in graduate school when Yahoo.com had "categories" so you could limit your search to already sifted areas of the web. I thought it was great when Yahoo.com was using librarians to help "catalog" websites. Informal tagging violates all of this and doesn't necessarily help anyone find anything because we all use slightly different vocabularies; without creating any source where we can discover one another's tagging vocabularies (or what I might have called cataloging terms) the web becomes that more difficult to navigate.

Hidden books!

I've read two really good books this year and I'm wondering if mentioning them here (it is The Book Blog, after all) will encourage anyone else to read them. OK, one of them hasn't come out in the States yet. I got an advanced readers' copy at Book Expo America of Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips and I really want to recommend it. The Greek Gods are alive and living in modern London; Athena is a dog-walker, and Apollo has a television show where he pretends to be a psychic. (Are Gods psychic? Or are they just Gods?)

It's not really fantasy; it falls into that middle area where I'd put Rankin's Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse. It's due out in December and I want to encourage people to read it. I think it could be the 21st century Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, in terms of cult classics.

And The Word Was by Bruce Bauman is a powerful novel about the ability to continue living when faced with unimaginable loss. The book was very compelling and I would have stayed up all night reading it, if I hadn't had to go to work the next day. If you know you're going to be on a plane for 2 hours and want to be distracted, And The Word Was is the perfect book for you.

Rollyo? Thing #12

Why on earth should I care about the rollyos created by Debra Messing, Arianna Huffington, Rosario Dawson, or Brian Greene? OK, after that rant, Rollyo looks really interesting. It's better than the Bloglines account (which I found completely overwhelming), because it's easier to manage and filter, but it fills the same information need.

However, in terms of "sharing" rollyos, it's not terribly useful because the rollyos aren't sorted at all! You can "explore" the rollyos, which is a very unhelpful term because you're not exploring, you're searching through the rollyos looking for ones that use search terms that you're looking for.

Professionally, I think I should be looking at book review sites, and this might be a good resource for it. While I'm designing a My Books & Authors rollyo, I think it would be much easier if the search sites were automatically alphabetized while I was editing them, because it would be easier for me to find one or double check that a particular site was part of the rollyo, however I like that the sites included in the rollyo are listed on the page with the results of my search.

Online Image Generator -- Thing #10

I'm going to call this guy Fred.

LibraryThing's ease of use or Thing #11.

I went to LibraryThing.com to catalog the books that are already listed on my "What I've Been Reading" list. However, when I tried to make changes to the list in LibraryThing, I couldn't just go to the LibraryThing page, make the changes there, and allow the link to stay static, even though as far as I could tell the link should take an Internet user to the same page ("What's On My Bookshelf"). It doesn't. I had to go back to LibraryThing, copy and paste what appears to be the same code back into my blog and then it was changed.

This is tedious, and since the information that should have been embedded in the code that I copied and pasted into the "Random Books from My Library" entry had changed, I don't really understand why the information on my blog didn't change with it. Am I the only person who thinks that doesn't make sense. I assumed that the link to LibraryThing was not static, because if it is, it isn't as useful as I'd like.