Friday, 30 November 2007

13. Del.ici.us

The most useful part of this exercise to me was the Beelerspace introduction to Del.icio.us, or rather from that blog to a rather obscured link to another post by the same author about how Gmail uses tags instead of folders to organise email's (which is a ramarkably good system).

I tend not to use bookmarks on the web; generally I have too interest in going to sites other than the ones I can get to easily via google (yay google), as well as having so few subjects I would actually either go to or remember I have previously searched for to make it worth my while.

I wonder how long it will take dubious advertisers to start spoofing tags? Google's extremely effective search strategy was a response to people who abused meta tags to gain site rankings in search engines; I can see people creating bots to create accounts to add tags to their site to gain eyeball traffic (this can be seen on some big software download sites which allow comments and ratings - because the site is so big the comments arn't moderated so arn't exactly useful).

Thursday, 29 November 2007

12. Rollyo

I can see this having potential uses, especially the example one for quotes (since I have done many searches for quotes for our roster, where many of the same sites would show up each time).
It took me a little thought to work out the difference to Google, though. Usually a Google search provides accurate enough results from pages that I trust within the first page that I don't really need to have it narrowed down further.
It does seem useful if I did have a collection of sites that I searches all the time; but I don't have enough to make it worth my time setting up a rollyo for the few sites I do search. Still I might revisit this sometime.

11. Librarything

Very nice site; I's very impressed with the layout and the ease of use. Almost naivly simple to sign up to an account.

I like the suggestor and unsuggestor searches; I looked for a fairly popular author with lots of books (Terry Pratchett), and it actually came up with not only similar and appropriate books (which I had already read) but also a few I shall have a go at. I'm a little annoyed that they seem to focus quite heavily on results from Amazon, but I suppose if they have access to that behemouth's database of ratings, suggestions etc then they would be foolish not to use it (not that I've had much success with Amazon's suggestions before).

What would be great would be the ability to export our reading history from My Info so it can be imported into sites like this (or even a home based database, of which there are many).

My bookshelf; http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=radnom&shelf=list