Week 6, Thing 13

No wonder they call it "Delicious," it's amazing!  I have heard the name of the website, never fully understanding what it was.  And now, I am addicted.  Last week I began exploring the website in order to try and work ahead for class, except I have become addicted to delicious.com and can't pull myself away!

Much to my surprise, I was able to import all of my Internet Explorer bookmarks at work.  As a children's librarian, I am constantly saving websites and blogs for craft ideas, book lists, resources for ordering materials, and programming ideas.  I spent hours organizing and tagging these websites on delicious.com.

The searching feature is wonderful.  Google has been my go-to for quite some time, however, Delicious.com offers something different.  Searching other people's bookmarks allowed me to see websites that others felt were important enough to save.  Through searching, I must have imported over 20 new websites on my account.

My goal is to posting more comments on my classmates blogs, thus I created a tag through delicious.com so I can easily access them.

Thanks to delicious.com, I can now access important websites for work through my home computer.  In the future I'm hoping to work from home for ordering materials and planning storytimes and programs when I have children.  Delicious.com makes this concept feasible.

All types of libraries can benefit from utilizing delicious.com. Through tagging important websites, time will be saved in the research process if the first few steps have already been taken.

Week 5, Thing 12

Rollyo has amazing possibilities for schools and libraries, IF the website can speed up.  The concept of creating your own search tool is genius.  The process took much longer simply due to the loading speed.  Based on the comments I read from other classmates, they too shared the frustration of Rollyo's extreme pokiness.

I decided to continue using the topic of genealogy to complete the Rollyo task, and for the upcoming lesson plan assignment.  Copying and pasting websites into Rollyo to create my Rollyo wasn't difficult.  However, I was unsure how high the authority should be for each website.  Multiple graduate classes have emphasized the importance of website accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage.

Please click on the link for my Rollyo search tool for genealogy resources.  Genealogy Resources (Rollyo)

Week 5, Thing 11

I was thrilled to discover all the fantastic websites reviewed by SEOmoz.org.  The variety of websites they review is impressive, ranging from the top sites for widgets to philanthropy.

One of my hobbies (which has unfortunately taken a back seat) is genealogy.  Thus I was thrilled at the opportunity to explore the 1st place winner for genealogy websites, My Heritage.  Below are a few of their impressive offerings:

• Facial recognition
• Free download to Family Tree Builder 4.0
• Genealogy Blog (I subscribed to it right away using the RSS feed!)

The website is a combination of a blog and social network.  The initial set up is free, offering the user 250 MB of web space, or approximately 250 in the family tree.  For $6.25 per month, users can upgrade to Premium status and receive 500 MB.  Or for the serious genealogist, $9.95 per month can upgrade the user to unlimited MB and people in their family tree.

Libraries have been a crucial resource for the field of genealogy (see MyHeritage.com's blog on September 24, Genealogy Blog).  Thus there is most certainly a use for these web resources in the library community, especially in public libraries.

As for the Travel IQ suggested by 23 Things, lets just say geography is NOT my forte.