Week 5, Thing #10: "A new fantastic point of view!"

Playing around with the text and image generators was amusing--and addicting! I enjoyed a number of the generators found on The Generator Blog like: the anagram generator, the Garfield comic strip generator, the poem generator, the Shakespearean insult generator, andthe Picassco painting generator. My favorite image generated project was from the Comic Strip Generator. Unlike the Garfield comic strip generator, you have a whole array of different pictures from television and movies so you have many characters to create funny comics. Here is one I created:

I know it's corny, but I think it's cute. I could make a whole bunch of bookmarks and stickers out of this too!

Week 4, Thing #9: Don't Just "Google" It!

When exploring the uncharted wilds of news, blogs, and feeds it is most helpful to have a guide. The search tools that I found most helpful finding news was topix.com. I liked how I could browse for news articles by topic and source. Topix.com has a wide readership from around the world, evidenced by the number of comments that users leave on the articles. I liked reading their comments because they enrich the news articles with various perspectives, I am glad that Topix.net has this feature. The bar graph of my topic of interest in the news was fun to see, and I wonder how watching the trends in news topics will be useful. The advanced search option allows to you to restrict your search to a specific source and locale, and I liked using the advanced search because it distills information into a dose that I able to digest. If I was interested in searching for a blog, I liked technocrati's advanced search and Google Blog Search (if only because I was familiar with its interface).

It is helpful to know that these search tools exist, especially since I was so reliant on Google.

Week 4, Thing #8: It's as "simple" as RSS!

This exercise was an opportunity to discover the true purpose of those "small funny tags on websites" and what RSS really means and what it can do for me. Setting up an RSS Reader was easy because it already existed--I just never accessed it! Thanks to my gmail account, conveniently, my Google Reader was there waiting for me to fill it up with subscriptions.

I used to frequent the blogs of my favorite poets and websites, visiting my bookmarks daily in the hopes of encountering new content. After a while, however, I grew tired of waiting for updated posts and I slowly stopped visiting them. Thanks to newsreaders, I can re-connect with these lost links as well as save time and stay informed of new content. I can also search for new blogs and websites that interest me and subscribe to them as well.

Libraries can utilize newsreaders when planning events and programs for patrons and discovering new books for their collections; taking advantage of newsreaders' instant dissemination of fresh content. After reading the post on RSS for educators in this blog that I found on the school library learning 2.0 page, I was excited that the writer was a former English teacher who assigned homework to his students through blogs! So to spin-off this idea, libraries could use newsreaders to subscribe to the blogs of the members of their book or homework club. RSS appears to be an exciting forum for information seekers and sharers. I am curious to discover how libraries have utilized them to enhance and improve their library services.