Week 5

This is the card I made in an online image generator. I also looked at Library Thing and cataloged my reference books about old valentines, another of my collecting interests. I want to go back and do more. It is a really cool site. Speaking of valentines, here is a valentine from my collection:




I used the Yahoo site to creat my avatar. It represents me at least 35 years ago, since there was no option for grey hair or added pounds!

Rollyho is useful if you are doing research on a topic and want certain websites searched for the topic or a subcategory of that topic. For example, I know certain places which probably would have information about valentines, a collecting interest of mine. It is nice have them all searched for me, instead of my having to look in each place.

Week 4

I learned about RSS feeds and set up a Bloglines.newsreader account for a number of news-related feeds. Then I looked at MERLIN and found some library-related blogs and news feeds to subscribe to One blog I enjoyed was Distant Librarian . I think it was the one which led me to an article called "33 Reasons Why Libraries And Librarians Are Still Extremely Important". It was reassuring!

Having grown up in the newspaper era and having worked at a television as well as a radio station in my past life, I tend to want to get my news that way. But I will keep an open mind about RSS feeds and blogs. The RSS feeds hold more promise, I think, as sorting out blogs can be time consuming. Many of them seem to be quite subjective. Others are really websites in disguise. Technorati seemed cumbersome, but perhaps I was not using it correctly. I did go to the advanced search for all the subjects I was looking for.

Week 3

Today I spent quite a but of time looking at Flicker. I learned that tags are another name for keywords. While looking at 3rd party flicker applications I discovered a postcard browser. I looked at map and came across a person's postcard project.

This is a postcard from my collection of Baltimore postcards dating from the the turn of the century to the present. It is a linen one from the 1930's.

All this new technology interests me, but I am particularly intrigued by how television and newspapers have expanded their coverage via the internet. Having been an avid newspaper reader since I was young, I still go there first. But, as a friend who is a Sun reporter said to me, there are more pictures, less text, and fewer feature articles. They have closed their foreign bureaus, retired or fired feature writers, and have expanded coverage online instead of in print. A good case in point is the information on gardens of Baltimore. The print article was fairly brief and referred you to their online site.

CNN in particular has used the new technology, but so do the regular networks. At this point I have no desire to look at tv from my cell phone or IPOD, but I might get to that. The small screen is what I object to.