Technorati

I created an account in Technorati and enjoyed playing around on the site - especially their range of widgets. Two weeks ago I had no idea what a widget was, now I copy and paste HTML like an old pro! I selected their news feed to put on my blog, but it updates so slowly that it is not really worth having, unlike the NZ Herald feed, which is always right up-to-date, and opens the Herald site in a new tab when you click on a story. Then I had to get to the business side of the exercise. I searched for Learning 2.0 in the blog posts and got 727 hits, the first of which was 'Giving up on work e-mail'. I had a look at a few entries including this, which looked promising:

Random Thoughts about the Hyperlinked Library at CML

http://tametheweb.com/ 2008/ 08/ 13/ random-thoughts-about-the-hyperlinked-library-a...

Yesterday was a great day at Columbus Metropolitan Library. I did two sessions of a customized version of the Hyperlinked Library to help launch the Learn & Play program. The staff seemed very excited to begin and some had already ramped up their blogs. I talked to some good folks over the wonderful vegetarian-friendly lunch, including Nick, who shared the following from my morning talk at his blog he’ll be using for the program. I like the fact that he’s capturing ideas, actions and things to ponder further and putting it out there.

2 days ago

Tagged:

• Learning 2.0 & Beyond

In the blog directory, I got 540 posts, mainly of very limited interest. I couldn't work out how to search under tags. I then went to Google and did the same search and got some great results, mainly from libraries and schools.

Searching other people's blogs presupposes that the majority of people have something interesting and/or erudite to say. The entry I have copied above (probably breaking copyright law) is of very minimal interest, as were the rest of the blogs I had a look at. Blogs are great when run by people with something to say - the National Library's 'Create Readers' is a good example, but the millions of people blogging generally are not worth reading. I enjoy having a look at the blogs of my colleagues, but only because they are my colleagues, not because they have earth-shattering ideas. Even though I claimed my blog, I did not set up a ping to Technorati, as I don't think the world needs to read my learning experiences! Well that's my rant - I should rename my blog 'Library Musings by a Reactionary Gran' perhaps. My favourite saying is: They said if a million monkeys typed continuously they would eventually write the works of Shakespeare - now we have the internet and we know this is not true.
I have to add a postscript to this rant - some of my colleagues do have some very good ideas, which I have been reading more of since I wrote this post, and blogging within the library staff is a pretty good way to share those ideas in a semi-structured way.