Monday, February 27, 2006

Foodies luv libraries

Here's a cool discussion going on over at I'm Mad and I Eat about how to get the most from your library amongst foodies- not really any library insiders posting, just people exchanging info - you can get email holds? I didn't know that - kind of thing.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Call me pimp-mommy master . .

This is a rush job because I am just so damn excited I am posting in the midst of school work: I knew Ask Jeeves had reworked itself. I recently read about Gary Price's new job over there. And so when the class assignment for Principles of Searching had us compare a search using Dialog to a search engine of our choice (what results did they think we were going to come up with? Dialog? Seriously.), I decided to take a break from my love affair with google and test out Ask.

Coolness. Expanded search suggestions on the side, narrowed suggestions, too. I can save my searches? I can save my searches! And tag them!

There are plentyo'things I haven't played around with yet, and a couple features I haven't figured out the point of - like the little binoculars giving me a super small peek at the website I'm going to. It's way too small for me to make any judgements about. (Maybe I just need to put on my glasses.)

But holy cow. Tagging of my saved searches. This is just what I've been looking for.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Weekly Echo

Weekly Echo draws together images of the things/people/events most in the news/blogs/search engines of that particular week. Really interesting for me - I don't have tv, and I read my news in an aggregator and listen to NPR - in other words, I just don't see many images associated with the news (and this is also pretending that entertainment news is actual news).

It's simple but well done - mousing over images gives you a little pop-up to explain the image (and I needed a lot of explaining for some of them), clicking links you to a news story somewhere about the subject of the image. And soon there will be commenting. Social fun.

Friday, February 03, 2006

an interview . . .

. . . but not a job interview.

Heidi over at Quiddle asked me about my lack of membership in ALA and other related stuff. It's good to think these things through a bit more, and the act of answering her questions helped me do that. For now, it seems I am happy to be active on the local level, though I'd like to be more active.