Reading about Web 2.0, Library 2.0, & the Future has only confirmed an idea that is floating around there. Technology is good and change is good. But we already knew that. However, that was pretty much all I got from these articles. They were sort of difficult to understand and filled with references to many things about which I have no clue. What is WorldCat? I'm hoping it is some sort of giant cat which is plotting to take over the world. I am not a fan of this lesson and as such am now going to abandon it.

Emily Explains Search Engines

This exercise was not very helpful for me, except that it confirmed what I already know. Google is the only search engine for me, I don't know why, I just have some sort of special bond with it. That said I did try Mooter, Clusty, and Exalead. Mooter got an instant "No" because it was a cluster. When I am doing a search I do not want a cluster to whittle down my search I want all of the billions of sites I should get. Clusty is just okay. It is hard to read for some reason, don't ask me why. Now, Exalead is a search engine I could potentially use. It has small pictures off to the side of the results which makes me infinitely happy, but that means you have a very limited amount of results on each page. In conclusion, I will consider using Exalead in the future, but Google is still King in my book.

Emily Explains RSS Feeds

I have heard many of my co-workers complain about the RSS Feeds lesson being really difficult, but I didn't find it too challenging. When I set up my Google Reader account it helpfully asked if I would like to add "bundles" of feeds, which were packages of about 6 different sites that I could add all at once. Thank you again Google, you always know exactly what I want(where would we be without Google? If they decided to take over the world I probably wouldn't be too upset. Who wouldn't want to live in Googlandia? Or Googlemerica? Or The United States of Google?). So once I whittled down the list of feeds, taking out a few I didn't really want, it didn't seem too hard. I was able to get the 10 feeds required for the lesson and add a few I found on my own in about 20 minutes from start to finish. The only thing I don't like about feeds is from some sites you never really know what you're going to get from it. For example, YouTube. I thought it sounded like a fun feed to have, seeing as YouTube is sometimes amusing, but all I got in my feeds were some videos that I can only assume were Polish. Not too helpful. But, even more unhelpful were the so called "search tools" Topix, Syndic8, and Technorati(or as I affectionately call it Techno-lame-i). After having had a day to consider RSS Feeds I have decided that I don't really care about them. I don't look at so many websites that it is all that useful for me and the "search engines" are terrible. So...thumbs down!

Emily Explains Flickr

Flickr is awesome! It is so unbelievably addicting, I could waste hours on this website. First I was distracted by the satellite view of the earth and spent half an hour there and then I found the main part of the website. There are so many photos, you could look all day long and still be amused. Good ol' Flickr, it will probably become a favorite website now.This picture makes me laugh every time!! Thank you to Elizabeth for taking the picture and thank you to Melanie for letting me post it and finally thank you to Paul for wearing a bonnet. In public.
I would add an explanation for this picture, but it makes perfect sense to me.

Emily Explains LibraryThing

I'm going to break from the crowd here - LibraryThing is cool, but I don't find it particularly amazing. It's a fun way to keep track of the books I have read and also to see what books my friends like, but I don't see myself becoming addicted to it. Several days passed between the creation of my account and this post and I honestly forgot I even had a LibraryThing account. That is how much it means to me. I personally would be just as well off sticking to an Excel sheet or Word document listing all the books I have read/want to read. LibraryThing does have the advantage of being on any computer I encounter during my day but with the flash drive I will soon be getting I can easily remedy that problem. All the computers I ever use have Word loaded on them so I will probably just stick with a trusty ol' Word file. But who knows, it's possible after this rambling post I will become hopelessly addicted to LibraryThing. Maybe I'm just in a contrary mood right now.

Emily Explains Tagging and Technorati

Tagging and Technorati are not at all useful in my opinion. I suppose it's probably because I don't visit so many websites that I need another one to keep track of them for me nor do I need to search through someone else's blog. I can't even keep track of my own blog, heaven forbid I could keep track of someone else's! Sooo...that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Emily Explains Myspace

Not much too explain really. It's space that is mine. It's sort of fun, but overall I don't think I will keep it once 2.0 is over. It was really easy to set up and figure out how to use. However, all of my "friends" are people I see everyday so I don't really have anything to say to them on Myspace that I wouldn't just rather say in person. Adding photos and being able to see other peoples' photos is semi-amusing though. So, on the whole I don't see the big craze over Myspace, but to each his own.