Thing 31

The link to Mashable's article 9 ways Twitter can help you in the real world is broken. Ironies!

I browsed the list of 100 authors on Twitter. I could see following some of those people. :) There's a news flash for me -- Mashable actually has interesting articles. "How to use Twitter for social bookmarking" wasn't one of them. Bookmarklet posts URLs to Twitter and concurrently saves them to browser favorites. How to save bookmarks and annoy people at the same time!

I was talking to The Love Bunny the other day about how most of the Hibbing library tweets had nothing to do with the library, and said that the only thing people really want to know is when new books come in. (Okay, what they really want is book reviews of new books, but we're short on staff.) I notice that the Tame The Web guy has automated tweets set up for when new books get checked out. I wonder if new book accession could become automated tweets. That would be a lot of tweets . . . but then again, he's allowing people to tweet catalog records.

Of course, that will only bore their followers, not the library's.

Thing 30

RSS & social bookmarking are two of the best things to happen on the Web.

Wow. There's a statement.

RSS feed filters, lol! Because even chosen feeds deliver Too Much Stuff. It's about time they developed feed forwards to email. Since my chosen email isn't the same brand as my RSS feed reader, I never see the feeds. I suppose a Personalized Home Page would solve that problem, but I don't consider it a problem. :)

RSSCalendar.com: handy for people who don't have a pda.

And, of course: don't just HAVE feeds, publish them for everyone to be edified.

RSS Awareness Day: whose genius legislation was that?

"Search Delicious from your browser address bar" makes no sense to me. It's easier just to do the same things on the Delicious page. Although -- something actually useful! I don't have an account, but I could see subscribing to tags. I do find it handy when people have their Delicious link on their blogs.

1. Slacker Manager needs a Slacker Editor, or possibly a copy of Turabian. Stop egregious misuse of apostrophes. It's its!

2. I looked through the Absolutely Delicious Tools Collection, and thought the Firefox extension would be useful if I ever decide I need a Delicious account, and that Bookmarks Insuggest would be great if I wanted to quit my job so I could spend all my time on the internet.

3. And -- oooh, shiny! Fresh Del.icio.us - A client-side application to keep clean (check broken urls) of your del.icio.us account bookmarks. Broken links, the bane of the casual Delicious user.

Thing 29

I signed up for Google Alerts. I haven't got any yet.

I was surprised to see GMail as part of a Thing. It's, like, ancient in internet years. I have considered having my Yahoo email forwarded to GMail just to use GChat, but I've never gotten around to it.

I liked the Google Sites. I wonder what the fine print is on content ownership. I thought it looked really easy. I have a set of line-by-line instructions for using Dreamweaver to post content on my webpage (don't update often enough to have it memorized) that's three handwritten pages long. There's a strange combination of Intarwebs and Luddite.

I can't live without the Google toolbar. The fact that it's not on my work computer downstairs, and I can't put it on, is really irritating.

Thing 28

I ws completely baffled by the whole concept of Customized Home Pages until I realized it was just another way to compile RSS feeds and all the various other minutiae of online babble.

I was disappointed that Flickr dropped their photo editing segment and farmed it out to picnik, so I wouldn't use them even if I didn't already pay another service to archive and print my photos. I despise Facebook and its one-liners, but I can see where it would be handy if you don't already have an online community that you belong to based on interests alone. (If I wanted to talk to my high school/college classmates, they'd still be my friends. Some of them are.) I don't read my RSS feeds.

The upshot is, I don't have much to compile.

I tried to use My Yahoo before, but I hate the way it's laid out.

I can see where iGoogle or Netvibes could be genuinely useful for the "2.0 textbook" information collection. If there were something or a bunch of things I genuinely wanted the newest information on every day or every week, it would be a great collected source. Valenza's pagecast is pretty awesome. The tabbed pages-layout is extremely cool.

Okay, enough about Twitter.

I got an account. I'm following the Hibbing Library and Jeffrey Donovan, who is a cute spy hero in a show with the always-entertaining Bruce Campbell. Most likely I will never look at it again, like my RSS feeds. Most of the people I know who use Twitter use it to follow celebrities. I read an article in the newspaper where some college prof is requiring students to use for class, and I was like, Whut? But Angie and I deduced it's because kids are busy texting; they don't need Twitter for anything.

I can see where it's different if I want to promote myself, my job, something I try to interest people in so they give me money. Fine. Although I'm not sure the info Tweeted by the Hibbing Library is going to raise huge amounts of interest. OTOH, if I'm looking at Twitter for my own interest rather than my own promotion . . . I get enough of being marketed at in every possible way. I don't need to JOIN SOMETHING ONLINE just so I can be marketed at some more.

Also? I hate it when people post compilations of their daily Tweets to their journals. If I wante to see what you're Twittering, I'd follow you on Twitter. :P

Twitter

I do not like that Twitter wants to mine my email to find my 'friends' using, hello, the password to my email, Sam I Am.

In fact, it kind of enrages me.