Long time now blog - yay, Easter. Or, if we're really being honest, boo Masters assignments. While I am confident that having my Masters will eventually be of some use (if only in impressing someone who knows nothing about higher education, and the real use of theoretical subjects), the actual doing it is proving difficult. I'm sorry, but very little I have ever learned in higher education, particularly things relating to management, and especially IT, has any practical application in the real world. Things work differently, here.

Anyway. All that aside...

I'm now back to finish up week seven. I started off looking at del.icio.us whenever that was, and now I'll finish off with technorati and LibraryThing. I tried the suggested searches in Technorati, and got the same results for both, which had something to do with the fact that it was a single word search. I did a random search for 'brown rabbit', which came up with over 3000 results in the basic search, and 74 for the exact phrase (or 2000 odd for both words). Alas, a search for 'sock girl' brings up mostly porn. I'm not sure that I'd use Technorati on a regular basis for anything - I manage perfectly well on my own, finding the kind of things I want. (It's worth noting that, once upon a time, someone randomly googled up my online journal with only a random phrase that I happened to use, and turned out to live about fifteen ks away, and is now my Significant Other. And that was before Technorati - or at least before I'd ever heard of it).

Actually, I suppose if I was looking for what people were saying about a specific thing, at a specific time, Technorati might be useful. And perhaps, in that context, I can see it being useful for libraries to know about it. Still. I don't know. Not convinced.

Meanwhile: LibraryThing! I have long been enamoured with LibraryThing, although my few forays into this kind of thing have focused on Delicious Library, because that particular brand of personal library database will scan barcodes using the inbuilt iSight webcam in my Mac. And there is nothing better, in my mind, that being able to scan a barcode instead of type in an ISBN, don't you think? (Obviously, at work, I have access to a normal barcode scanner, but not at home). Unfortunately, I never got very far, because (at least at that point - things may have changed since) the databases it took results from were all American or British, and either didn't recognise my Australian barcodes, or had different covers (and I am too much of a perfectionist to let that slip). So.

I do love the concept of this kind of software, though. The idea of being able to share information about what you're reading, find out things you might like based on who shares books with you, and so on, is an awesome tool. I do similar things on Facebook, through a similar tool, and I really enjoy seeing what people I know are reading, and what they've thought of it. This kind of tool would be great within a library, because it provides an instant selection of books that other people have enjoyed, which you might also.

Please excuse my inability to write a proper english sentence today. Call it post-Masters assignment brain. Yes. That's it.

Anyway, I've put a link to the rss feed for my LibraryThing account on the sidebar of this page. Yes, okay, I did just scan in the barcodes of the closest books at hand (a couple are my personal reading material, and a couple are in here waiting for re-cataloguing or repair).