Tagging in the Clouds

I find the concept of tagging interesting, but I haven't used it in searches enough to judge its usefulness. I searched Great War, an era of history I'm interested in, and found a large tag cloud (18,000 hits) for an uncommon name for World War One.

I'm interested in how an author's experience in the trenches effected his writing and his moral outlook. Tolkien is one of my favorites, but I didn't find him through the tags. I found him the old fashioned way. Most of the tags led me to writers relating their direct experiences of the War. I'll practice some more and see if I can get better at using tags.

A Tagging We Shall Go

Well, for this one I decided to search Edgar Allen Poe, since we're on the topic of Poets. Google brought up 2,750,000 hits. Wow! I think I would need to refine that a tidge. Using EQuest keyword brought up 14. I think I could manage that. EQuest author brought 124. Of course on these latter two I was searching for books only. Still, I would have thought the keyword would have yeilded more than 14 books.

I can see a parallel between taging and cataloging, however, I'm not familiar enough with the history to know if tagging is a reinvention. I suspect it is.

I already did some tagging in Library Thing. It was kind of entertaining seeing how the comparative sizes changed when I added a new book. I guess I'm easily amused.

Roll Yer Own

I can see why this is important. If you do a lot of searches, you go into Google and find hundreds or sometimes even tens of thousands of hits. For many of these sites you have no idea what they are or how reliable they might be. With Rollyo you pick your own sources. I can see this being especially useful for searching specialized topics.

The Book Collection That Ate Sheboygan

For many years I've thought about trying to organize our books. I was always daunted by the sheer enormity of the task. (In fact, if our daughter doesn't take her own collection with her when she moves out, we will soon have to rent another place just to live in.) With Library Thing I can organize virtually. No lugging heavy boxes, no risk of being crushed to death under avalanches of old sci-fi paperbacks.

The only drawback is the size limitation (Does anyone actually own fewer than 200 books?). Guess I'll have to get the pay version.

I'm going to try to make a link. It looked a little confusing.

More Feed Stuff

Hmn... I can see that this can become very addictive very fast. The number of topics available are near limitless. After sampling a number of them, I think Technorati is probably easiest to use, with Feedster being a close second. I'll have to ration my use of these in order to remain rational.

Got to go. Technorati told me that all of the Road Runner cartoons are available on UTube.

Feed Me Bloglines Feed me

I had no idea what RSS was till this lesson. It does make keeping track of your blogs quicker and more sane.

I signed up for Bloglines and get feeds from seven sources now. Among them are: one political, one sports, one hobby related and a couple from Flickr friends. I'll probably add a few more from time to time.

My Trading Card

My creation
Originally uploaded by thornsberryrobert

Guaranteed to cause embarassment. Of course, John will be jealous.