Tags

Del.icio.us
Tags are a basic necessity for keeping track of your online information via bookmarks, but learning about them was confusing, and the more I read about them, the more confused I became! I found the Slacker Manager site with "Several Habits of Wildly Successfull Del.icio.us Users" to be a very helpful for those that know what they are doing, but it plunged me into doubt about what I thought I knew about tags. I did more investigation to see how they're used.
I think I finally have an understanding of how these work and the wonderful sites, such as Del.icio.us, that make it easy to use tags to mark your information for future reference. It's a very handy tool for placing tags on your bookmarks and other data, such as photos and blogs. The MRRL account was helpful to see how tags worked for keeping track of sites and relocating information. It would be an wonderful tool for anyone doing reseach, on their own or with a school, business, or project.

Technorati
It took a long time to access the video tutorial, but it was worth the wait. It was an excellent overview of this website, which exists to compile blogs and allow everyone to find blogs that are of interest to them. You can mark your favorites and rate the blogs. Browsers can add their blog as well. They have both "signed in" or "not signed in" ways to view the site. Someone who has heard about blogs, but doesn't know what's out there in the blogosphere or where to start, can be advised to come here to find blogs of interest to them for fun reading, or to look for information, or to even see the most blogged videos. Things are filed and seachable by subject or tags, or even a blog directory. The results were very different for searching Learning Library 2.0. I got 2,570 hits from using blog posts, 10 from tags, and 55 from blog directories, but it's very easy to check the different options for the same subject, so you can try all 3 to see what works best for your search needs. Truly amazing how many blogs are out there and the numbers are doubling every 6 months-unbelieveable! I thought this was an amazing site and very user friendly. I was going to claim my blog just for the experience and to use tags, but decided not to make my blog that public.

LibraryThing
I thought LibraryThing was incredibly cool for anyone that would like to catalog their own collection. I don't intend to do that, but since it was part of our Learning 2.0 program, I did open an account. Being a member to access the information others have shared about books, makes this a giant web book club, of sort. It's also very easy to catalog your books and to access information about them. Here is my account site. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/crowsnest

Got a MySpace!

This was quite easy. Getting a better look to the profile will be a bear, from what I hear, so I'll wait to make any upgrades. I'm going to keep it simple and private, since I don't really have an interest in online social networking at this point. If I get addicted to this MySpace thing, that could change. I do think it's great for libraries, but wish MySpace would set up a template for groups, which would be more appropriate. It's interesting to see who has asked to be a MRRL friend. Other libraries are glad to have company out there.