Wikis
I learnt something new today – never knew wiki came from there 🙂
I (amongst many others) have spent some time trying to persuade students that they shouldn’t cite wikis as law, especially considering that anyone can make a page on a wiki and make it say what they want. A couple of weeks ago I felt obliged to change a page on Wikipedia that referred to someone who kidnapped children in the 1930s as ‘someone even Michael Jackson would envy’. Really hope our students have enough brains to avoid quoting things like that even if they do quote Wikipedia! But regardless of the dangers of Wikis, I love them. They are a quick (see! It fits!), and easy to search to find basic info and definitions, which you can then use (if needs be) to do research proper. And if there is something you are interested and the wiki is established, there will already be an entry. And if there isn’t, I can make one 🙂
Wikipedia thing.
The article that interested me the most was this… There isn’t really any discussion of it (although it is part of the WikiProject Books), but it intrigued me enough to make me want to read the story. The write up gives you just enough information for you to not have a clue what happens in it, if that makes sense! The ending write up is extremely mysterious… The entry is only a stub (i.e. a page created for a reference in another page), but there isn’t any need for it to be in depth as it is, even if the English student in me wants to break it down and analyse it 😀
Current events, as several people have already had the joy to discover, is mainly bad news, like Irish pork going down the drain, although there is something about Sark’s first democratic elections 🙂
Technorati
I think I’ve used Technorati to check my own blog’s stats and who is linking to it, but I haven’t done that recently. I’ve not really looked at the other side of it, so it was quite fun to find out there is a knitting advent calendar on Lime and Violet’s website 😀
But, going back to the actual tasks rather than ones I made up 😉 Searching for Huddersfield brought up all kinds of goodies, including several references to ‘the inimitable’ Dave and his presentation at the Mashed Libraries thingy last week 🙂 and, probably unsurprisingly, references to pubs in the locale… 😀 Think that was just coincidence that Dave and pubs come up in the same result? But everyone else has probably had the same kind of results – a general search brings up lots of interesting posts across a wide range of blogs, but the blog results just brings up a load of people trying to flog stuff.
Finally I should add that in no way did I use Technorati to look up Strictly Come Dancing, although I might have hunted for some Mighty Boosh stuff, and also to see if anyone else had had any peppermint nightmares…
Tagging
I confess. I’m a sporadic tagger. I don’t tag my blog posts, but do tag my photos. I blog to share knowledge and experiences, but don’t share that knowledge very well beyond my faithful regular readers. I upload pics to Flickr mainly because I’m a Ravelry obsessive (if you are a fibre crafter, you should damn well know what Ravelry is (if you are but you don’t, Google it. It is ACE), and if you aren’t you really don’t want to know what it is ;D), which means that Flickr all too often gets used as a hosting tool and the sharing gets done in Ravelry. And I only tag things in Ravelry when I remember…
But I really need to fix this. Tagging is really really useful. What’s the point in sharing stuff online if people can’t find it without trawling through blog posts and their web browser growning under the weight of a million plus hits in their searches? I do kind of wonder whether there is a fine line between helpful tagging and not-at-all useful tagging. The searcher is only as good as the tags PLUS their own search technique, and the tagger only as good as their own knowledge and language. So, if you start tagging photos with ‘Techmology’ like my friend does, the likelihood of anyone you don’t know finding your photo on this basis is low. But, on the other hand, it can be quite funny 🙂
[wonders how many people will go and search Flickr for the tag Techmology and bump Heather’s photo views up through the roof. If you do go, highlights are the mangroomer, and the pasta sauce ‘with meat’]
That kind of went a bit random. And also a little bit philosophical. I hope you are suitably impressed at that considering it is Monday (although I had major issues typing the word philosophical).
Bryony Ramsden's 25 Things Blog 