Sunday, February 1, 2009

Thing #12 Roll Your Own Search Engine

Inspired by Jason Kaspar's OPL Digital Images Rollyo, I thought I try to create one to search the 3 sites I search when researching Native American images - the digital collection of the Denver Public Library, the Library of Congress, and The Smithsonian. I wasn't expecting a lot of success because the 3 sites have there own search catalogs. I got some results, but it would probably take a lot of tweaking to get the results limited to digital images.


Thing #11 Library Thing

I've looked at LibraryThing a couple of times considering adding it to HIP. In 2007 the Similar Titles function wasn't very impressive, and I never got a response when I asked for pricing. I've added the LibraryThing widget to the right.

Thing #10 Image Generators


It was fun trying some of the image generators listed at The Generator Blog.
I'm posting one here created at Museumr - Scamper on display at The Alte Pinakothek Art Gallery in Munich.

Thing #9 FInding Feeds

I did some searching at Topix, Synic8, and Technorati, and didn't care for any other them. If I was a news junkie I might have liked them, although involvment of users in the editing of news at Topix makes me question the information I would find there - mixing news with wikipedia methods isn't a good combination. All 3 search tools were confusing, and all the advertising made it worse.

Blogline's search tool was better. Using the "more" search features helped a little in getting better results.

Thing #8 RSS

I got my notes out from when I took Michael Sauers's workshop on RSS, and found my blogger password. I was surprised to see my account was still there. I got caught up on some feeds, and subscribed to some new ones, including 2 owhatageek blogs, and noticed Firefox gave me the option to add the subscription to Blogger, but IE didn't. That I haven't checked Blogger since the workshop reflects the fact that I've never found rss feeds useful.