12th Thing: del.icio.us

This is another tool that could be very useful to us as we provide reference assistance to our patrons.

11th Thing -- Rollyo

In a matter of minutes I rolled a search engine on cruising! That was really easy. The hardest part will be remembering the password that I used when I set up my Rollyo account. This could definitely be a useful tool, especially for the reference staff who gather websites that they like and want to be able to search across those sites all at one time. Give my Rollyo a try. There are only a handful of sites rolled there but it gives you an idea of how the tool works.

10th Thing -- Generators

Now here is a Web 2.0 application that I could spend waaaay too much time playing around with! I'm a Scrabble fan so I had to add the name generator. You can get your own Scrabble tile name by clicking on the link under my Scrabble tiles. I've been trying to figure out how to get it to show horizontally. No luck with that so far. I'm sure that there are some generators that can be put to legitimate library-related use. But this 20 Things project is supposed to be fun so I looked -- mostly -- at the generators that made me smile. Of course, as an English major, I did like the Shakesperean Insulter generator, especially for those insults that were actually taken from Shakespeare's work.

Thing #9 -- Feeds

Because I'm always trying to make work as much fun as possible I choose to search for posts on library humor. That strategy didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. I found some blogs but not as much as I'd expected, or hoped. I know that working in libraries can be a hoot so where are all of the funny library blogs? Maybe people who work in libraries are just to discrete to write about the humorous things that happen there. So instead I just searched for library related blogs. This time I founds lots of sites. I prefer using the search functions in Bloglines and Technorati for one very simple reason: they look nicer. Syndic8 was just unappealing to look at and Topix wasn't much better. I found some interesting blogs but I didn't subscribe to anything else. It's good to know that these search tools are available if I need to find blogs on a specific topic.