Rollyo, sounds like some kind of video game or a cartoon character, but nope, it is actually an application that allows you to create your own personal search engine. Like Flickr or other online apps it has a whole lot of other features as well and although the idea sounds great, I’m not sure if I’ll be using it much. Have to give it some consideration.

As another friend pointed out it could be a great tool for doing specific research on a subject. You could set up a search to only look in certain academic journals or sites, which could be useful. The site points out how some Rollyos have been set up for what is going on in the political blogosphere, or in string theory, just looking for recipes and not a lot of other stuff, only travel info, and so much other interests. So, yeah, if one is doing certain research or likes to keep updated on certain subjects or fields it could be a very useful tool.

One nice thing Rollyo can do, which is handy, for those without a lot of tech knowledge is created a search bar for your own blog or website.

I suppose one could even create a search bar to look only at certain sites, thus screening one’s mind off from listening to any info that doesn’t come from their trusted sources. Great for keeping one’s narrow view intact. I could see it now a nation kept blind because they don’t venture beyond the narrowly defined parameters of their search engine…

Okay, Library Thing… As a coworker of mine pointed out it is kind of like Myspace or Myspace for those who have books. I get that in how it is designed with the ability to function as a social networking site. You can use it to locate individuals who share similar reading interests or just happen to have the same book as you. Like any social networking site you are making connections based on some kind of similarity or interest shared with another individual.

There are a lot of other interesting features built in, such as the ability to look at reviews of books, or how other users rate various books. I like how you can place a search of your own personal catalog or a randomly generated set of titles from your personal library on your own blog or website. If you use the option to show covers it creates a pretty cool visual effect.

What I was most impressed by was how easy it was to add an item from your own collection of books to create an online catalog for yourself. Just entering the title or ISBN created either the item you have or a list of items that have that title, then all you have to do is click on that item and, bingo!, it is now in your personal Librarything catalog. It is just as easy to create keywords or ratings for your library. I found this a fascinating way of easily seeing what books you have and how you associate and create meaning for the items in your library.

My biggest quandary was what to put in my library. I mean just adding the books I own is one thing, but what about the books my wife owns that I often read as well? Or what about books that I am temporarily borrowing from friends or the library? These aren’t items I own, but they are temporarily in my possession. They are borrowed items and will revert back to their rightful items in time, but do I consider them as part of my library? I finally decided that these items would be a part of my library, but “temporarily”. In fact I could even tag them as temporary or being borrowed. As for items in my house, but being shared I decided the easiest thing would be to make my library broad to include all items in my house whehter I would necessarily read them or not. After some thougt I set out to add some items. So far I have uploaded one shelf from my “library”. It was done pretty quickly, but one shelf means I have a ways to go…

All right I have online library, now what?

My next quandary is can I add my movies and CDs and if not, why not? Hmm, I need to go look into this. I’ll continue this thought later when I find out the answer…

Ta ta for now!

Okay, image generators are cool. So much fun that I think I found a new hobby and didn’t want to move on to the next 23 Things item. To me they are more like fun toys that allow you to manipulate photos and graphics to create new images that you could do what you want with. Some generators are pretty simple with what they can do, but others are more complex. My favorites were

• the Simpsons avatar creator

• and the film poster creator  

Naturally, I reduced the size of the image for the movie poster to fit on my blog page.

A couple others I had fun creating were

1. A funny name badge of myself.

1. An inspirational poster.

To create your own Simpson Avatar go to the Simpsons movie site and click on Create Your Own Avatar at the top of the screeen. Most of the other images were created using a site, Big Huge Labs,  with a whole lot of cool image generation toys. You could spend hours playing around on that site. You can have  a lot of fun with image generators. Let your imagination go and release the kid in you though if you really want to have some fun with these. Well, that is enough babbling for now. I am off to play with some more image generators.

Okay, my little social experiment has run its short course. It was weird and creepy in a kind of stalker way. I also found Twitter a bit addictive. It is true that it is easy to update, but I often found that I either did not have the time, had no access to a computer or I would get busy and forget to update. I guess you have to really be committed to run this as a successful program or social experiment.

Apparently you can upload with a cell phone to really let the world know what you are doing while you are on the go, but I haven’t tried that yet. I’ll have to look into that more. Tiptoe around the concept. I don’t like extra expenses, I have enough of them, so I have to see whether my cell phone company will charge me for that and if so how much?

Further thoughts about libraries. I decided there are other uses for Twitter besides the micromanager. My ideas focus more around marketing. Staff could post letting the public know what they are up to. Say a new book is added, one could post, “Just added Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. Or posting funny or interesting things that just happened to the staff member in the library. One could also mention they are watching the current children’s program. These could all be an extension of the library and the way it presents itself to the public. Ways of making the library and its staff more personable and of creating another way of reaching out to the public.

To take this further, the library could create its own Twitter account. This would extend the library as an entity. Postings could be done by various staff members and could in the process extend what the library is doing. What items are being added, how many people are coming in or checking out items, interesting reference questions being answered, various programming that is going on at the moment or other interesing happenings. Followers could tune in to see what is going on in the library. The library could simply set up and embed Twitter on the library home page, so that users checking out the library have something else to tune in to and interact with. This could be a fun way of bringing the library into the community. Seems like a cool idea to me.

Okay, this is the second day of monitoring myself. It is kind of weird and easy to update. I see I could basically leave it running all day and within seconds update my behavior, but I need to have a computer handy. One thought I had concerning libraries or work environments concerns productivity. Since it so quick and easy to update one could easily post what one is working on throughout the day. If the boss wants to have you print out a report of what you have worked on for the day, week, month or whatever just point him to your Twitter account. The boss can always than check on the things mentioned in your account, further the boss could easily monitor your activity daily if he is that paranoid about what you are doing… Seems a bit extreme, but I could see it happening. Look out Twitter junkies here come the managers.

Okay, I am supposed to sign up for a Twitter account. Allright, I did.

In a lot of the tech journals they seem to either rave about or say it is a mindless waste of time. One article I read said it was an extension of our ability to know what is going on the lives of people we know, but don’t always get to see. Thus, increasing our ability to communicate with them and understand how their lives are going. I don’t know about all that. To be honest I’m a bit sceptical of this whole Twitter phenomenon, but I won’t pass judgement yet. So here I am running a Twitter experiment on myself. I am supposed to use Twitter to monitor myself for the next few days and then figure out how it could be used in a library setting. Good question that. Maybe, I’m not being very creative, but I don’t have an answer to that yet. Anyhoo, monitoring my own behavior sounds a bit creapy.

A few posts ago I talked about an interesting artist who has made his life public. With photos constantly updated, lists of his transactions, and a gps tracking to show his current whereabouts on a map. Seems like Twitter would be quite an extension of making his life public. Now one would really know what he is doing.

Anyhoo, I’m off to go monitor myself. Let me strap on my social scientist hat and see what I’m up to.

Okay, I added a couple library blogs to my RSS feeder. I didn’t really see much on the links provided by Infopeople and unfortunately, the ones that sounded interesting had links that went nowhere… Not good for librarians going to links that go nowhere… The one that sounded really interesting had to do with hackers and libraries, but, of course, that link went nowhere. I wonder if it got hacked. Anyhoo, I had to scour the web to come across library related blogs that interested me. My favorite was a link from the Shifted Librarian blog to a blog called Librarian Avengers, it is pretty funny check it out if you want a good chuckle.