My Del.ico.us Assortment of Info Morsels

I like the Del.ico.us concept and have had an account for some time but never used it, preferring to use my My.Yahoo page bookmark list to track websites that I like. This exercise was good for me because I think Del.ico.us offers some major advantages over the Yahoo page bookmark list and I will probably make much greater use of Del.ico.us.

1. Del.ico.us is easily sharable. I think this is a great resource for teachers who want to share sites with students.

2. Del.ico.us has the text box for descriptions about each site.

3. Use of tags on Del.ico.us allows for even more descriptions about selected sites.

4. Use of tags allows for targeted browsing of other Del.ico.us users' selections of sites labeled with the same tags, which makes for interesting, productive surfing.

I have to admit that I am a huge fan of tags and tag-surfing in general because it fits my nonlinear learning style. (I tag-surf LibraryThing ALOT!) Not everyone may be as comfortable with this kind of format depending on their learning style.

I think that use of tags underscores the need for information literacy because I always "read the label" before I consume information by checking the authority of the information source. If the source is sketchy then I pass it by as unreliable and move on to investigate the next interesting tidbit.

Click here to sample my Del.ico.us dish.

The lovely truffles shown in the picture at the head of this post are from Grocer's Daughter Chocolate's website.

I'm Down With OPP

I love using Flickr to connect with OPP (Other People's Pets). Some of my faves are Chmurka, a Polish hamster, who appears in the Flickr badge on my sidebar, Ah Dat, the Hong Kong pug, Fukusuke-Pon, the Japanese rabbit, and Leo, the Austrian kitty, whose photos appear in the katzenzungen (cat's tongues) pool. I think these pets are so cute and so much fun to look at and I never have to clean up virtual poo!

The Day the Music Died

I have been working on my MySpace page getting it all nice and festive for Halloween. Ms. Jennifer from WA (Thank you!!!!) told me about this cool music/social networking site, Project Playlist, and I tried it and I REALLY liked it. I went to town and made a really nice spooky playlist so I could get my Halloween groove on and BAM! I go to my MySpace page (9/27/07) and my Project Playlist tunes won't play. MELTDOWN!! cause I Googled "MySpace and Project Playlist" and found out that MySpace had blocked Project Playlist....in the past. Apparently the problem on 9/27/07 was something unrelated to MySpace. The problem has been fixed and my tunes are playing today (9/28/07).

The serendipitous fallout of my overheated Google search for answers led me to Mashable , a social networking site that allows you to organize your other social networking sites, your sites where you organize your social networking sites, blogs, etc, and more. Mashable calls it The Grid.

Interestingly enough when I first went to Mashable around 7 AM, after discovering that I was tuneless, I found a post dated April 07 that talked about the MySpace/Project Playlist blocking issue and advised Project Playlist fans to protest the blocking because when MySpace blocked YouTube, MySpacers complained and YouTube was no longer blocked. When I looked for this post again at work when I started drafting this post to rant about Big Bad MySpace blocking my music, the 4/07 Mashable post was gone and my broken Project Playlist widget was displaying a new message that the MySpace music would be back on soon! I must not have been the only one blaming MySpace for the problem.

Things happen fast on the web. So the end of my long and winding rant is that I ended up setting up a Mashable account and now have yet another social networking account! I also discovered Dizzler, another music widget site that I found on another librarian's MySpace, and am playing with that. Nice to be able to put my musical eggs in more than one basket!