Thing 28: personalized home page

I have a google home page, chosen because I have a gmail account, google calendar and use blogger already. Each of those is a gadget on my page, along with a to-do list, weather, and a collection of reference and news options. I also have a reader to aggregate blogs. I just added a twitter gadget to go directly to twitter and have it open in the home page.
It does make it easy to collect a variety of useful sites and make them easily accessible. I also personalized it with a theme at the top of the page so I can look at a different picture each time I go to the page!

Thing 27: Twitter

Signed up for Twitter at https://twitter.com/ and am following 11 people. Hibbing Library uses it for daily updates on events, internet outages etc. which seems like it would be useful if people follow a library's tweets! I also added the twitter button to my blog. My user name is marciaanderson

Thing 26: Ning

I joined Ning, and the NCLC subgroup, and posted a comment. I also added the 23 things Ning badge to my blog. I am already a member of another Ning group started by Maggie Montgomery of KAXE radio on local foods. http://eatlocally.ning.com/
Ning is a great way to socialize around a specific topic and for a small group.

Thing 25: Blogger toolbox

I added some fun things, including: a "Contact Me" which gives an alias contact email to avoid spam; a "Subscribe" button to allow subscriptions to the blog; a box to use for searching the blog; and a "labels" list to collect all the labels. Now if I just remember to label each post I'll be fine!

I wonder, as I look at tag clouds, labels and other labelling and sorting options, about the usefulness of a controlled vocabulary to make things easier to find. Do I add labels, tags or subject headings?

More things on a stick: Thing 24

In an attempt to keep up with the ever-changing online world, I signed up to participate in MLA's "More things on a stick" program. I skipped the first "23 things on a stick" session, so I will undoubtedly need to go back and grab some of those things to be able to complete this session.

I started by updating my blog, first started before moving from Oregon to Minnesota in the fall of 2005, and not really used much after about 7 months. (see the dates of the older posts!) I tried a new template, started a web site list, and added other blogs. Adding the other blogs was done by adding a google reader to my igoogle home page, then importing the feeds to the blog. That gives me the feeds in both places. I also added a little to my profile.

Last summer I started a blog for the library, http://grandrapidsarealibrary.blogspot.com/ and we use it for current events and some fun things like photos of costumed staff at Halloween. There is also a google calendar attached to it. Both the blog and the calendar are fed to the Northern Community Internet site, which gives them much more exposure.