I have been so busy playing with it and going ‘Ooh’ and "ah" that I forgot to mention that Yahoo’s bookmarking site (once a proud indie Web 2.0 flagship) del.icio.us, has had a makeover (including a new URL, now just plain http://delicious. Huh.)

I am quite happy with the addons for Firefox and IE which are expanded to take up more of your browser edges if you like that, and I do - it’s helpful for my grazing habits to have my favourite bundles of tags sitting in the toolbar in case I get too distracted with feeds.

This way, I occasionally do read, reply, listen to or research things I’ve saved.

And although I’m not a great fan of cluttered desktops, I rather like
the sidebar sitting in the browser, even though one has to return to
the del.icio.us site to edit bookmarks and tags.

There are people of course who wonder why we use sites like delicious at all, who argue that blogging is dead and that Facebook and social streaming tools like Twitter are the new face of the social web.

There are also old stodges like me who not only like delicious, we like keeping web bookmarks so much that we have a Furl account as well, where we can keep a copy of the original webpage ‘4 evah’. (Furl is owned by Looksmart and I was first introduced to it by Mary Ellen Bates, a US librarian and information professional who tours the world giving workshops on Web research.)

But there are younger people out there who, despite it being so last week, are happy to help us oldies make the most of our muddled, child-like efforts to colour in bits of the Web so we can find them later.

Here’s Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb to tell us how to build our own custom search engine to milk several sets of bookmarks from different sources at once. If we so desire.

I’m not convinced of the usefulness of that approach, but the original post she quotes from Matthew Ewing’s blog has some terrific commentary on delicious usage in general, with Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW chipping in to offer this comment:

"thinking about it more, perhaps my preferred response would be - thank
goodness many people do tag things in Del.icio.us because using their
collective intelligence is one of the best things about the service."

I think use is something that depends on so many things, like desire and availability and time to customise your tool of choice, that I’m no longer upset that my use of the Web is still mainly restricted to collections of print items, and that my best shot at finding them quickly is to mark the spot, in some way, if only to remind myself that I did actually see this thing once before…and thought it might come in handy.

And if that’s your usage pattern, any more powerful search  technologies will still need to acknowledge that in some way. There will still be a place for people like me who are easily overloaded and want to find something - how can I put it nicely? -  more than once. Us readers, certainly, need to be able to tell the Web to behave in some ways like a personalised librarian as well as a researcher - one of the greatest things about it at present is that it can be both.

Don’t get me wrong, there are areas of the ‘in the moment’ Web I find relaxing and delightful, like concerts and art galleries in their way. I"m certainly not above visiting graphic websites to see things for the first and probably last time, just for the experience of the moment - to which end I note also that Corvida at ReadWriteWeb recommends this photo website, Vi.sualize.us, calling it ‘a place where all the cool photos hang out’.

Have a look and let me know what you think. I’m tagging it for later, Augustus.

Crossposted at Reeling and Writhing.

I don’t know why I didn’t subscribe to the if:book feed earlier.
Here’s some interesting news about LibraryThing having an interface with the British Library, thanks to the assistance of a software company called Talis, whose head honcho, Paul Miller, is a library academic and writer whose work I read in library school in the online journals Ariadne and First Monday.

As Talis has jumped into Web 2.0 in a big way, though with a Semantic Web underpinning, it’s hardly surprising they’d be advocates for LibraryThing with the big guys.

Oh dear, poor old Sputnik. How you are neglected. Only some links this time around - I’m doing more literary stuff over at reeling and writhing these days, and the tech reading has fallen off quite a lot: most of my news comes from ReadWriteWeb, which means most of you have already read it.

I intend to keep an eye on this: Librarians who Library Thing (from the groups on Library Thing). (And keep an eye on that link as well - it is down at the moment, so I will go back there and check it soon.)

ReadWriteWeb reports that apparently NASA is close to stabilising a semantic browser and presented on it at the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference.

As everyone knows by now, Google has purchased Feedburner for around $100 million, confirming what Chris Sherman said last year at WebSearchPacific workshops, that advertising is increasingly important to the G. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone reported that:

In a blog post, Google’s VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki said that Google aims “to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users” and spoke glowingly of Feedburner’s current RSS feed advertising platform. As we said last week, this marriage seems like a match made in heaven. Google already controls the mostprofitable text ad network on the Internet and will now have the opportunity to expand it into a large number of RSS feeds, giving them even more reach. They also gain access to a lot of statistical data about how people consume content.

Maybe it also explains why, when I went through my notes on Sherman and Mary Ellen Bates’s workshops recently and was exploring the analytics site Blogniscient, I was redirected to Google to subscribe to a feed on a search. I went back to Blogniscient and entered another search, only to be returned to a page of Google search results. Try as I might, it was impossible to get the original interface to resume activity. Incredibly annoying, and I didn’t bother exploring the cause as it was clear that in the space of six months, Google had been out shopping and just hadn’t bothered to tell anyone who visited this site what was going down. On a subsequent visit I noted that the most recent articles and headlines on Blogniscient were dated March 2007 - so that must have been the date of the takeover, yet the site is still up and there is no information on it about what has happened.

There is a report in this morning’s paper that Google and Microsoft are elbowing each other over Google Desktop being blocked by Vista software. Bigger isn’t always better, is it.

If you want to get books in bookstores, Lulu’s not the way to do it: The production costs are too high. If you want to produce a special item for a handful of people or do a book that you know won’t get into bookstores anyway (how many of my books have you ever seen in a bookstore other than at ALA?), Lulu so far looks like a good option.

I had the good fortune to meet the famous Jessamyn West on her flying visit to Melbourne this month, at the State Library cafe thanks to Michelle Thomason of ALIA Groups. I created a Pageflakes account the other day and have stuck a flake with the Librarian.net feed in it on the first page - and here’s the first snippet of her wonderful blog that I’m mining online.

Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at OCLC, and the author and editor of Cites and Insights, has published a book using the increasingly popular self-publishing platform, Lulu. He gives an account, here (from which the quote above is taken), and Jessamyn offers some discussion here,
where she mentions how cumbersome being involved in a scholarly journal can be, and notes the arrival of left of centre small library publishers, Library Juice Press, who have a terrific blog.

It was great to get an invite to assist at the first Library Unconference in Australia which was held last Friday at Thomastown Library and very ably facilitated, using Open Source technology, by Christine Mackenzie and the team from Yarra Plenty Regional Libraries, who have recently completed the Charlotte-Mecklenburg program, 23 Things.

I teamed up with Paula Kelly, the manager for Reader Development, Library Learning and the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library, to run a session on social networking and reader development - my contribution consisted of an introduction to a few book blogs, I’m a bit sorry I didn’t get the visual side of it to run a bit more smoothly, but I was conscious that Paula and her web project manager, Lili Wilkinson, had more library based projects to discuss than me, including the fabulous YA website and blog, InsideADog, so tried to steer things around to them ASAP. So if you missed my bookblogs list, and want to visit some, there’s a list here.

Christine has called for our thoughts, and here are some of mine - more of a ramble than anything else, though I have weeded out as much of the dross as I can:

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