Great Gadgets and Wonderful Widgets continued...

Having gobbled down lunch and done my stint at Bowyer's Arms in aid of the Village Plan I can now return to my penultimate post for 23Things.

Finally I add delicious to iGoogle home page. First I make room by deleting UKeIG blog - no-one has "yammered away" since March 2009. I left their news and announcements feed as this had been updated. I went to add stuff and searched for "delicious". Some interesting gadgets for Delicious, low fat vegan cooking which looked interesting and would probably offer some healthy alternatives to my regular diet but not what is required for this exercise. Also there was Banana Rama to help two hungry monkeys get some delicious bananas. Typing in del.icio.us brought up more appropriate widgets. Interestingly, they did slightly different things, for example: "nuage delicieux" a french site for the cloud display of you delicious tags, and "oishii "showing most popular sites recently booked marked by delicious users. Glancing through the delicious gadgets and their descriptions I selected "My Delicious". The "My Delicious" abstract seemed to suggest it would do everything I want; "get a delicious hotlist right on your home page, browse bookmarks or see the latest entries from your networks, easily switch user ... ." In selecting this gadget the criteria I used were the providence of the gadget feeling that a "google gadget" was likely to work and be reliable. I checked the starred rating and number of users and reviews to aid my selection. Needless to say I was also influenced by the attractive icon. I set the parameters to "Fiona" and realised I had retrieved all the delicious sites belonging to any "Fiona". Making it more specific my delicious sites appeared happily displaying my latest entries on "cloud computing and libraries". This is very useful and will remind me to find time to read them. I really believe 23Things isn't going to come to an end with is task and the final post which follows. I add the picture above - I learnt how do this from an earlier task accomplished from way back in week one or week two!
I like the "editors picks" . It is an ideal way to promote various gadgets particularly as there are so many of them - one for everyone and everything; daily horoscopes, BBC Good Food, a "day since counter" and "Sudoku". The abstracts are clear and informative. I had already added National Rail enquiries to my iGoogle page. I wonder who the "editor" is and how often the picks are updated especially as the gadget "Vancouver 2010 Olympics Games", schedules, results, medal counts for 2010 Winter Olympics must now be out of date. It was a popular widget with 3,352 users, 21 ratings and starred at 4 1/2. This rather prompts me to note that one's iGoogle page probably should be regularly refreshed and like this blog will never be as perfect or complete as one would like. With the elections looming I was tempted by "TheyWorkFor You" gadget, the abstract of which reads "Information on MPS from TheyWorkForYou.com" It has five stars, one review and 2,334 users. I feel the number of users will increase in the coming weeks.

Sadly my last post approaches

More Delicious

Thing ten was easy. As I was begining to feel weary I just followed the given instructions step by step. Thankfully it worked first time. I do wonder though how instinctive the process would be without the helpful screen prompts we were given. I shall have to try it again on my own sometime. Just too tired to experiment with more things!

Above is a picture one of the institutions on my network

Delicious Delicious

Loging in was easy. I decided not try to link to my previous experiments with delicious as it would only be an added complication and probably drive me to distraction. I think I did things a bit differently from the instructions adding delicious thru' the FireFox Add-Ons. I used the import bookmarks option so my delicious account was instantly populated. Just how many redunant bookmarks can one person have! I was unsuccessful with adding the "bookmarklet" and will have to go back and try this functionality again.
I found navigation thru' my long list easy by selecting my tags. I tried the bulk edit option after I had copied and pasted my string of tags and description from a file on notepad! The editing functionality was easy.
I used the tag function to bring togther my sites on Buddhism and/or book history but it would have been nice to have them arranged in a permanent set of results.
I like the search function which allows one to search within your bookmarks, your networks' bookmarks and within delicious.

At first acquaintance delicious apppears a useful tool to organise a wide range of web resources. Delicious allows you access all your books from a remote location on any computer so you don't have them linked to a worl machine or personal laptop which seems a good thing. The tagging function permits the association of keywords with a variety of web media. It is useful to be able identify those users within delicious who share your tags and build a personal network of those who share your interests outside your immediate networks. The tagging function might I feel be used rather like a citation index; identifying key sites, and perhaps some offbeat ones too and, in locating related sites. It is a bit like throwing a pebble in the pond and watching the ripples spreading ever outward. The tags also revealed an number sites in languages other than English which might not otherwise not have been found depending of course that you can read French or German or Italian ... The top ten tags functionality is useful in identifying appropriate and helpful keywords. My only reservation is that self assigned keywords that are tags can lead to inconsistency and imprecision within your own bookmarks. It also lends a certain unpredicatability when searching within delicious for related sites of interest. It seems to be a good tool for sharing a relevent selection of key web resources with a group of readers or researchers for example my list of sites of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. I also have a list of key sites for Chinese Studies too.

I hope Angela likes my link to Tibetan Art works.

I need rather more time to locate and read up on the uses of tagging and folksonomies.