Wednesday, August 8th

Alrightie, time to report on del.icio.us and Technorati. I got on del.icio.us and formed an account and started adding some websites with my little descriptive tags......the thing is I really don't look at very many websites. I mean other than email accounts and the NYTimes, my bookmarked pages don't range very far beyond our banks and the electrical company. This was evident when I started adding my websites to del.icio.us: I added Epicurious (of course, my favorite recipe website), my marathon plan and runner's log at the Runner's world website, and then the site for Performance today, the NPR program I like listening to at work. Ummmmmmm and I think that's about it for my day-to-day life. Am I abnormal??? Anyway, I don't think del.icio.us is really for people like me....when you only have 4 or 5 websites you look at regularly, there really is no need to catalog them for retrieval. And I could use delicious to look for other similarly-tagged sites, but honestly, unless I'm on a mission for something specific, I just don't see myself taking the time to surf around.

I feel the same way about Technorati. If I'm looking for something specific, then Technorati could be a great tool, but otherwise I'd just be using it to find the most popular favorited sites or to check out the best blogs on Iraq, and honestly that's just too much of an information overload for me. The current #1 site, for example, is Boing Boing: a directory of wonderful things which it appears is just a compilation of human interest stories and curiosities. It's all interesting...I just don't have the brain space and time to intake it all. I feel the same way about cable television actually....I start to cave every once in a while because I miss all my sports, but I know that if I had cable television I'd watch very interesting shows and I'm sure I'd be a better person for it, but I'd have a whole lot less time on my hands.

I wonder how normal I am. Do most people have loads of websites and blogs they monitor? Maybe I'm just a bear of very little brain. :)

Friday, August 3rd

I was a little dubious about Rollyo...would I really use this?? That is until I saw the Food and Dining rollyo someone had set up....to only search true food sites like Epicurious, Chowhound, and foodie blogs. I realized that it would have helped if I had had this last night when I was searching for a good recipe for Chiles Rellenos and trying to figure out whether the original recipe uses Hatch New Mexican chiles (or Anaheim) or Poblanos. Searching on Google brought up a lot of personal pages and mexican grocery stores websites which I didn't want to have to take the time to evaluate. But when I searched for chiles rellenos in the Rollyo engine, it brought up some of the recipes I had searched for in Epicurious, plus a discussion of Hatch vs. Poblano in Chowhound, and a thread on a forum in egullet.....all sites which have delivered for me in the past. Plus, it brought up a blog I had never heard of The Accidental Hedonist. So I can see myself using this for food; I would also be interested to perhaps create one for archival issues. When I'm searching for help on a general topic, I have various websites and forums I search which I could roll into one engine.

Note: searching for "Archives" in Google is not recommended as almost every site has what it calls an Archive. Archivists will argue that this is a misuse of the word, but I'm afraid it's a losing battle in the world of semantics.

Note #2: It appears that Poblanos are the most commonly-stuffed pepper in Mexico and California, while in New Mexico, you'll most likely get the Hatch. So there you go.