#12 Roll your own search engine

It’s funny that using Rollyo to search several sites at once is actually easier that going any individual site and searching it.  I suppose you could probably get better quality results if you go to the individual sites, though, depending on what you’re looking for.  For me, and with this topic, the advantage would be primarily the convenience of one-stop searching, along with eliminating all the usual garbage you would get with a normal web search. 

Here is my search engine on ballroom dancing:

http://rollyo.com/leafygreen14/ballroom_dancing/

#11 A thing about LibraryThing

I entered six of my favorite books into my catalog.  It would have been five, but I thought I’d better add another one to show that I’m a grownup.  (Did it work?)  I can see using the social information as a fun way to decide what to read next.  

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/leafygreen14

#10 Play around with Image Generators

I’m not much of a photographer, so I don’t have a lot of images laying around to work with. But I thought that this image and this image generator from Lunapic worked well together.

http://www79.lunapic.com/editor/?action=photo-spread

#9 Finding Feeds

I used the same search terms for all the search tools listed.  Topix felt more like a regular web search.  I found news stories and webpages but could not find the feed symbols.   Syndic8 only came up with two results.  Technorati gave me blogs with only occasional on-topic posts.  The only one of the search tools I found useful was Bloglines.  The results all had feeds that I could find and use, and they were generally fully on topic.  Bloglines wins!

#8 Make life “really simple” with RSS & a newsreader

After going through the process of deciding which of my co-worker’s feeds to subscribe to, the value of newsfeeds became quite obvious.  I went through the entire list, which took quite some time.  I used to do this regularly at the beginning of this project  Then, when the list got too long, I would only look at a few, but I always wondered what I was missing.  Now that I have added most of the blogs to my Bloglines account, I can go there first and immediately see who has posted.  Everything is right on one page and right at my fingertips.  Cool. 

Here is my public Bloglines account:  http://www.bloglines.com/public/leafygreen

#7 Blog about Technology

Speaking of Babel Fish…

I use the Babel Fish website occasionally when I want to translate something from a foreign language or when I want to write something in Spanish.  It can be very helpful, but you gotta watch out, as the example below with the dancing doggies demonstrates. 

Here is a special discovery exercise for you that you may have heard about.  Use Babel Fish to translate a sentence into another language, and then use it to translate it back into the original language.  Hilarity usually ensues.  Let’s try “Cook the brown eggs.”  The Korean translation of this actually translates back correctly back into English.  Now let’s try Russian.  This yields “You will weld the brown of egg.”  So Babel Fish has not quite reached the Star Trek universal translator standard just yet.