Thing 3: Blog Search Tools

After reading Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, my eyes hurt. Not sure I needed all those statistics about blogging. Statistics can be used to prove anything so I guess the conclusion the world is blogging but what percentage of the world? Seems to me that those that blog are do a lot of it which skews the statistics of how many people actually blog.

And blog--what a word! who thought that would be appealing?

I tried searching on all four blog search engines. I now know there's a person with my name that invented the Dump-A-Matic, a device that turns any pick-up truck into a dump truck in a matter of minutes. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that information but he's very popular on the blog scene.
Google gave me the most hits (of course), Technorati's list seems more relevant; BlogPulse gave a scarce half dozen and nothing about Mr. Dump-a-Matic; and Bloglines had 4 results. In looking at them all: Google--there's nothing to look at; Technorati--obviously wants to be the leader in everything about blogs; BlogPulse has some cool tools and is coming from a business analysis perspective; and Bloglines is pushing its blog aggregator (I'm going to return to that feature later and use it).

Thing 1.5

I've enhanced my blog today and yes indeedy I am learning things. I delved into adding more gadgets. Gadgets, widgets--real time wasters but very fun.
1. I added my picture--I know it kind of blows the whole anonymous thing--but I'm not concerned. It's always good to practice cropping, resizing (wish it would resize me), etc. I find adding pictures whether using flickr, camera software, downloading from the web, etc to be one thing I have confidence in doing.
2. I added a blog list--decided to make it halfandhalf, personal interest and librarianship. Obviously my personal interests include politics so I won't make that list right now.
3. Added a text widget to explain my blog title
The functionality of the blogger gadgets makes enhancing a blog a simple process. I have noticed that gadgets that aren't "Blogger" gadgets can be troublesome.

Thing 1 is a snap

The hardest thing about Thing 1 is deciding what name to call the blog. Blogger is indeed a simple process. I have just used Blogger for another blog we started at the library so it wasn't my first time. But I found it intuitive then and so similar to Microsoft Office functions that it's instantly friendly. It will be interesting to add cool things to this one and then use that knowledge on the library blog.