gathering moss

Rollyo is now unblocked, but I haven't really found anything particularly useful to do with it. I tried making a search box to search online images from a handful of online art galleries and art print sites, but a search on the roll turned up lots of rubbish as well as the kind of thing I was looking for. Also, because there seemed to be no way to actually return thumbnail images, it wasn't the world's most useful image search.
One of the existing searchrolls, for food and recipes, was quite nice. Looks like a text search works better than an image search. What might work a bit better is taking an existing searchroll and modifying it with additional sites as required. It really does look like there are a lot of rolls already included with some of the core sites I might have picked anyway - just did a test search for 'anime', for example. It's easy enough to see how it works, but I'm not 100% enjoying the search results page; for whatever reason, there is often a lot of repetition in results from the same site, there are irrelevant sponsored links from advertisers, and Rollyo adds in a search of the entire web to each searchroll (if you can delete this, I haven't found out how).

Kelly recommends a possible alternative called 'Ning' which I'll check out sometime.

Just thought that another way to use Rollyo might be to look up a subject of interest, and see what other folks consider the definitive sites - probably quite a good discovery tool.

librarythings and failing to roll

I joined LibraryThing a while back, while I was on maternity leave and for some reason sizzling with energy for Doing Stuff (painting, cooking, craft... cataloguing?!), so I've already got a lot of stuff in my library there. Makes it handy for browsing in 2nd-hand bookshops, if you can check whether or not you already have a title - at least, that would be the theory if I ever kept my cellphone charged for making with the checking.
Just added the 'widgets' to my sidebar; a random selection of 10 from my 'library', and a search box. I like seeing the 10 random titles pop up - it's like a drive-by friendly wave from a mixed bunch of folk (some you really like, some you barely remember).

The LibraryThing pic below is a link to my catalogue. Looks like all of this stuff seems to work okay on the Learn.net.



Rollyo is blocked on the Learn.net, though, so it's off to Michael. Re Rollyo, I can't immediately think of anything in particular I'd use it for, but it possibly has some good uses for the website. We could again apply that librarianly talent for selection of trusted resources, and create 'mini-web' search engines for our public. For example, maybe we gather a handful of sites where teen books are reviewed, and make a search box for the Teen pages on our site. I guess in terms of functionality it might work a bit like the way on the Internet Movie Database you end up with a page full of movie trailers from different sites? Have to see how it works when it gets let past the WebMarshal sentinel.