Rollyo

Earlier, when we were asked to blog about technology, I wrote that I was frustrated by the limitations of Google's Video Search. I wanted it to search more sources than just Google Videos and You Tube.

Rollyo actually enables me to create a search to search all of the different video sources that I wanted. I love it when I get my own questions answered!

I decided to create a roll for Asian drama videos, since watching these is a hobby of mine in my free time.

Interestingly, as I was creating my roll, I realized that more is not better. I originally had it searching along with the other sites, but I found that veoh returned so many results in itself that I couldn't really see any of the results for the other sites. So, I included just a few less well known sites in my roll that I search often. If I want to search veoh, I can can just go to veoh to search.

Here's a link to my search roll.

Select Search Engine...Asian Drama VideosSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

LibraryThing

I liked LibraryThing, and I think I might actually use the suggestions feature in reader's advisory when What Do I Read Next? fails to offer any good suggestions (which is a lot of the time).

Here's my attempt to link to my catalog:

Playing with image generators

I enjoyed myself immensely playing around with some of the image generator sites, especially Flickr Toys. I chose to share the one from this web site,

http://www.glassgiant.com/chocolate_bar/

I guess because I was hungry or wanted chocolate? Which is probably always when it comes to chocolate...

I added the Generator Blog (http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/) to my Bloglines account just for fun.

Library 2.0

I agree with Dr. Wendy Schultz that "Library 2.0" is actually a temporary time and place. I will go further to add that the whole idea of library 2.0 seems somewhat artificial to me. In my opinion, libraries have been and are changing on a nearly continual basis (with some stops and starts and sudden accelerations). To me, Library 2.0 is little more than a label that some are applying to a particular place and time.

I think in the library field there are a lot of people panicking that library's are not "keeping up with the times." I believe that what we are really seeing is a tendency towards discretion. Libraries have traditionally waited to see what was going to take before adopting new policies and technologies. Undoubtedly, though this is before my time, there was a huge debate about whether or not computers should be included in libraries. Eventually, when it became clear that computers were going to become a huge part of people's lives as well as an invaluable resource for knowledge, computers were included. Today, we are having the same sort of debates...should libraries create blogs, and interactive features on their web sites such as customer reviews as John J. Riemer suggests in his article? I think the answer is yes, we will, and in some cases, already are.

I think libraries will continue to adopt technologies that have been proven effective.

Adult Education Classes

In the last few months, I've taken a couple of adult education classes at local schools. I'm trying to learn spanish and to excercise more, so I'm now on my second Spanish class and I'm taking pilates and yoga. The pilates and yoga class are a lot of fun and the pilates class in particular is good exercise.

My feelings are more mixed about the Spanish classes. It's good that the Spanish classes take into account that the people who are coming are working full time and have busy lives, but I'm not sure that I'm learning as much as I would in a more conventional class. Still, I'm enjoying this class far more than I can remember enjoying classes in college since I don't have the pressure of worrying about being tested or homework.

One of the things that I enjoy about living in Broward County is that it has better opportunities for inexpensive adult education than any other place that I have lived.

Del.icio.us

After exploring Del.icio.us, I think that I'll definitely use it to help me find sites. For example, I might use it to see if I could find useful information to help me with programming. I tried a search for library anime club (and variations of those words) and pulled up for interesting sites on anime and libraries.

I'm not sure yet whether creating an account and bookmarking sites through it is much more useful than using the bookmarking feature in my browser. I think I'll explore Del.icio.us some more when I have more time.

The Scope of Google Video

When I go to the Google Video support page ( http://video.google.com/support/ ), it gives the following scope for the service:

"The Video index is comprised of videos that people have added using Google’s services (You Tube, Google Video) as well as videos from other third-party sites."

Where are the videos from the third-party sites? I personally have never seen videos from any site except You Tube and Google video (though I have been using it since the feature was introduced), even when I know that these other sites exist and offer a particular video. Popular video sites such as www.crunchyroll.com and www.veoh.com don't seem to be indexed at all in Google Video.

Google Image search trolls the web for images embedded on an seemingly impossibly wide variety of web sites. Why is the scope of Google Video so comparatively limited? Google Video would be a better search engine if it could actually be used to search for videos on all of the web. As it is now, to look for a particular video, I have to go to each of the video sites and search.

If they are concerned with copyrighting, why are they not concerned with copyrighted images?

Despite it's limitations, I prefer watching videos on Google Video when they are available because those videos that are actually Google videos (and not you tube videos indexed on Google Video) are higher quality and are not generally separated into many parts the way that videos on you tube or crunchy roll tend to be.

Does anyone know of a site that searches for videos the way Google searches the web?