11/25 – Technorati and Google Blog Search

Already Jan 2009, whops I’m a bit behind already! better make some time to catch up …so here goes item 11 of 15 Things –

Technorati and Google Blog Search

So the 1st thing I did was to save both of these as delicious book marks http://delicious.com/trendhub

and then…searched for “Morris Dancing” something I did for a number of years, but no more….it is a tradition struggling to survive, as reported by the BBC and others a few nights ago

Technorati – Search / 490 results for morris dancing

Google Blog Search – about 138,380 for morris dancing. (0.44 seconds)

looking through some of the results the ones on Google Blog Search seem far more relevant, and many more results the Technorati search brought up some very odd links, many of them in at the top of the list not at all relevant….But this led me off down all sorts of twisted paths, linking in more searches,back to Flickr and Flickriver Badges,

Terry Pratchett turned up in there somewhere, somehow http://www.lancre-morris-men.co.uk “The Lancre Morris Men originally came about from the imagination of Terry Pratchett OBE. Their physical maifestation came about around eight years ago through the formation of a north eastern side called Otterbourne. Being avid Pratchett fans and with the original members having names like Plumber (an electrician), Baker (an accountant) and Wheeler (a farmer), it wasn’t long before they were being referred to as the Lancre Morris Men*.”

so now possibly hours later it’s time to move on 😦 .. … … I haven’t time to read all these and get distracted by lots and lots of fab stuff, and go on more twisty,windy paths into other peoples pics, thoughts, ramblings, opinions, journeys and adventures ….. well not just now anyway, But I’ll be back…..

New Dashboard Design

WordPress New Dashboard Design I like it!

mostly…then again, maybe not!

whats happen to my font?!….

I want to be able to choose my font and size independently, not pre formatted headings paragraphs etc…yuk! yuk!

so I’ve played around with this some more and…

Ok I’m getting used to it, might be ok after all, just miss my extra choice of fonts, having a winge, don’t like change when its imposed on me…

10/25 Tagging

Del.icio.us – I love it!

http://delicious.com/tags/trendhub

I’ve had a link to my Del.icio.us tags on this blog from the beginning and use it/them regually with students, I like the ability to share and see what other people with similar interests have tagged, It’s a very useful tool for me, I find the fact that I can pickup my favorite sites on any computer anywhere, and maybe sometime soon I’ll set up a seperate personal account…. watch this space...

here’s just a couple – well 3 – of my tags –

Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

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Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. – here’s a link to one of my Wordle Tag Cloud Visuals Trendhub by Desimelion

 

Trend Hub Tag Cloud - visualisation using wordle

 

SDC ColourClick: Colour facts at your fingertips

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Colour facts and information at your fingertips: Society of Dyers and Colourists

Color Marketing Group

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Color Marketing Group is the premier international association for color design professionals. Our mission is to create color forecast information for professionals who design and market color.

8 & 9/25

so RSS feeds… I’ve had both a Bloglines and Google Reader account for some time but got a bit out of the habbit of using them, this task has been a good reminder of why I set them up in the first place…. save time -no really – honest – so that I could keep up with news and blogs without being completely/permantly fixed to my computer ….That Doesn’t Work….

I’m now spending more time than ever staring at the screen (no longer just using my computer for artwork, photos, etc., but reading all sorts of stuff as well )

I’ve now more than ever linked into my Google Reader, I’ve 4 tabs on my igoogle account each with even more RSS feeds, and somehow I’ve stummbled across FriendFeed (I need to look at this in more detail to get the hang of it and decide if its useful/interesting enough to keep) it is however all ready linked to my Facebook, Flickr and my igoogle account.

I’ve found I don’t like Bloglines much and rediscovered why I didn’t use it much…I just don’t like the interface much and find it clumsy. I really don’t like the look of syndic8.com so haven’t even bothered to explore this at all – I much prefer topix.net, I must have used it before , how else did it know to show me Keighley as local news??!!  mostly though i will continue to add feeds from sites that I already use or have found in other ways, I don’t need to look for more blogs etc to read that happens all to easily anyway as I use and brows the web each day.

7/25 and there’s more..

Well there would have been but…

I really liked flickrSlidr BUT after choosing a great selection of images and creating the slide show ….and trying every which way I could to upload to the blog, I then found it has
issues with wordpress, hayho, so no slide show here

flickrSLiDR allows you to easily embed the classic flickr slideshows on your website or blog. All you need to do is enter the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group you would like to embed along with some options. You’ll receive the HTML embed code in return.

7/25 more on mashups

Mashup – flickriver badges, this uses a flikr photostream and creates a radom selection of thumbnails that changes each time the page reloads. You can like to specific users /groups or sets of photos from that user, or images using the same “tag” or just random images
I like this “mashup” and will use it with students in the Trendhub and maybe on Blackboard

Flickriver badges can be found at http://www.flickriver.com/badge/create

The one below uses a selection from a gobal tag (Hats)
it looks at all images on Flickr tagged with the word Hats

This next selection takes the most recent uploads at random from the

Flickr group “colorfields”
“This group has a simple concept: take photos of a frame-filling field of A SINGLE COLOR and post that. It can be textured, have imperfections, etc…but the frame should be filled with one color. They should be abstract enough that the color is clearly the focus, and the most important thing in the photo.”

Use the Color Fields Color Finder to locate photos of a particular color.

I’ve used the colour finder above and the multicolor search lab with a couple of students last week when looking at trends and colour pallets

7/25

Ok the thing is…I’m spending far to much time and having far to much fun on “Thing” 7/25- Mashups…. to blog about it!

Eleanor Gwynne Miller (LOC)

Eleanor Gwynne Miller (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

Thing 5/6

Because I love a good hat, and the gloves arn’t bad either!
oh and my daughters called Eleanor though she’d hate the hat

Eleanor Gwynne Miller – 1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.

image found via The commons – http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Book drop

Thing 5 : here it is my first upload via Flickr’s blogging tool

Book drop, originally uploaded by Dave & Bry.

I just love this image – its jewel like, mosaic qualities –

The more you look the more you see

I want at least 1 print like it (using just Art and Design related books) in the Trend hub…printed really large so you get lots of diffrent bits comming into view the closer you get. Thanks Dave for introducing me to this – I will learn how to do it myself!

Week 2

it’s Wednesday already – a non working day for me…in theory…

anyway I’ve got as far as looking at this weeks tasks, but not much further, luckily I already use Flickr so thats a head start

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know about Flickr: The Commons so thanks for that one.

25 Things – Week 1 – Hello world!

Hello 25 thingers…

a bit of a late start…it is still week 1 of – “25 Things @ Huddersfield” – Just –

I spent most of last week either with a computer that refused to talk to the network or with bugs that made my ears feel like they were going to explode, and sometimes both…exploding the network might have been better, anyway at last I’m here at home on Sunday afternoon making a start.

So 1/25 – complete…interesting video.. I’ve bookmarked it for later use

2/25 – done

3/25 set up blog – here it is, I have set up a blog once before a few months ago but using blogger,that was to document my sons charity walk (during his school summer holiday) from John O groats back to Keighley, I’ve been meaning to give wordpress ago so this is a good nudge. We’ll see how it goes, I’m not a diary type person or a words person come to that so I’ll have to find ways of keeping this visual, that was a reason for excepting the 25 things challenge, to explore and exchange new ides.

4/25 – I already have both a yahoo account and gmail/google mail but i just might set up another google mail to keep “things” separate …so that’d be let me see….1/2/3 emails for work and 3 for home and now another 1 so 7 email addresses – do you think thats a bit excessive?!