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Category: Tools and Technology

Categories? Tag Clouds? So Many Decisions. (Plus an unrelated note)

I’d just reconciled myself to the idea of not having categories in my blog (because I use Blogger). I’d told myself, “It’s ok. Actually, the tag cloud is better. It’s cooler, more spontaneous, cooler, oh yeah, and cooler. Categories are for old folks.” (I’m very good at rationalizations.) Well, now I find out (via this amazing blog I just found) that there’s a hack that could let me have categories to my heart’s content (you can find it here).

But here’s the thing… My sidebar is pretty full. I keep tweaking it, and moving more of my blogroll to the folders in my bloglines account that don’t get displayed on my sidebar, etc., but I can’t think of a good way to make more space. So now I’m wondering, to category or not to category…that is the question. Would this be more useful than my tag cloud? Does any one have a preference? Do I do both? Oh, the decisions!

On a completely unrelated note, I think Stephen did end up “scratching some assumptions” on Monday, and the future is showing through (see his response to my post). Thanks Stephen! And, as I said in the comments there, I didn’t mind a bit that the talk went long. Great talk.

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Do you WeSearch?

For a rich source of research help for data and other sources in the social sciences (economics, political science, education, sociology, anthropology, and more), check out the weserachQuestions blog. And remember, it’s SEARCHABLE.

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Here’s an Idea: Database Help at the Point of Need

Another cool idea that came out of the Reference Symposium was generated at the session on Learner-Centered Instruction run by Aimee Whiteside and Barb Horvath. We were all working in small groups to plan our response to a given scenario: students didn’t know the differences between scholarly and popular journals, and we were to design a tutorial to help them navigate between the two kinds of publications. Can it possibly be coincidence that two groups independently came up with the same strategy? We were separated by an entire room and about 100 people, but we both decided that bits and pieces of the tutorial should be embedded in the databases themselves so that when a student wonders whether a citation is a scholarly source or not, he or she could just click on the help button and get walked through the decision from right within the database. Why isn’t this possible? Is it possible?

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Google Notebook

A co-worker just alerted me to Google Notebook. It’s kind of like a web version of EverNote. I’m still playing around with it, but if you have it’s associated Firefox extension plugged in you can get little icons next to search results which will shoot the result page into your notebook. You can open your notebook by clicking the icon that gets embedded into the bottom bar of your browser, and you can edit you notes. You can also have several notebooks and choose which you want to be public and which you want to be private.

Google’s taking over the world!

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