Zoho writer

The last time I used Zoho writer was when I added information on the newspaper collection to the trial slv wiki. That was some weeks back but I'm back investigating this application under Week 7 of the Learning 2.0 programme.

In the meantime the SLV desk diary has been launched and trialled for about 3 weeks or so and it's a good resource. I found out that if someone's asking about Christmas opening hours we need to publish the notice for each day between 25 and 31 December or you won't get a complete picture.

Text generator

This is exciting! The text collage generator came up with this cool graphic. Being of unartistic bent I wouldn't have been able to come up with anything like this on my own so I'm really impressed. There is a rider that the image "may be subject to copyright" so I'm owning up to "borrowing" it for research purposes. Makes me wonder about artistic compositions generally and how easy it is to use the hard work of others.
The URL is http://www.languageisavirus.com/textcollage.html

Not exactly the rooftop of the world but the view from my office.

Flickr-ing

It was interesting to compare the downloading of a photo from flickr and another taken with my mobile phone. Both are quite simple processes but on the photography side of things one can see that photos taken by a mobile phone's just not as good.
Flick-r is huge and one can waste a lot of time (as I did!) comparing different views of places that I'd seen in Europe. I had previously uploaded a selection of my Europe photos to flick-r but the limit of 200 is a little on the small side.

Grand Place, Belgium

I was amazed by the architecture in this square in Belgium and this is a photo by Paul Smits that I found on flickr. A great fish eye view of Grand Place.

More about Technorati

Searching for "Learning 2.0" in blog posts, tags and the blog directory brought up similar results (I did this in the advanced search option at the top of the Technorati website). I find it interesting that not many people in the online social networking community link up to learning 2.0 sites. Check out the blog directory and see how many "fans" our community has. Guess we're not the movers and shakers we'd like to be.

Looking at the popular category I noticed a lot of .com sites represented. There are very few .net or .org sites. For all of that it's interesting to note that the most popular blog is Boing Boing (good name, gives the impression of something bouncing back and forth amongst that community of readers). It's described as a "weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies". Great if you have the time and inclination but I prefer something a little more targetted to my own interests.

Technorati

I resume this learning discovery after a hiatus of several weeks of leave, project work etc. Fearing that I'd lost the momentum and the thread of continuity I'm pleasantly surprised that one's able to drop and pick up this programme of learning anytime. This flexibility is an important aspect for many of us who balance a whole lot of tasks at work while trying to fit in important stuff like Learning 2.0.

Technorati works like a search engine for blogs, all types of postings and tags assigned by users to find blog posts, photos, videos, audio. There are other websites that do this function such as Feedster and Bloglines. Even some traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo do the same thing to some extent. Google has searchable categories such as news and groups while Yahoo has entertainment, sports and video.

Technorati certainly gives you a feel of how over-populated online opinion is and opens up opportunities to link up to like-minded communities.