Sunday, May 20, 2007
Stumbleupon & Writing
Do you ever get bored with the internet? I do. It's all stuff all the time. Overwhelming really. So overwhelming, in fact, that I tend to get into ruts and look at the same sorts of things all the time. When the itch of boredom gets to me, I start flailing around looking for new blogs or aggregation sites to read. While checking out Pi's blog, I stumbled upon Stumbleupon and did a wee bit of a search. When I don't know what topic to search, I default to Dave Matthews Band, just to see who else has this interest. If this doesn't net me anything interesting, and it often doesn't, I look for writing sites. Stumbleupon had a nice selection of those, which I present to you here:
There's an essay by Kurt Vonnegut on How to Write with Style . . .
Paul Brians' Common Errors in English, which links to a page of errors for reference (lay & lie are always tripping me up) . . .
One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence (you can submit your own) . . .
and One Word, which is a site that gives you a word and you have 60 seconds to write about it. Good for shutting off the critic and getting down to the business of writing.
There's an essay by Kurt Vonnegut on How to Write with Style . . .
Paul Brians' Common Errors in English, which links to a page of errors for reference (lay & lie are always tripping me up) . . .
One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence (you can submit your own) . . .
and One Word, which is a site that gives you a word and you have 60 seconds to write about it. Good for shutting off the critic and getting down to the business of writing.
Labels: dave matthews band, english, internet, kurt vonnegut, paul brians, pi, stumbleupon, writing
Friday, April 13, 2007
Tag - You're It!
After Pi left a comment on my blog, I cruised on over to his blog to check it out. Interesting commentary there. I found a post on tagging, which got me to thinking about my philosophy of tagging. When I tag my blog posts, I do it first for myself. Tagging the most obvious subject of a post is easy. It's the secondary and successively smaller topics that I mention that I'm never quite sure of. Working in a museum doesn't make this any easier. In fact, it makes it harder because when you look at an artifact or document, you automatically start cross-referencing it with the other subjects people might be looking for. An example: You have a photo of a train next to a depot. Do you file it under train, or depot? What about all those people in the picture? How about that water tower or bridge in the background? See? It gets complicated. Filing copies of the same photo under all of those topics gets to be excessive. We only have so much space. We really can't be taking it all up with 50 copies of the same photo. Same as with tagging. Once I tag the obvious topic, I tag the other sorts of things that I'm interested in following - husband, children, writing, creativity, blah, blah, blah. The one thing I won't do is tag for a topic that is not included in the post. Believe it or not, some bloggers do this in order to get attention for their sites.
As an aside: Did you know that tagging developed from metatags? (I think I learned this on Pi's website.) Metatags are built into the hidden part of website code and they allow search engines to find your website by topic. Good metatags are critical for raising your ranking on search engines, which is why there are people and companies that'll play fast and loose with both metatags and tags.
Another aside: Neil Gaiman is known for his unusual tags. Check out his tag cloud. (Tag clouds are just the coolest thing ever!)
As an aside: Did you know that tagging developed from metatags? (I think I learned this on Pi's website.) Metatags are built into the hidden part of website code and they allow search engines to find your website by topic. Good metatags are critical for raising your ranking on search engines, which is why there are people and companies that'll play fast and loose with both metatags and tags.
Another aside: Neil Gaiman is known for his unusual tags. Check out his tag cloud. (Tag clouds are just the coolest thing ever!)
Labels: blog, children, creativity, husband, metatags, museum, neil gaiman, photos, pi, tag clouds, tagging, train, website, writing
