LibraryThing & Rollyo

I first heard about LibraryThing from some students in my grad school classes. A few of them are kind of addicted to it and asked me to sign up to check it out. So I did. And I added two books. And I never logged back in....until this class, when I finally had time (and reason) to explore it. Actually, it does seem like a pretty neat thing. Tagging books seems like a nice idea too, though time consuming, so I haven't done any of that yet. The friend who originally got me to sign up is a tagging hound, but she enjoys it and it probably helps her find more books that suit her interests. I like that you can add other people as friends and view each other's bookshelves -- it might also help you find books that you might like to read if you see that someone else has already read them. I'd really like to start using LibraryThing on a regular basis to keep track of the books I own or have read, so I'm glad that it was included in this course.

When I did the Rollyo exercise, it seemed like a cool concept, but I'm not sure how often I would actually use it. Since I'm taking a trip to San Diego this July, I added links to a bunch of information on the city, some attractions, visitors guides, the page for the hotel I'm staying at, etc. Rollyo could be pretty neat, since it allows you to search just the sites you want for information you need, but I almost think I would rather just save the sites to a favorites menu and go through them one-by-one than search them all together. Rollyo can be useful if you're looking for a particular item or specific information but you're not sure which site it might belong to -- if you've included it in the Rollyo search engine you've built, it would be easy to search for it and find it. But, a downfall of this would be if you have too many sites saved to the Rollyo search engine, you might have to still sort through pages of search results to find the exact information you're looking for. It was fun to try out the program, but I think I'll stick with my favorites menu for now.