flickr and books and tags, oh my!

So you may have noticed that I've added some new "thingies" to the right of the blog. I've been playing around with widgets (as they're called) to see if I could pimp my blog. It's all in the spirit of trying to make this blog feel more like it's mine--that and I see other people doing really cool things with their blogs, so I wanted to do it with mine. In the future I'm going to try and fix the page's code so it opens up the space a little more--you may notice that there's a lot of wasted space on the blog, with such wide margins. It's not my fault, it's the template that blogger provides. That'll all change, hopefully after the semester ends.

I wanted to just briefly mention what those widgets on the right are. I've already talked about the flickr tag--which is really awesome--but the three books listed from my library are just as cool. These are books that I've cataloged at LibraryThing--books that I own--and this widget is giving three random books from that catalog. There's a lot of cool ways that LibraryThing has been used. I'll save that for an upcoming post (let's hope!), mainly because I've realized I haven't been blogging about my profession at all. Shameful.

The other widget is what's referred to as a "tag cloud." It's a list of tags that I've applied to websites I've tagged on delicious. This widget takes those tags and aggregates them in a visual manner so that you can tell which tags are more often applied, judging from the size and shade of color of the tag. So, you notice the tag "folksonomy" is really big and dark. That's because I've applied the tag of "folksonomy" more often than other tags, such as "destination," which is tiny and lightly-shaded. Pretty cool, huh? If you're interested in learning more about these new Internet applications, I'd suggest going to the websites themselves. Links are provided on the widget itself--just look for the little blurb.