Evaluating websites

Book Clique Cafe has a 'contact us' web address. There is a copyright declaration with date, also the date each page was revised. Linked with Amazon. Aimed at online reading groups who create book discussions on the web. No junky advertising.
Book seer is a very basic site of just two pages - a bit of a gimmick. Several titles I entered generated no recommendations, so somewhat limited. Have to delve further than first page to find information about the site. A literary web project by Apt.Labs, which has contact details of the authors. List of clients are all reputable publishers.
Librarything is a very good site, aimed at booklovers of all persuasions. You sign in and become a member.When you create a list of the books you've read, other members recommend similar titles you might like. Every book listed has reviews written by Librarything members. Also talk forums, blogs, local events and featured authors. There is a copyright declaration and no advertising. 'See what bloggers and the media say about Librarything' is very positive and encouraging. Librarything is available in many languages.
Personally, when helping patrons, I have used Fantastic Fiction, Literature Map, and Librarything, which is especially useful for its reviews.

An author's perspective

Authors on tour live has an archive of previous podcasts listed alphabetically by author. Searching the list I came across Lynne Truss, who wrote the very popular 'Eats, shoots and leaves' about punctuation. In this podcast she talks about her new book, 'Talk to the hand', which I have read. It's great to hear the voice that goes with the name and face. It gives a fuller understanding of the book and empathy with the author. However, she sounded slightly nervous and a bit forced. It must be hard for authors who are quite comfortable writing unseen but not so at ease in front of a live audience, but to increase sales they have to be visible.
I think this would be a useful tool to recommend to patrons who want to know about their favourite authors.

Readers and booklovers

Book groups don't appeal to me but after looking at some of the online book groups, I rather liked the Book Clique Cafe, which is a collection of online reading groups, based on genre, e.g. Roman history group, Mystery addicts, Diaries and journals.
There are so many groups and sites for booklovers, I could never have the time to keep up with them all.
I have liked Librarything ever since we did 23 things last year.The suggestions for further reading based on titles I've already read have been great.
Cleopatra's daughter by Michelle Moran was my latest enjoyable read. The orphaned children of Queen Cleopatra and Marc Anthony are taken to Rome to be brought up by their father's rival, Octavian and his sister, Octavia. Moran tells their story, through the eyes of Princess Selene, with all the politics and splendour of Ancient Rome.
From ten suggestions on Librarything for similar books I've already read only one, so plenty to be going on with there.
Bookseer provided a similar list with some titles from Librarything and a few different ones from Amazon, so even more to be going on with.
I liked the footnote, 'Of course, you could go ask your local bookshop or your local library'.

RSS revisited

At last I can do it! A very kind work colleague showed me how to edit the URL of the feed to subscribe to Bloglines and it worked. Now I should be able to help other people who are having trouble. I learned a valuable lesson with this - always read the instructions carefully, right to the end.

File converters

This was very easy to do! Google docs has a narrower page setup so the text was three lines instead of two. Was the font slightly smaller? Bold and italics the same. The table lines were lighter. The bullets changed from fancy to plain points.
Also uploaded the document from Google docs to Zoho docs. This time the page setup was the same, the bullets were plain and the lines of the table had disappeared.
So a few minor format changes when converting a file.
This will be very useful for helping our patrons.

Google specialist search engines

1.I searched Blinx and Youtube for 'Only fools and horses'. Youtube had 1,790 results including multiple entries of the same videos; random layout of entries was rather confusing. Blinx, however, had a very clear page showing a list of all the episodes within each series, more like an organised catalogue, which I found easier to use.

2.Under magazines in Google book search, I chose 'Organic gardening' and entered 'zucchini' ( no entries under courgettes ). The result was page after page of the magazine with the word 'zucchini' highlighted where it appeared. This was very clunky having to scroll down looking for a word, instead of being led straight to relevant articles.
I then chose 'Yoga journal' and searched for 'sun salutation'. Initial results were more appealing - a large thumbnail of the page with the search term highlighted and the page number to click on taking you straight to the article.

The magazine searh could be useful for patrons wanting to recall a certain article from a magazine, so long as it was one of the titles listed and there aren't very many at this stage.

I've had a look at Google, Yahoo, Bing and Exalead, also Dogpile and Metasearch - information overload! I didn't realise how huge and extensive Google is with so many options for extending a search. Wonder wheel is great, offering related ideas and topics for information.
I searched all the search engines for the meaning of the phrase 'Gone for a Burton'. They all came up with plenty of hits, also unrelated stuff including someone's blog with that title. Google had a satisfying explanation from Wikianswers, which said -
Gone for a Burton comes from "Going for a Beer". During the Second World War it was used in black humour when someone died in battle. Usually the RAF.
They had not died or had gone missing, they had only slipped out for a Beer. Burton's being one of the biggest Breweries and Brands of Beer at that time.
My next search was 'Growing courgettes in NZ'- a vast difference between the search engines in the number of results: Exalead 197, Bing 545, Yahoo 5020 and Google a whopping 32,400!
At present Google would have to be my first port of call for information because of familiarity and the wealth of information. It was interesting to try out the others though and to know there are other options available.
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