Week 3 in Learn 2.0

I really like the Bloglines software. One of my favorite webcomics, Achewood, has separate blogs for just about every character. I love to read about the daily lives of the characters from their own points of view, as well as that of the artist. Now, I subscribe to all of their blogs via RSS, as well as some feeds that Bloglines picked based on my preferences, like New York Times book reviews. I even added some Epicurious daily recipe feeds linked from the Department Of Fun "Chocolate Chips" link on the course page, as well as the "Technology at OCLS" feed from the library.

As for Grokker, I can easily see how it will become a very useful website. Unfortunately, whether it's because of site issues or just simply still being a beta version, it was too interminably slow for me. The mapping of different categories was useful and easy to understand, just too slow and reliant on longer-loading images to be much use right now. I'm sure as it gets cleaned up, it will run much faster and more reliably, increasing the number of people who prefer its intuitive grouping of results.

The Adventure activity wasn't as hard as I had thought it would be. The tutorial has screenshots and accompanying description, so it was easy to follow. Admittedly, I didn't try to reinvent the wheel with my pipe (just had it aggregate the first 3 Achewood character blogs together in ascending date of publication), but just being able to look at top pipes that other people had created was instructional enough to explore the range of what can be done. I especially like the pipe that takes music from your last.fm account and finds videos for them on YouTube. Similarly, there was one that took the top 10 downloaded songs from ITunes and found videos on YouTube for them. Imagine being able to read Le Monde in English, as one pipe lets you, via a translator. The possibilities are endless and awesome.