Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts

Friday, August 29, 2008

Ebooks (aka the end is in sight...)


It is interesting to note that Project Gutenburg was one of the first producers of electronic books (ebooks), and can only offer text from books published before 1923, so you will definitely not have a problem finding classics written by authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to name a few. The only downfall with Project Gutenburg is that it cannot offer the lastest bestsellers or even up-to-date computer books, as these books are not in the public domain and are subject to copyright. I looked at my favourite classic author Jane Austen ( I must admit I got hooked onto Jane Austen because of the movie Pride and Prejudice) and was amazed at the different ways you can download the titles you want to read. You can download Pride and Prejudice using the formats Plucker, Plain Text, Adobe PDF and TeX. I also looked at Sense and Sensibility and the formats that were offered here were Plucker, HTML, Plain Text and Adobe PDF. I must admit this is a great way of reading classics because you can access the whole novel online and read it in your own time and it's free. I guess this is definitely a selling point for people who love reading classics but cannot afford to purchase the novels. Maybe Manukau Libraries could have a link on their website to Project Gutenburg, so library customers who love classics can have access to these books from the comfort of their home or in the library.

Finally a word about Kindle, this is a wireless electronic book reader. The great thing about the Kindle is that it can store up to 200 books, and these can include best sellers, and it takes less than a minute to download a book. However the downside is that you are charged for any content that you download, so downloading a bestseller could cost you $9.99, which I guess is cheaper than buying the bestseller. I however still prefer to hold a book in my hand to read, there's just something about curling up in bed with a great book. You can also download blogs or newspapers to the Kindle, however this will cost you e.g. subscribing to the New York Times could cost you $13.99 per month whereas you could read this newspaper online for free.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

Took a good look around Technorati and did a keyword search for "Learning 2.0" in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. There were differences in the results. From the Technorati Search Page I found putting a capital "L" and a lowercase"l" for the word "learning" and having a gap between the word "learning" and "2.0" and having no gap between the word "learning" and "2.0" gave you different results. I found these results:

Learning2.0 - 251 posts
Learning 2.0 - 684 posts
learning2.0 - 254 posts
learning 2.0 - 684 posts

So as you can see there is a big difference in how you do tag your blog posts.

Using Technorati's Advanced Search I did a Tag Search and found again that there were differences in the results and here they are:

learning 2.0 - 686 posts tagged
learning2.0 - 266 posts tagged
Learning 2.0 - 684 posts tagged
Learning2.0 - 263 posts tagged

I then looked at the Blog Directory and the directory is only used to find blogs about subjects you are interested in or to find blogs by their blog title, it doesn't give you the number of blog posts which have the same tags - so no results here.

Exploring popular blog, searches and tags I found the most popular blog was Boing Boing with 3,820 fans and the Top 100 blogs by authority was Breaking News and Opinion on the Huffington Post, which had 26,454 blog reactions (comments). Under Top Searches I looked at the topic Olympics and came across this blog post Beijing 2008: Sky Team's Microblog [IMG] - in the blog it mentioned that 22 Sky News people will be covering the Olympics by contributing to a Microblog using mobile phones, this is very ingenious for getting news out of China and bypassing China's censorship rules don't you think.