23 things +5

Today I polished off the plus 5 tasks for 23 things.
I joined Linked-in, made a search for colleages and added an invitation.

I experimented with the National Library of Australia version of VuFind.
NLAs VuFind is rather dull looking, I think it needs to have images added to liven it up. I like the way having the See references and Subject headings in the Narrow Search area gives them more prominence. I discovered that you can narrow your search by format but I'd also like format to be one of the drop down sort options.

In Kartoo I made a search for softies. The initial results were way off track, but once I narrowed things down by clicking on plush, the second screen of results was more promising. I found that compared to a similar search in google, there were lots of commercial retail sites rather than blogs or crafting community webpages. Does Kartoo give preference to "sponsored sites"?

I wasn't impressed with Voyager for managing RSS feeds. The blurry grey on grey colour scheme of Voyager would be no good for sight impared users. It would be helpful to be able to search RSS feeds by keyword like you can in Digg.
I had to search in Digg to find the address of an RSS feed I liked before I could paste the address into Voyager. I added /Film http://feeds2.feedburner.com/slashfilm
I successfully deleted most of the US-centric news feeds and added my own but somehow kept getting results from Newsvine which I couldn’t delete.

I read up on the idea of the Semantic web. I've been using AskJeeves for years through its various incarnations and name changes. I'd always found it especially useful to show to international students who tended to type their whole essay topic into google and then get no results. Though I think it helped them to understand it when I called it "natural language search".