Googling here and there!

Hello all,

I want to add something to my previous post about sources.
Sources are all about using the proper searching tools and evaluating. So, what about something that help you to join the two aspects?
I'm talking about fantastic tools that enable you to both search and evaluate at the same time. These tools help you to limit your search among data and information that have been already published; therefore, you can trust more on what you're reading...and half of the job is done!

These tools are:

- Google Books, a search engine that provides pieces of books from libraries and publishers worldwide; it works with tags;

- Google Scholar, a search engine that provides sholarly writings, such as theses and academic articles; it works with tags.

Another interesting tool from Google is Google Blogs. It works with tags and it searches for blogs on the World Wide Web. Google Blogs is similat to Technorati, except for the fact that the latter not only works as a search engine for blogs, but also provides info, stats and researches on the blogosphere as a whole.

So, let's surf guys!

Bye

Giorgia

(photo source)

...some Del.icio.us links...

While I was surfing on the big waves of the net through both Technorati and Del.icio.us, I found some interesting websites and blogs that I'd like to tell you about. I decided to store them as bookmarks in my social bookmarking account.

I've pasted there the links and I've given a short description of them. Anyway, if anyone interested has an account on Del.icio.us can find my bookmarks using the search toolbar...just searching for the tag 'bloggingenglish_09'.

My bookmarks:

• Omniglot is a blog concerning a plenty of linguistic issues, such as translation, ESL, education and foreign languages learning. It is very interesting, its style is formal when talking about language games and fun stuff, and it becomes formal - but not too technical - when exposing specialized issues;
• Livemocha is an online international community, where people from all around the world sign in to take online language lessons and give feedback to the others. Anyone interested can choose among 20 different languages and take lessons at 4 different levels;
• BBC English page is a webpage inside the BBC website. This page is full of tips, links, games, crosswords, audio files and fun stuff for learning English while enjoying;
• GrammarGirl is a blog full of 'quick & dirty' tips and suggestions for better writing in English. It gives a lot of lessons through both written texts and podcasts. These lessons particularly focus on word choice, grammar and punctuation;
• Two Expats is a blog run by two young Italian guys living in London. Gioia and Matteo (their names) write about food, life style, music, friends and everything else about their lives in London. The blog has a catchy and funny style, it is obviously written in English with some Italian words here and there.

Hope you like them as I do!

Bye
Giorgia

Me & Blogging

I never had a blog ‘till now, ‘cos I was always concerned about being boring as well as exposing myself too much. However, as I read on the net while doing a paper on the blogging phenomenon, almost EVERYBODY has either a blog or a page into a social network...so it’s high time for us to become active cybernauts :)
As I’ve just written, I found a lot of interesting info on ‘blogging’ during the wiki project on the 1st semester: blogosphere is HUGE and there are plenty of blogs, the ‘cyber-world’ is so big that have been invented websites working as search engines for searching blogs (e.g. Technorati or Icerocket).
Neverthless I’m sure that blogging and analysing others’ blogging – using the proper tools – will become more and more interesting, useful and easy as we go on.
Try to go in Google or Technorati and key in “how to blog...”, you’ll find a lot of tips and walkthroughs for managing properly a blog and its tools.
Beyond all these technical notions, I think (and I hope) that this new adventure will help me to improve my writing skills in English as well as my vocabulary both informal and formal. I think that this can be an effective experience through which achieve some of the above mentioned language goals I set at the beginning of this semester!

Read, write, observe, analyse, learn...It's up to me now!

Bye
Giorgia