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

To Bookmark or not to Bookmark…?

The more I go on learning new things about the web, the more I get scared :P
Well, we all know how huge is the net…scary!
We all know how huge is the blogosphere…twice as scary!
Now we can make them smaller…at our fingertips…SUPER-SCARY!

What about creating your own 'little' world wide web?

I’m talking about bookmarks, or better, Internet bookmarks.
They work just like real paper bookmarks we commonly use while reading books; therefore, we use them to find what we need easily.
When you frequently visit a website or blog you can save their URLs in order to be easily retrieved. You can do it on your pc or you can subscribe in a social bookmarking community, such as Del.icio.us and store your bookmarks in the personal page you’ve created. Being a social community you can share your bookmarks with the other people in the community. Also, you can create your network of users and see their bookmarks.
Social bookmarking communities are better than your pc, since you can visit your bookmarks from any computer, while if you save bookmarks only in your pc you can retrieve them just from it.
What's more, to make the search of bookmarks easier anyone usually put tags, that is to say, key words to label the URLs stored (i.e. if you type ‘language’ in the community toolbar, will appear all the shared bookmarks with the tag ‘language’).

I think it's a really good tool to keep track of our favourite websites, without searching for their URLs all the time, or without writing them down on a piece of paper that you may lose!

Well, I think it’s all…
Let's enjoy with this new tool!

Bye
Giorgia

(photo source)