LibraryThing -- Yay! Rollyo -- not so much

I love LibraryThing. It's attractive, easy-to-use, interactive and is a tool that I know will grow with me as I discover more and more uses for it. I love how easy it is to add books. You see the covers and know instantly, that's my book. You can add tags of your own choosing and then sort and resort your collection in ways that meet your individual needs. I love that you can explore by topic or by others who own the books you do. It's much of what I love about libraries -- having a collection, keeping it some kind of order and sharing with others.

My first instinct is go home and enter all my books and think up tags for them. [But then again I've got my knitting waiting for me at home, so maybe LibraryThing will have to wait a bit -- I think I'll enter things gradually -- maybe by topic or alphabetically or .... hmmm]

Now Rollyo, I'm not as enthused about. I like the concept of being able to choose a collection of vetted sites and search them for what I'm looking for. I think that has some merit. I could see a classroom teacher using it with a class where the students were to be limited in their research to a select group of sites. That might work.

For me, though, a big part of what I love about the Internet is the randomness and the serendipity -- the stuff you find on your way to looking for something -- stuff you didn't even know was there.

I'm going to keep an open mind about Rollyo and play with it a bit more before I decide about its usefulness to me.

I wasn't a big fan, however, of setting it up. I found it challenging to produce the url I knew I needed to have for my discussion post. It wasn't intuitive or easy to set up or to use. I found it difficult to figure out the results on the results page; which were my sites, which were others, which were ads. (Why are there ads?)

I did not find it easy to add to my list of sites without installing something extra. I expected it to come with a feature built in so when I came upon a site I wished to add I could click a button and add it, not have to cut and paste it in. [If I missed something, please let me know.]

In sum, I appreciate being exposed to both of these sites this week. I was unfamiliar with them both and they expanded my concepts of "things I can do on the web" to accomplish familiar things in new ways that include being part of the web community.