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I have seen these answer board pop up a fair bit in Google searches, especially if I format my search like a question, eg. How do I clean red wine out of carpet?
I trust them to a certain extent on simple queries, but never follow any health advice or base passionate arguments on them! I find them slightly less reliable than Wikis as some real silly people seem to post real silly answers on them. Maybe this is because it takes less effort to post a short answer to a set question than to write a structured piece on a chosen subject.
I'd be stoked if I posed a question on an answer board and a librarian answered, but I'd be more likely to ask at a library first before resorting to answer boards. :) I've noticed some of the librarians' replies weren't rated too highly (mustn't have checked their links in a while!) and I think the reason for this is that people on the internet are too impatient. Generally a librarian's response will be long and give many options, which is foreboding to read and understand for a lot of people. I still think it's a good idea for librarians to get out their and advertise their services to the internet using public - even if only 1 in 10 will actually end up using the library's resources as a result. I did notice that the librarians have smartly tagged their answers with a range of search subjects that will hopefully lead more people to their answer.
I think it would be a great idea to expand on the SL's Ask a Librarian service to include an easy to use web forum (moderated to remove inappropriate questions of course) that is easily searchable via Google. Hopefully we would then get more visitors to the website looking for answers and our reference librarians wouldn't have to answer the same questions quite so many times.
Here is my answer on Yahoo!7 Answers - you should be able to guess which one is mine (the one with all the SLNSW references in it!) While I was answering it another 3 answers popped up before mine! Wow!
Technorati seems to be quite a useful search tool but there are a couple of things I don't like about it. Firstly, it will be displaying nowhere near all the blogs available on a subject you may be searching as a lot of people would not think to get their blog listed and, secondly, it's not useful unless you are quite technical. I was looking at the How do I get indexed? FAQ and found all the pings, links, feeds and claims quite confusing!
Obviously despite all this it would be advantageous for someone who wants their blog "out there" to put the effort in and learn how to get indexed on Technorati. It's just not something everyone is going to know about or feel confident doing, compromising Technorati as a search engine in my opinion.
My search for bookmobile brought up a lot of information on new technology coming out for downloading e-books to read on mobile phones. When I did an advanced search for bookmobile as a tag I ended up getting a lot more focusing on travelling libraries in vans that visit schools! Two very different interpretations. I was interested to see that you can search for blogs that have linked to a specific page. I'm not sure how accurate this is, but it would be useful if you could get the results as a feed to see who is mentioning your site in the land of blog.
I only got one result searching for SLNSW2008 which is a little video I think might be linked to the Learning 2.0 blog! In fact, I used Technorati to double check that fact and found that a whole lot of other blogs have linked to that video as well! This is definitely a useful feature to track links back to you. Unfortunately I didn't get a bunch of Flickr images popping up in the search results as mentioned in the Learning 2.0 blog.
As far as LibraryThing goes, I am familiar with the idea already as I mentioned in my previous post. I prefer Shelfari as, well, it's totally free! And I like the idea of having a community created information base. I created an author information page with ease and then it was up in minutes for everyone else to use! The problem here is obviously the same as the Wikipedia problem - you can't trust everything you read straight up. It has been reliable in my experience though. And, as you can see to the right, a blog widget is available as well. :) Here is a link to my Shelfari account.
LibraryThing looks great too. What a fantastic internet invention. Go internet! Maybe we should start an SLNSW Shelfari book club?
