Rolling with it: Thing 12

I have been putting off Rollo Day. Probably because, in my years as a journalist, I became very adept at searching for legitimate answers on the Web. And this was Not One of Them. My main problem being that using Google, the Grand Poo Bah of searching, yields a lot of junk but it also leads you to new legitimate sites you may otherwise never have discovered -- something that will never happen with Rollo.

But ignoring this site forever wouldn't be very progressive of me, would it?

So I put it off for a few days. And tried to find a rationale for my aversion. And that turned into weeks. And then we got a reminder email.....

And then it dawned on me that without using the darned thing, I couldn't have much of an opinion. So today, I tried to make it relevant.

In a short time (days? weeks?) my new niece, Lucy, will be born. Her mother, my sister-in-law and dear friend, has had many, many complications leading up to this birth. With every new complication, I would hit the net, trying to learn more. Generally, this search would turn up a lot of hits on message boards: "I have this problem. Does anyone know the answers?" Mostly, these would be followed by posts of "Me too! Anyone know the answer?", repeated over and over. I quickly learned to find actual answers using a few pregnancy sites and WebMD.

Finally, I understood the usefulness of Rollo. If I only plan to search specific sites -- and want no information outside those sites, this is a Good Thing (as Martha Stewart would say). With this in mind, I created the Rollo search Nervous Mama, a combination of pregnancy.com, pregnancy.org and webmd.com. Perfect for finding out causes of horrible lower back pain, sans frantic repetative postings.

But I'm not sure when else I might need a similar search tool. The great thing about the net is how much information is out there -- and how much new information appears every day. Rollo restricts this, so, unless one is annoyed by excess information (and if you are in the library profession, that's probably not you) it seems only to limit learning.