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The Investing Online Resource Center offers information for people interested in doing online investments. It has a section for those just getting started and a section for those already using the Internet to invest. To top it all off, they have a simulation of what it is like to invest online as well as simulations that explain margin accounts and warn of pump-and-dump investment schemes.
YES, Inc. is a site that offers a playlist for over 2300 radio stations across the country. Browse for your station of choice by city and you will find all of the songs they have played in the last 24 hours listed by exact time they were broadcast.
Nooked RSS Directory is a directory of corporate RSS feeds. Feeds can be browsed by category or searched by keyword.
Via beSpacific.
VideoDetective is a site that offers movie trailers online through streaming media. You can search their archive by title, actor or keyword. You can also browse current releases in theaters, current DVD/video releases or a calendar of future DVD/video releases. Right now they are featuring trailers for the Academy Award nominees.
Chowhound is a website where you can find information on all of the restaurants in your area that are hidden gems, plus it has reviews of more flashy restaurants that are honest and not full of hype. Enter the site and then you can click to find your region and read the messages about your area. You can also offer your own perspectives on restaurants.
Word IQ is a site that offers tools to help users find definitions and information on words. It also has an encyclopedia, and ways to search the Web and articles. Very slick.
The New York Times Movie Reviews offers 10,000 NYT movie reviews online. You can browse by title, year, genre, critic, or country of origin. Or you can choose to do a specific search by title, people or keyword.
Via Kegliography.
Mystery Writers of America have announced the Nominees for the 2005 Edgar Awards. The categories are varied, but the nominees for Best Novel are:
By a Spider's Thread by Laura Lippman
California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker
Evan's Gate by Rhys Bowen
Out of the Deep I Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming
Remembering Sarah by Chris Mooney
NOVA | Saving the National Treasures was the most recent episode. It looked at the incredible efforts of the team that helped to preserve the original Declaration of Independnce, Constitution and Bill of Rights by designing and building new enclosures for them. Completely riveting and fascinating. The website offers informational and interactive sections, showing the conservation, damage already done, and the incredible cases that were built.
fac.etio.us goes hand-in-hand with spid.ero.us. It offers a quick way to find del.icio.us bookmarks that are of interest to you. You can limit it by tag, creator, site, feed, or date. Very slick and very useful if you want to see the latest on a specific subject.
spid.ero.us is a very handy site. It compiles the top bookmarks from various social bookmark sites like furl, spurl, and del.icio.us. You can quickly scan the newest bookmarks, the most popular and the most highly recommended. This is going to save me some time!
Reuters has an article about the new Global Booker Prize which is a lifetime achievement award for international writers whose work has been done in English or widely translated into English. Eighteen authors are on the shortlist representing thirteen countries: Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Ismail Kadare, Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Naguib Mahfouz, Tomas Eloy Martinez, Kenzaburo Oe, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, Antonio Tabucchi, John Updike and Abraham B Yehoshua.
RockRage: Music Band Fonts is a very cool font site. It has full alphabets for the fonts used by bands for their name and titles.
Small-town library serves its own is at first glance a sweet article about a tiny library. But as a librarian, things bother me about it. First would be that the hours of this library are amazingly few. They are open only 4 hours a week! Sad. Then we have horrible quotes like, "After a while, when you put it on the shelf, you know where to put it." This from a woman who has worked there for six years. Yes, libraries have a system for shelving books. That way you can find things again. And finally the awful mention that the librarian loves working at the library because she can read "practically all the time" is very sad.
Now, I know that some libraries are way underfunded and understaffed. But the low number of hours combined with a librarian who reads all the time is not going to create a positive place that will draw people in, much less serve the whole community.
As a director of a small library, we have to start insisting that even librarians in tiny communities and tiny libraries have to know more than where the books go on the shelf. Where is the passion for service? For children? For information? For connecting books with people? For all of the things that make working in libraries wonderful?
The Cancer Blog is a blog that offers news and information on all sorts of cancer, including treatments, prevention and activism.
The Diabetes Weblog offers news and information on diabetes. Its blogroll alone is worth looking at for a list of some of the top online diabetes resources.
As someone who maintains a collection of recommended links, The Virtual Private Library is a very interesting project where the sites are apparently harvested by bots. Done in blog format, each subject covered has its own individual blog, though unfortunately the feeds don't seem to be working at this time. The subjects are wide ranging from astronomy to business to deep web links.
rssGenealogy.com
is a website and feeds that feature genealogy news and articles. The site features over fifty genealogy feeds that serve some of the largest genealogy sites online. A great solution for online genealogists.
Project Honey Pot offers a way to fight back against spammers. You publish a false email address on your website that the spam harvesters target. Any email sent to that address is then reported as spam to the authorities. Very easy and very slick.
Of course, my geek husband knew about this long before me, grabbing a book by Project Honey Pot to show me. So I understand that they have been around for awhile, but this was too cool an idea to not mention it!
ALA has released its list of the top most challenged books in 2004. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier tops the list that represents books challenged at schools and libraries. Other books range from Steinbeck to Angelou to Sendak.
ThePokerSource offers reviews of poker sites as well as information for beginning poker players like odds, playing online, and tournament tips.
Mom Advice offers advice and support for mothers. With a free newsletter and sections on parenting, money, work, and food.
Webnote offers a way to keep notes on your computer. There is no software to download and you can access your notes from any computer on the Net. This would be an interesting application to use for staff rather than having a stack of little notes at the desk.
Copyright-Free Photo Archive offers a huge selection of copyright-free images, including wildlife, plants, space, weather, environment, and more. There is a list of keywords that can be browsed. Best of all, the images are large and clear enough to be used as computer wallpaper.
The Internet Stock Blog offers "news and analysis of Internet stocks." It does not recommend stocks for buying or selling.
The Blog of Death offers obituaries of famous people on a daily basis.
Recent deaths at Wikipedia also has a nice listing, though some of the information can be sketchy.
The Book Standard is a new website that offers book news, charts, author and agent information, and a variety of bestseller charts. My only quibble is that it doesn't have RSS feeds.
All Game Guide offers information and reviews on video games from all kinds of platforms, including PC, consoles, handhelds, arcade and vintage systems. The guide can be searched by game title, character name, company, person or platform.
Google has a new map program: Google Maps, which offers some of the best local maps that I have ever seen. They are clearer than local maps that the Chamber hands out! I know where I am coming for maps of small towns in the area when I am trying to give directions. Very nice!
At a recent meeting, the person sitting next to me groaned when the speaker said that our system was supporting Firefox as browser of choice. She leaned over and said that she didn't like Firefox at all and that it didn't have the same functionality she had in IE. While I don't agree about the functionality of the straight downloaded version, I did recommend that she look at extensions to help her customize Firefox.
PC Magazine now as a list of the Top 15 Firefox Extensions. I have others that I like even more, but this is a great jumping-off point for beginners at adding extensions.
Dickinson Electronic Archives is an archive covering Emily Dickinson. It offers correspondences within the Dickinson family, responses to her writing, and a collection of rare resources.
Free Online Graph Paper does exactly that, it offers free graph paper in pdf format from normal graph paper to multi-width, asymmetric, and dots. Just print and use!
Interview with a link spammer from The Register offers a look into the head of one of the people who is actively spamming this blog and almost all others that accept comments.
Via The Blog Herald.
Virtual Reference Desk has now posted handouts, models, papers and other materials on presentations done at their 2004 conference. Topics include live electronic reference, chat reference, and online ready reference.
The 25th Annual Razzies nominees have been announced, offering awards to the worst movies of the year. Catwoman and Alexander lead the nominations.
Web Pages That Suck is a great blog for those of us who maintain web sites. It teaches good web design by showing bad live examples. RSS feed.
The Pew Charitable Trusts have a great website with information on their reports, news items, and policy and civic information. Best of all, you can subscribe to e-alerts that you customize to your own interests. Very nice.
New Virus Attack Technique Bypasses Filters
This is something for librarians and patrons to be aware of! Viruses are now being sent using the .rar format that completely bypass existing virus filters.
"Many of the messages in .rar virus e-mail are slick invitations to view pornographic content, which is part of the reason for the viruses' success, experts say. .Rar's compression algorithm is 30 percent more efficient than .zip technology, so it is often used to compress such content. E-mail purporting to deliver images and video in an .rar archive may well be taken as legitimate, experts say.
Once opened, the archive typically contains an executable file with a double extension, such as "foto.jpg.exe." The viruses themselves are new and are usually droppers that install a Trojan or back door on the user's PC."
Library Underground is a new find for me. It is a "guide to alternative library culture on the world wide web." It has categories of sites like activism, personal home pages, sexualtiy, weirdness, and fun & games.