Rhino Site
The International Rhino Foundation offers information on rhinos with an emphasis on how you can help those that are facing extinction.
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April 30, 2005
Direct2Drive
Direct2Drive offers what may be the future of video game sales: direct downloads of newly released games. This is a great way to purchase a game. No need to go to a store, and no need to order online and wait for delivery. I suspect that libraries will not want to use this, because they don't receive any official box or discs, but otherwise it should work well for individuals looking to purchase the new games right now.
April 29, 2005
Public Presidential Papers
UC Santa Barbara offers Public Papers of the Presidents as part of their American Presidency Project. The site offers the Presidents' public messages, statements, speeches and more covering Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush in 2001. You can view the papers by month and year, search by keyword, or limit by a range of years.
Meet the Author
Meet the Author is a site that offers video clips of authors introducing their books. Right now the site has over 400 clips with additions being made each day. The represented authors include huge names such as John Le Carre and Jodi Picoult, as well as new authors for you to discover. The site can be searched by name, title or date of entry and you can specify what genre of book you are interested in.
April 28, 2005
Best-Ever Freeware Utilities
This site offers the top freeware utilities. These would be great to advise patrons to use, because they are free and work well. The list includes spam filters, spyware removers, anti-virus programs, and firewalls.
April 27, 2005
NationJobSearch
NationJobSearch offers a collection of job links. You can look through the top job sites, listings by state and specific industry, and information on careers, resume writing and other job-related subjects.
April 26, 2005
Historical Scotland
Historic Scotland offers information on more than 300 historical buildings and ancient sites.
April 25, 2005
Tricks of the Trade
Tricks of the Trade is a blog that offers tips from experts in a wide range of fields, from webmasters to fly fishermen to skydivers. There is always something interesting on this site.
IgoUgo
IgoUgo offers travel information and advice, including travel deals, information on destinations, photographs, and an opportunity for you to share travel reviews.
April 24, 2005
Travel Blog
Fodor's now offers a blog on their site: Travel Wire. Featuring travel deals, tips, and recommendations for hotels, restaurants, and more. The site does have a feed to add to your reader.
Ask Dave Taylor
Ask Dave Taylor! is a blog where you can ask tech questions from HTML, to CSS, to web design, Linux, Windows, and OS X. Answered questions make up the body of the blog, so just reading it can give you information on using technology.
April 23, 2005
New Pyramid
MyPyramid is the online site for the USDA's new food pyramid. Enter your age, sex and activity level and you will get a personalized food pyramid.
Public Radio
PublicRadioFan.com offers program listings for hundreds of public radio stations worldwide. You can find specific programs by name or category of show and you can also search for specific stations by name, location, format, or language. Nicest of all is the Stream Launcher that offers a quick way to simply start listening to a station.
April 21, 2005
James Madison
American Memory from the Library of Congress offers The James Madison Papers, a collection of 12,000 items in digital format that document Madison's life. The items include his correspondence, drafts of legislation, legal and financial documents, and an autobiography.
SauteWednesday
SauteWednesday offers a collection of food and wine related links, from news articles to large lists of food publications, food blogs, cooking sites, and info on dining out and wine and beer. This is the ultimate food link site.
April 20, 2005
Proximity
I haven't posted an online game in awhile, so it is even better that it is one that I actually enjoy playing! Proximity is a game of logic where you place tiles strategically on a board facing a computer opponent. It takes a matter of seconds to figure out how to play, but don't be fooled by the simplicity.
April 19, 2005
Koala Site
The Australian Koala Foundation has a site that offers general information on koalas, a photo gallery, and a special section just for kids. A great site for reports.
April 18, 2005
Tagging Along
Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review is a useful article from D-Lib Magazine that offers a look at social bookmarking tools like Furl, Flickr, and del.icio.us. If you haven't tried a tagging site yet, this article offers a list of the top ones to try.
I actually use two services, Spurl and Furl. I do my tagging and bookmarking on Spurl and use Furl to email websites to people since it is so easy to do while surfing. Tagging is not just the latest fad online. It is an important movement to people indexing and cross-referencing information themselves. I believe that it will have a large impact on future generations of not only search engines and web sites, but also library automation.
April 17, 2005
BlogBridge
BlogBridge is my new feedreader of choice, beating out Bloglines for me. Partly, that is because I don't need to be using a web-based reader, since I drag my laptop around with me everywhere. But BlogBridge offers exactly what I am looking for.
1. Ease of use. I easily imported my OPML file from Bloglines and can export just as easily when I change to another reader.
2. I can rate my feeds with star ratings that put my most important feeds first on my list, so I always get a chance to read them. Plus, when feeds are updated they are moved to the top of the list based on their star rating. Ones that are not updated, just stay at the bottom of the list, but I don't have to scroll past them at all.
3. I can mark individual blog posts as read or not read, making it much more useful than Bloglines where I have to purposefully mark an entry to be kept as new.
4. It keeps a default number of old posts. I have mine set to 200, so I can always look back over old posts that I have already read when I realize that I forgot to click on something. Very nice!
5. It works with the wide range of feeds that Bloglines does. I have tried so many feedreaders that don't do LiveJournal or Blogger feeds right. This one works perfectly and doesn't argue at all.
6. There is the ability to tag your feeds. As more people do tags for their feeds, the database of feeds will grow. The software will eventually start to offer recommendations for feeds based on the ones you read and the star rating that you have given them. This will be an incredible asset to serious blog readers. I am always looking for new feeds and frankly the Bloglines recommendations never seem to change.
7. The price is right. Free! And even better, open source.
All of that said, I do still like and appreciate Bloglines. If I was bouncing between computers, especially shared ones, I would still be using it. BlogBridge does offer synchronization so that you can run their software on multiple computers, but it does have to be installed on all of them. And nothing beats their Sub with Bloglines bookmarklet. I still use that to find pesky feeds that I can't locate on websites.
I have completely converted to BlogBridge now. And look forward to their new version coming out in the next few months. I think they have a real future if they can continue the way they have begun.
Style
Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W, just won the National Magazine's Award for top magazine website. As you would expect, it is filled with fashion shows, trends, parties, shopping, and beauty tips.
April 16, 2005
Historical Newspapers
HistoryBuff is an amazing collection of digitized historical newspapers. It allows you to read the Pennsylvania Gazette from 1749, printed by Benjamin Franklin, Germany's surrender in World War II, and front page coverage of astronauts walking on the moon. Newspapers date from the 1700s through recent years. To find the actual newspapers, click on Primary Source Material on the menu at the left side of the screen.
Via Librarian in Black.
April 15, 2005
It's About Time
The official U.S. time is a government site that gives the exact time within 0.2 seconds. Just one of those handy sites to know about.
InternetFrog
InternetFrog.com
tests the speed of your Internet connection. There is no software to download, instead you just visit the site and by visiting it, your speed will be tested and recorded on a graph showing how it compares to other access speeds. Great for those of us who are casually interested in Internet speeds but don't have the speed numbers of different types of Internet access memorized.
April 14, 2005
Urbana Free Library Construction Blog
The Urbana Free Library is doing a great job with their construction blog. When I first started blogging, I thought that it would be perfect for communities to stay informed on what is happening with a construction project. Not only does it automatically file the new entries first, but it is easy to use, easy to enter photos, inexpensive, and serves as a hub for information on changes in hours and services during the project. And best of all, it can serve as a historical piece after the construction is completed.
April 13, 2005
Representative Poetry Online
Representative Poetry On-line offers a collection of over 3,000 poems online by 500 poets. Indexes offer access by last name, title, first and last lines, and timeline.
April 12, 2005
Healthopedia
Healthopedia is an online health encyclopedia that offers a wide range of health information, including daily health news. It covers 1,500 topics, offers health centers seventy detailed centers, and information on 11,000 drugs.
eHow
eHow is a site that offers instructions on how to do almost everything. They have sections covering cars, jobs, computers, relationships, business, food, health, hobbies, holidays, home, pets, sports, and travel. The entries can be searched or browsed.
April 11, 2005
Popup Test
PopupTest is a site that will test your popup blocker for effectiveness on a range of popup types, including common ones and uncommon ones.
RSS Feeds
Blog Business Summit has an interesting post about RSS feeds, saying that most people who use an RSS feedreader don't actually use it, mostly because it strips all of the design elements away from the posts.
I agree with this to a certain degree, wishing that the character of the blog or site I am reading would carry through on the feed. However, I know that feeds have changed the way that I use the Internet. They allow me to maximize my time by not visiting websites daily to see if they have been updated. Instead when they are updated, they alert me, allowing me to use a wider range of sites on a daily basis. So yes, I would love to see design elements come through on feeds, but really, they do what I need them to do. They save me time.
April 10, 2005
GreenCine
GreenCine is a Netflix-like service that specializes in indie, arthouse, anime, and foreign films. But unlike Netflix, GreenCine lets you view their listings like their top rentals, award winners, new releases and much more. Any fan of smaller budget and independent film will find lots to browse through here.
April 9, 2005
Wikipes
Wikipes is a recipe website that uses wiki technology, allowing you to submit your own recipes to the collection.
Digital Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections feature a wide range of digital projects from Africana and arts to historical documents to women's studies.
April 8, 2005
Eye on Books
Bill Thompson's Eye on Books offers audio interviews with big name authors. This one is really worth a visit!
April 7, 2005
Pookmail
PookMail.com offers disposable email accounts. Just choose a pookmail.com email address and for 24 hours you can receive emails using that address. It is perfect for websites that you don't want to give your real email address to, but have to offer an address to get to their content.
April 6, 2005
Patriot Act Coverage
Online NewsHour -- Domestic Security: The Homefront and the War on Terrorism offers balanced coverage of the Congress' consideration of the renewal of the Patriot Act. Reports can either be read online or listened to on RealAudio.
Omro Public Library on Library Stuff!
Congratulations to Omro Public Library for being mentioned on Library Stuff and Rambling Librarian. This goes to show exactly what I have said over and over again, in the blog world, no one knows how small your library is!
There are now a bunch of us within the Winnefox Library System doing new material blogs. All of us are directors of small rural libraries who needed a way to replace our previous automation system's automated new item lists with another way of doing things, at least until our library system figures out how to automate the process again. I thought that blogs were the perfect way for us to go. They are easily maintained and wait patiently for the next update, something that with our changeable schedules as directors we needed! If you click on each of our blogs, you will see that we each have a flavor all our own. That is another strength of blogging. It can be as involved or as simple as you want it to be. This is definitely a success story, but the minute it is automated again, you will see us using that format rather than hand doing the links! I guarantee it!
April 5, 2005
Yagoohoogle
Yahoohoogle lets you search both Google and Yahoo at the same time. Results are listed side by side, so you can compare the search engines either for your own site's results or for research.
April 4, 2005
Baby Name Wizard
The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager is a fun site even if you are not looking for a baby name. Using Java, you can find any name on a graphical chart and see how popular it was in different decades from the turn of the century through today.
April 3, 2005
Daylight Saving Time
About Daylight Saving Time offers information on the history, rationale, laws, and dates of Daylight Saving Time. Have you changed your clocks today? And remember to check the batteries in your smoke detectors too!
April 2, 2005
Beverages Online
BevNET.com offers information on a wide range of nonalcoholic beverages including fruit juices, energy drinks, soft drinks, and bottled water. The site offers reviews, industry news, forums, event listings, and related links.
April 1, 2005
FTP on the Web
Surftp is a web-based FTP client. For those of us who still use FTP to handle files, this is a great thing. It means that you can use FTP from any computer without installing a client. Sweet!