Happy Holidays!
I will return to blogging after the holidays. May your holidays be filled with candlelight and love. And hopefully we will get some snow yet! Gray clouds and rain are just not right for a Wisconsin Christmas!
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December 22, 2006
Medicine.org
Medicine.org offers information on diseases and conditions, health news, active discussion forums, and a section on general health concerns and issues. The lay out of the site is clean and clear, with the sections neatly laid out and accessible. I also like the way they provide the most recent content and the most active forum topics prominently. Additionally, there is an RSS feed for their content.
VideoJug
VideoJug is a site that offers informational videos made by regular people. You can learn how to eat sushi, how to survive the holidays, how to make specific dishes, beauty tips, DIY, and much more. You can suggest a new subject for them to make a film about and rate the existing films. The films have printable instructions for you to use as well. Very slick!
December 21, 2006
Dorling Kindersley Clip Art
Dorling Kindersley now has DK Clip Art available for FREE! Most of the images are done in their distinctive clean style of a single object on a white background. Sweet! Point kids doing PowerPoint slides for class here, use it for your library websites and publicity, and share it with people creating documents of any sort. It is great to have quality images available for free!
Babble
Babble is a website for urban parents. It offers columns, feature articles, blogs, information on products, entertainment, and travel. It also offers a community for you to belong to where you can comment, post, and interact.
December 20, 2006
Fictional Empathy
An interesting tidbit from SixWise tells us of a study that shows that Those Who Read Fiction Are Better at Reading People. Interesting!
I do think that it does follow logically. The whole reason to read fiction is to empathize with the characters. Nonfiction can be read for that reason too but also for many other reasons. Personally, I am a fiction reader but also enjoy nonfiction about specific people, especially memoirs. Empathy all the way baby!
December 19, 2006
Learn Guitar 2.0
VideoTabsArchive lets you learn songs for the guitar through videos of the fingering. You can search the video collection by song or artist, browse by most popular, most recent, and highest rated. And of course you can rate the videos yourself.
Cool Sites
I have always loved browsing collections of recommended websites. cool site collection follows in the tradition of Cool Site of the Day from way back at the beginning of the web. This new site has screenshots, visitor ratings, and an RSS feed. Web 2.0 strikes again!
CosmoTV
CozmoTV is an alternative to YouTube. They offer accounts where you rate the shows you like and then it will recommend other videos to you. You can also save video clips to your account and see the most recent videos you have watched easily. The best part of CozmoTV is their channels, allowing you to quickly find subjects of interest like Monty Python, cute babies, adorable kittens, or amazing car videos by simply browsing.
December 18, 2006
StumbleVideo
StumbleUpon, one of my favorite web services has added an additional feature: StumbleVideo that works the same way StumbleUpon does for websites except it has video clips. You can give any clip a thumbs up or thumbs down and limit what you view to specific categories. The more you rank, the better the recommendations are.
DrawSpace
DrawSpace offers online drawing lessons for beginner through advanced artists. Learn about perspective, crosshatching, squirkling, shading, and much more.
StudyBuddy
StudyBuddy is a site via AOL that is a homework search engine. You can enter keywords, browse school subjects by grade level, and play online learning games. Parents and teachers will also find section specifically for them.
YurNet
YurNet is a search engine that allows you to do metasearches of the top search engines, but also has some interesting additional features. Comparison Search lets you compare up to 3 search engine results side by side. The search engines you can choose from are varied and include specialty engines for images, video, audio, blogs, news and resources. Another feature to check out is the Internet toolbox that lets you do a variety of specialized searches for any domain.
December 15, 2006
Online Home Searches
Pew Internet has new data:Looking for a Place to Live, that shows that growing numbers of Internet users are looking for homes online. I am one of that number, having found both of our last two homes online first. We did work with a brick-and-mortar realtor, but both homes were discovered online first. The site I used most was Realtor.com, but individual realty sites work well too and often have different photographs and more information on the same houses you find on Realtor.
December 14, 2006
Spoonfeed
SPOONFEED.org is a quick way to check on some of the top blogs and social sites online. The site lists the last ten items from feeds that include Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, Clipmarks, Furl, MetaFilter, YouTube, and Odeo.
Newgie
Newgie is a personalized news website. You can read the newsiest headlines of the day, select categories of news that you are interested in, and find communities that suit you. Additionally, you can add RSS feeds to follow via the site.
December 13, 2006
Apologies
I don't know how long this has been happening, but I apologize. It seems that a lot of legitimate comments from repeat posters have been automatically sent to junk. I finally figured it out when my own replies to comments never appeared. So I was being junked on my own blog! How rude!
Anyway, it is fixed now and you should see your comments and many others suddenly appearing. I love the conversation of comments, but most of these have just automatically been put on the blog without being sent to me first, so I didn't get to read them. If you have a comment you want a reply to, just email me or send it again.
Sorry about the inconvenience and the delay in realizing there was a problem.
December 12, 2006
Presidential Candidate Selector
SelectSmart has its Presidential Candidate Selector 2008 Front Runners up already. You answer a survey about your own personal political philosophy and then it matches you up with the candidates you agree with most. Interestingly, it lists all of the candidates in descending order, so you can scroll down and see who you don't agree with about anything at all. No real surprises here, but it does help clarify who is most like you among the top choices.
December 11, 2006
Wordie
Wordie is a site that lets you express your love for words. You can create lists of your favorite words, words you hate, practical lists, etc. Then you can see what other people have included those words on their lists. It is a social site for reclusive word lovers.
WeJustGotBack.com
WeJustGotBack offers travel advice from families who have already been there. The site is filled with information for people who travel with children. You can search content by keyword or by the child's age. Additionally, you can look up destinations by region, find tip sheets, read insider guides, or view the photo gallery.
December 4, 2006
On Vacation
On vacation! Will return next week with some new sites to see.
December 1, 2006
Stickis
I've been playing with Stickis for a couple of days now. It is an interesting way to tag and make notes on websites. If you have Stickis loaded and visit a site that someone else has made a note on, up it pops. You can place your own notes and tags on any site you visit. You can also add blog feeds in to Stickis and it will report when any of your blogs have posted about the sites you are visiting. Pretty slick! I like the popup feature so that you don't have to go looking for other people's opinons on sites, but I wonder how annoying it could become if this site really takes off. Ah well, I will keep on playing with it and see what happens.
Flaking Out
On this snowy day in Wisconsin, I thought it would be fun to highlight this site dedicated to snowflakes. I think it is one that I have mentioned before. The beauty of the snowflakes is simply amazing. The site includes photographs of natural and designer snowflakes, an explanation of snowflake physics, and ideas for activities like creating ice spikes.