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Google Maps has announced a new feature, Street View which lets you look at street-level photos for select locations. To access Street View, you can watch a quick demo video or just put in a search for a large city like San Francisco or New York and click on the Street View button that appears at the top of your map. Very interesting stuff and a nice addition to the Google Maps service.
Tageru is a very interesting search engine that is specifically for searching some of the hottest tagging sites online. You decide which of 43Things, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Furl, Wink or Wikipedia to search. The nice thing is that you start typing in your search term and it generates a list of similar tags. This is very important with tags, because there is no standard subject headings. Some people will tag an item with book, other with books, other with literature, etc.
Easy to use, fast and powerful, this site is a great place to go to find tags you are interested in on some of the top sites.
BeeThere is an online concert guide. You can search by city, event, artist or venue. Or create an account and enter your favorite bands (even upload the artist names from your iPod) and then you can notified in time to purchase tickets for related events.
Instant Bull is a Web 2.0 stock information site filled with all sorts of links to sites, stock information, message boards, and much more. Simply enter a stock symbol or company name and discover the most recent news coverage about it.
Fortuitous is a fairly new blog that offers great insights into different subjects. Two recent ones are on community and web apps. The posts are long, interesting and worth the read. But my favorite part is their design with everything at the bottom of the page rather than the top. Very refreshing.
You are all going to get so very tired of me talking about our new website, but because it has been such an undertaking and it is about to debut, please forgive me. :)
One thing that we are spending quite a bit of time with is the clip art that we choose to use on our posts. ImageChef will be a fun way for us to create customized, funny, hip graphics for our site. ImageChef lets you customize the graphic, choose the size you want and then has HTML code you can insert on your site! If you are looking for classy graphics that will reflect the time-honored bastions of your library, don't bother to look here. If however, you have a teen section to fill with hip graphics and you don't mind the fact that they are a bit cheesy, look no further!
Ooo! This is one that you just have to try out! Musicovery lets you run a radio by selecting the genres of music you like and then choosing from a continuum of Energetic, Positive, Dark and Calm. Then you get a morphing cloud of choices. Click on one you would like to hear and it immediately becomes the center of the cloud and you see more related songs. And best of all, you get to hear the songs you want. Not suggestions of things like the songs, but the actual songs. This rocks! Literally.
Nikon presents Universcale. This visual tour of our universe is graphic and fascinating. Start in the extremities of space where the size of heavenly bodies is staggering. And travel through to the microcosm that takes a microscope to explore. Amazing stuff that once again speaks to the power of the online medium.
You Could Write a Book is a site that brings authors and those interested in becoming authors together. You can find information on publishers, upload your writing for criticism, join the social network at the Author's Studio, and much more. If you have always thought of writing a book, this is a great place to network and find necessary information.
This is the site we needed when we were building our new library website! It has a collection of recommended library websites that show different styles, options, features, etc. Exactly what any website committee needs to get their creative juices flowing and to start lots of debates among members. Bookmark this one if you will be starting a website redesign soon, and who isn't!
Planetizen has a fascinating podcast with Enrique Penalosa talking about public spaces in cities. Penalosa was the mayor of Begota, Colombia where he started a very successful bus system and biking structure.
Listen to his speech and turn the meaning towards libraries. He believes in looking at what the ideal city would be and using time to create that vision. First, we have to clarify what an ideal library is for our community. Then we have to realize that our goal is really to create happiness. How does that change your vision of the perfect library? If we focus on creating a public space that generates happiness, that immediately focuses our attention on the customer and their experience in our libraries.
He also speaks about the inherent contradiction in cities between people-friendliness and car-friendliness. We have the same sort of contradiction in libraries between people, technology and books. How do we address it? I believe we have to embrace the contradiction and balance between them, not losing books for technology, not closing our eyes to technology to focus on our book collections, and never forgetting that the people we serve are at the heart of it all.
It certainly got my mind going this morning. Inspiring stuff!
I really like this set of three tips to help you with your presentations using PowerPoint. My advice is to avoid it if at all possible, but recently I found myself speaking for three hours and had to have some sort of slide to show people. I still bounced around a little between PowerPoint and the web, but so little of the hours were spent online that I had to have some sort of slide. I'm repeating the program at WLA, though it will only be 1 hour, and I hope to pull it off with no PowerPoint presentation. :)
But, if you too find yourself needing PowerPoint, these three tips will help you. Whether you use dual monitors (something I will definitely try next time), a giant clock to keep you on time, or laptop cue-cards, they will really help.
As I have mentioned before, I have an obsession with desktop wallpaper. I have my favorite sources, but this one may top them all. Social Wallpapering is a social site that ranks, classifies, and distributes high-res wallpapers! Their popular ones are quite nice.
You can browse the images, download a torrent pack, rate wallpapers, or register to keep track of your own faves or contribute your own wallpapers.
There is an interesting website segment that covers retail history. They write about malls that are vacant, stores that have closed, and some information on growing and booming malls.
I have found two sites that deal with this.
Labelscar is a "retail history blog" that just celebrated its first year of blogging.
Deadmalls.com is all about empty malls and dying malls.
Just another example of the interesting niches you can find online.
URateStuff gives you the ability to rate products of all sorts. Offer your opinion and contribute to the database of reviews. This site is very Web 2.0. They offer a tag cloud, blog, and RSS feeds for all of their categories. You can of course just read others reviews of products to figure out what to purchase. Search the site by keyword, or browse by category.
PickYourOwn.org is a website that lists farms which allow you to pick your own produce. With strawberry season fast approaching here in Wisconsin, it is a great time to see what farms have berries that you can pick. It makes a wonderful family outing as well. Each state has their own list by county. The site also links to pumpkin patches and Christmas tree farms.
Love, love, love the feel and function of this site. It is a search engine for a wide variety of different sites. Everything from eBay to Wikipedia to YouTube to an amazing array of social bookmarking sites. The best part is that they are all in one handy place, and that the creators of the site spent time thinking about how to make it less intimidating and more like a friendly and inviting collection of handy sites. If you are new to social bookmarking, this is a great collection of sites you should take a look at. If you are an old hand at social bookmarking, this site offers a great way to search across the various services.
I had never discovered the Unencyclopedia wiki. It is a "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." And look out! They have an entry for Librarian.
Note: do not click the link above if you do not have a sense of humor. This entry pokes fun at librarians, but at the same time displays a real understanding of what librarians do. I'd bet it is written by one of us.
I particularly enjoy the part on How to Vanquish a Librarian.
TIP! Vanquishing Librarians is most effective in non-book environments.
Repeat the following incantation three times "Your field is obsolete
and you will be replaced with improved content and slicker GUI
interfacia from Google." This should be sufficient to destroy the
non-technical librarian.
A geekier librarian may be resistant to this incantation and should
simply be bludgeoned with the first volume of the OED or a similarly
large reference book.
Visuwords is a way-cool online dictionary that creates graphs of the word you search for that show its relationship to other words. Actually, I think it is less of a dictionary (since it offers no definitions) and more of a thesaurus that offers not only words with similar meanings, but also related forms of the word you typed and antonyms. At any rate, whether it is a dictionary or a thesaurus, it is an interesting way to view words.
CORRECTION: There are definitions if you rest your mouse on any of the words. Sorry!
School Library Journal has a great piece in the form of a comic strip that perfectly illustrates what Library 2.0 theory looks like in practice. The main character is changing the way she serves the teens in her school library. She allows them to check out with fines, doesn't require ID, and *gasp* allows the teens to use her work computer.
The reactions of the other librarians are classic but not over the top, and I think you will see what your own reaction is to Library 2.0 in action. Would you be calling her crazy? Or would you be joining in this new sort of service?
MusicMesh is a very cool way to find new music. It has several features that I really like. First, you can enter a favorite musician or choose from their top searches. Then it offers a graphic of closely related bands for you to explore. Click on any CD and you will get a tracklist, reviews, the Wikipedia entry, and a link to Amazon for pricing. But best of all, any tracks with YouTube content can be viewed right in MusicMesh. I just found the new video from Mika! Hurrah!
Note, the fast-forward and reverse arrows on either side of the YouTube screen don't switch tracks but instead find other video content related to that song. That way you can find better quality videos without redoing your search.
My only quibble is that their search engine needs a little refining when it comes to linking to related music. Amazingly, neither Queen or the Beatles are listed as closely related to Mike. Instead I got linked to Emma Bunton. Sigh.
Pipl is a new search engine for people. It is unique in that it isn't an address or email search, but instead searches for the person throughout the Net. Results will show quick facts, which for me are remarkably accurate, contact details which show my last three addresses, web pages, and links to places that the person has posted to. If you are one of those people who likes to Google folks to know more about them, then you probably want to start using Pipl because it is far more comprehensive.
LISJobs.com has a really nice page that I had never discovered before! They nicely list the library job pages that offer RSS feeds. Even better, you can download their OPML file to get the entire collection. Job seekers, think of all those job ads winging their way to you rather than you having to dig for them. Handy!
Looking for popular wikis beyond Wikipedia? Then take a look at this list of the top 50+ wikis on the AdVolcano blog. They are listed by Alexa ranking. Some of them look very interesting and the number of topics covered by them is wide and varied. If you look closely, you will find the ALSC Wiki listed towards the middle, but most of them will probably be new to you.
Yahoo! Music now has a new Lyrics service where you can search for a song to view its lyrics or you can read the lyrics of the top ten songs or top ten artists.
Back from WAPL, I participated in one of the best panels I have ever been a part of. The four of us had similar interests and equally quirky senses of humor. :)
You can check out the links we recommended here. The session was full of people who enjoyed participating in woo-woo doghouse calls, drumrolls, and oooooos of amazement. It was sooo much fun!
A huge thanks to the geeky, charming and wonderful Joy, Beth and Nichole. You rock! Woo woo woo woo!
I'm off to the WAPL (Wisconsin Association of Public Libraries) conference for the next couple of days. If you are headed there too, check out the Have You Heard program on Friday morning where I am honored to be speaking with three great people about new Web 2.0 sites and devices. It should be a lot of fun!
I may blog the conference the next couple of days, if my laptop gets along with the wireless. Otherwise, I will catch you on Monday.
MetaEfficient is a blog that focuses on the environment and green innovations and technology. This is the place to go to learn about how to make your hybrid even more efficient, progress on renewable technologies, and organic products.
Yesterday, NPR's Talk of the Nation looked at how newspapers have started to cut back on their book review sections. Their guest, John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, made an eloquent case about why newspaper reviews are important and that they are still being read by more people than book reviews on blogs. Interesting stuff.
TagJag is a search engine that focuses on getting results in a different way. You can search by your favorite keyword (or tag) and then the results are handed to you in the form of RSS feeds that you can subscribe to. Subscribe to the entire list of resources, or select a specific site like Flickr, MSN, Feedster, or Del.icio.us and get an RSS feed specifically for that resource and your keyword. This enables you to zero in on the subjects that you are most interested in, and avoid doing keyword searches in a variety of resources to find what you need. It is a very interesting combination of tagging and RSS that works with the strengths of both.
Essential Architecture is a site that lists the 100 places you must see before you die with an emphasis on viewing great architecture. You know it is great architecture, when you see places on the list that you have visited and immediately you are taken back to that place and its splendor. Click on any of the images to see more information on the place as well as other photographs. E