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I am a huge fan of food blogs and have filled my del.icio.us links will all sorts of recipes found on great blogs. Well now, you don't have to fill your linkrolls, bookmarks or RSS feed reader with posts from food blogs like I do because you can just go ahead and search 1900 food blogs in one place!
Let me know what mouthwatering recipes I've missed!
Tasmin Little is offering a free download of her violin CD. Her hope is to bring classical music to a new generation and to people who otherwise don't tend to listen to violin. The download features composers J.S. Bach, Paul Patterson and Eugene Ysaye.
The download process can be a bit confusing because she offers several options. Most folks will want the mp3 format and why not go with the 320Kbps if you have the space. Enjoy!
What a nice thing to feature on your library site! Free and legal downloadable music that everyone can enjoy!
Oo la la! I adore the beta Lookybook site so much that I am posting about it on both of my blogs, something I almost never do! The site offers all sorts of picture books that you can page through online! They are top-of-the-line and recent books. The paging works seamlessly and smoothly with an intuitive interface, and you can embed the Lookybooks onto your blog or website, even without registering for the site.
Registration gets you your own bookshelf, the ability to comment on books, and other bells and whistles.
You can browse the books by highest rated and most looked at. Here is an embedded book so you can see how it works:
I can see this really jazzing up online bibliographies of picture books, or just allowing you to highlight a particular author. Think of the possibilities on your website!
For months and months now, I have been using ScribeFire to post to my myriad of blogs, both internal and external, Moveable Type and Drupal alike. But today, today I may have just discovered the next tool I will use to write my blog posts. Today I am trying out Windows Live Writer and I am completely amazed by its feel.
First, the writer emulates the look and feel of my blogs. Their templates are here around me as I type, the fonts stay close to the same and the spacing as well.
Second, inserting pictures, tables, maps, tags, video, and links is amazingly simple.
Saving as a draft is not only easy but inviting. Publishing at a later date is more than an afterthought. Splitting your post is simple, I can play endlessly with fonts and colors, etc.
Alright, so some of it isn't as nice as my good old ScribeFire. The Drupal blogs don't want to play nicely with this Microsoft product. The template for one of my blogs isn't the right one on the writing area, and that is a bit distracting.
So right now I am torn. I'll have to keep on playing with this to see if my Drupal blogs will ever happily work. But I am optimistic that there are great blog writers coming. Even if this one isn't the one for me, it may be the one you are looking for.
LinkBunch is a service that lets you group together a collection of links into a single link that you can share via IM, email, mobile phone, and other services. Just put the links in the box on the site, click Bunch, and there you have your new small link. Handy dandy way to share a collection of items!
I'm posting this right now to our library blog. We have to fight news with news:
When asked about whether he was nervous about Amazon's new ebook reader, Kindle, Steve Jobs replied: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told John
Markoff of The Times, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore.
Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last
year.”
It's enough to make a librarian weep. But wait! Here comes a wonderful article from the New York Times offering alternative statistics:
Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller
number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly
three-in-four have read a book.... The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.
Love jazz? Then My Jazz Network may be the social networking site for you where you can connect with other jazz lovers, listen to audio, watch videos, and even create your own channel of favorite clips.
Oh boy, this could be ba-ad...
Feed Crier allows you to take any RSS feed and receive it via Instant Messenger rather than an aggregator! Sweet! Now caution people, I would not recommend adding any of the big blogs to this. You really don't want your IM flashing or beeping for every Boing Boing or Slashdot post. But think of those blogs that update occasionally and that you want to be right on top of. I have a list of those, but I too will try to be cautious and only start with ten or so. :)
GovBenefits.gov is the official benefit site for the federal government. It offers information on federal and state benefits, easily browsed by using a list that breaks the benefits into categories. The site has information on over 1,000 programs. If you are unsure which benefits you may qualify for, click on the Benefits tab at the top and take their questionnaire. The site is available in English and Spanish.
I am doing a dance of Vista joy right now! My favorite little application has finally come to Vista! Hott Notes is a program that lets you put post-it notes on your desktop as reminders. Much more visual and in-your-face than either Outlook notes or the little applet that comes with Vista, Hott Notes also offers different colors, the ability to make the notes bigger, change fonts, add timers, and much more. Definitely worth the download for anyone running Vista. And if you are running 2000 or XP, it happily works on those as well.
Ever been to the Smithsonian? Are you a fan of the magazine? Then this is the contest for you! Share your story of a Smithsonian encounter or special moment and you could win a free year-long Contributing Membership. Get those pencils sharpened, or I suppose I should say get your typing fingers limbered up!
Nice piece on John Grisham on the CNN website. I know that we don't need to publicize Grisham to our readers, but it is a way to show that we "get" new popular literature. And if you are concerned about just publicizing Grisham, what a great way to tie in other great authors who may be under-read by people. Grisham himself refers to several of his favorite authors in the interview.
Gourmet Magazine has released a new version of their website. And boy is it mouthwateringly gorgeous. It features large images, videos, an inviting layout that just begs you to click through to details, and then gets down to the nitty-gritty of the site and offers lots of information and news. Well done.
RedZee (of the charming and strange red-striped creature) offers an intriguing new way to get search results. Rather than a wordy list of results, you get small screen captures of the sites that match your search to scroll through. There will be large black holes in your results, but the majority of sites are there. Just give the image you are interested in a double click and you are off. My only issue is that you are stuck in a RedZee frame rather than going to the real site, which is a pain and for a Web 2.0 site is a strange mix of 2.0 and old-fashioned link love theft.
The results of the search are also somewhat limited and the interface can be quirky. I found myself struggling to get it to type a new search. But it is worth exploring and is graphically interesting as well.
Every so often someone does something online that makes me realize how marvelous it is to have the Internet. It never involves a clever email message or graphics that flash and dance. Usually it involves the heart and soul of being human. And yesterday I discovered one of these sites.
Haltadefinizione offers The Last Supper in amazing detail: 16 billion pixels, the highest definition photograph ever according to their press release. Just click on the small image of the painting and off you go. Click again, zoom, pan, toggle the music on and off and just enjoy seeing this masterpiece up close.
Songza is an addictive site where you enter a search for any song or band and then can immediately listen to the song. As an added bonus, you are also connected to recommended songs related to the music you searched for. Beware! This is one that will have you grooving at work!
I haven't indulged my love of wallpapers for awhile now, so it is great timing to find this website which marries social networking with wallpaper for your computer. They even have an RSS feed with the most recent wallpapers. You can browse in a number of ways from the scale of the images (standard, widescreen, dual monitor) to a large group of categories. Rate the wallpapers you like, use them on your computer, and enjoy!
Yahoo! has a fascinating new way to get the top news from around the world. NewsGlobe is a virtual globe floating in blackness that automatically scrolls from one news story to the next. You get the headline and links to new articles. The globe can be used in two modes: Autoplay which takes you literally around the world in a few minutes and Interactive where you get to click on the area of the globe you are most interested in.
Yahoo! Live went, well, live today. It is an online video site where instead of the videos being prerecorded, you view them live as they are happening. The few I have watched are struggling with camera issues, lighting problems and such, but the concept is fascinating. Definitely something to keep your eye on.
Discovered this article on the latest Neat New Stuff on the Net and had to share it! The article focuses on newspaper websites, but his points about making those websites into a network rather than a destination could not be more true for library sites as well.
The article offers several tips on how to do this. Here are the ones that I see working best for libraries:
1. Link, link, link: Link out to content, link to blogs and link to your own related content. So when we do a list of bestsellers or new books on our site or our staff blogs, we link to our catalog. If it is a piece on a new hot author, we link to the books in our catalog, link to the author's website, and link to any news articles that explain more about the author and his/her books. This makes the library a place to head to to discover information already nicely packaged together. There are probably even more ways to do that.
Unlike newspaper websites, library sites also have to realize that it's time to start creating our own content. We have to offer unique information ourselves. It can be done by blogging, creating podcasts, making videos, etc. To be a real vivid part of the online landscape we have to be more than a hub for links, we have to be linkable ourselves.
2. Cultivate conversations. We are still working on this at our library. We have open comments all over the site and one of our long range goals is to have several hundred comments in the next few years. We want our website to be a place people come to talk together and also a place people talk to one another about. We are still searching for the element that will get people talking and contributing, but we are far from giving up! If you have had successful comments on your site, please let me know. I get them on my blogs, but not on the library site itself.
3. Build shortcuts to information. Offer RSS feeds on your website. Feeds can be added to websites fairly easily and aren't just for blogs anymore. Nicely, if you go with Drupal or Joomla for your website RSS feeds are already present for the entire site. And comments are available with little effort too.
I know that all of this takes time, but I think it's worth it. You want to be a place people come to for information, a hub. We are the information experts and it's time our websites demonstrate that!
TravellersPoint is an online community for dedicated travelers. The site offers forums for discussions, blogs about travel, photographs, and information on accommodations and destinations. Fellow travelers are the ones who provide the tips and help, giving real-world advice that is most helpful. If you are planning a trip, especially to an exotic location, this site is definitely worth traveling to.
Anthropology.net is a website that focuses on anthropology and offers space for discussion, reviewing research, and sharing information. The site has a blog format with an RSS feed. The posts tend to be lengthy and offer detailed information, including links to related research.
SimpleSpark is a website that offers a wide collection of web apps. You can browse by new apps, mobile apps, specific categories of apps, and apps for both the Wii and iPhone. The interface is clean and clear with a rating system so you can find the best apps out there to try. If you want a zany look at the apps, you can also click on the large play button at the top of the page and see 5000 web apps in 333 seconds. Not very informative, unless you want to see the scope of the apps and be amazed by the number there are.
Say it ain't so! Web 3.0?! Is this going to lead to Library 3.0? And what is that going to look like?
Well, after taking a deep cleansing breath, it looks like Web 3.0 according to this ReadWriteWeb article is going to be about personalization, such as personalized recommendations for products.
Wait.
Aren't we talking reader's advisory here? Or watcher's or listener's advisory? Don't librarians do this each and every day? Isn't this a strength of our profession? Perhaps we just need to take our show on the virtual road! Or perhaps our strength is that instead of having a faceless computer with a misunderstood algorithm making suggestions, we have REAL LIVE PEOPLE who can do it. And do it well.
Honestly, let's use our technology knowledge to blog, tweet, post, comment, shout that we already do this. Let's offer the service online to make it shiny and new, but let's not forget that LIBRARIANS RULE in this arena already. And let's keep on making sure that we are the human face of information, of recommendations. We are in the know already. Perhaps we can skip right to Library 4.0!
This article from eMarketer says that the audience for podcasts is definitely growing. In 2007, the estimated audience was 18.5 million. It is expected to grow to 65 million by 2012.
I'm doing a happy dance because the library just got LSTA funding to create two Podcasting Studios for patrons and staff to use. The library will be producing podcasts starting this spring! Do you have plans to podcast at your library? Are you already doing it? Are there subjects that have been more successful than others?
You know how there are some sites that are so very exciting that you have trouble stopping messing with them long enough to post about them? Well, this is one of those. Babbel is the latest in a long and checkered history of foreign language tutorials online. If you go back aways online, you may remember the thrill of the early online language dictionaries! Search a word and see it in 20 different languages.
Fast forward to the present and Babbel is one of the best FREE foreign language training sites I have ever seen online. The site is limited to teaching German, French, Italian and Spanish, but that is a plus. The focus allows them to create real quality teaching tools for people to use. The lessons are interactive, but not confusing. The emphasis is on the learning not the flash, but it is plenty flashy and nice. I found the interface intuitive, fun and engrossing. Just the sort of reaction you want to have when learning a language.
Give it a try! Then recommend it to your patrons!
WonderHowTo offers how-to videos on a wide variety of subjects. You can browse by the newest videos, Hidden gems, or today's most popular videos. Additionally, you can do a keyword search or browse categories to find what you are looking for. Many of the categories have hundreds if not thousands of videos. If you have create a how-to video, you can also contribute yours to the site.
SuperCook is a handy recipe search that aggregates recipes from sites all over the Net. You search by the ingredients you have at home. Nicely, they offer a list of recommended ingredients for you to add to your list. Do you have oil? Butter? Milk? A well-designed interface makes this site fun to explore. Click on any recipe and you are whisked off to the site that offers the recipe itself. There are some strange results at times. I am being assured that I have the items to make Quick and Easy Peach Cobbler though I don't have any peaches...
This one has my mind a-twirling around. Thatsmymouse allows you to add code to your website and share browsing so you can see one another's mouse. Their site offers a demo of co-browsing on Google Maps, but my mind immediately went to the lost souls struggling with our library catalogs. Perhaps this sort of help would work? How about our online databases? There are so many places that people can get confused and then just quit using our library resources. Would this service (or a similar one) be a solution?
OR
Could it be seen as an invasion of privacy? A way for Big Brother to view their activities?
OR
Both