Foodsel is a site that has information on various foods. The foods range from general foods to more specific brand-name information. You will find not only the caloric value of foods and also the energy, carbs, protein, minerals, vitamins and more. Nicely, the data is provided in both numerical form and on a graph.
Phonezoo is a free place to get ringtones for your phone! You can create ringtones and photos for phones, send ringtones, games and photos to your phone and find great ringtones already to use. Just sign up for free and enjoy!
The ringtones are varied from baby laughs to clips from songs to very strange but funny sound clips. Something for every taste.
I know, I know, social networking sites are everywhere. All vying for your attention. But I have another for you to try out.
Faves.com is a site that offers popular links in categories of your choice. You can choose from many different categories. My current topics I follow include blogging, food, Web 2.0, reference, books and technology. And I can add as many as I like. Then when I head there each day, I get a quick list of the top links in those categories all mixed together and wonderful to browse and explore.
It's a fast way to see what is hot in the areas you are interested in. Very fast to set up and even faster to check every day.
Where the Locals Eat is a site that offers a guide to restaurants in 50 cities. Even those of us in the Midwest will find cities to search, including Milwaukee, Chicago and Minneapolis (where PLA is later this month). The restaurants are a nice blend of different types from coffee shops to high end eateries.
The interface is friendly, a little flashy, and the content is nicely detailed. Icons offer further information on hours, handicapped accessibility, kid friendliness, whether vegetarians can eat there and much more.
Definitely worth a look if you are headed to PLA or to any other of the 50 cities on the list.
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!
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.
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.
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.
FedSpending offers you a very slick way to find out what is happening with federal government spending. You can choose to look at either contracts or grants. For contracts, you can search by contractor, see the top 100 contractors, view it by congressional district or state, or sort by product or service provided. With grants you can view the recipients by type, state or congressional district. You can also view them by agency and type of assistance provided. The best feature of the site is the many ways you can see the data represented. It makes the information all the more clear and interesting to view it in a myriad of ways.
LitLovers is a site that offers information for book clubs. They have book reviews, discussion aids, recommended titles for discussion, hints to help you talk about books, ice breaker activities, and much more. If you are running a book club at your library, this site is the place to visit. Find the next title for your club and a handy discussion guide all at one site!
Looking for audio files online can be a real pain! Enter SkreemR which gives you the ability to find Mp3 files easily. Just enter the keyword you want to search for and the results list pops into view. Any of the files can be listened to from right there, or you can open their player and add it to your playlist. The site allows ratings so you can mark the files you like, plus links to other social sites for more connections to the album, artist or song. The ease of use is what makes this such a winning site.
Now here is an online service any librarian could fall in love with. It puts almost any list of terms into alphabetical order for you. The site offers all sorts of options to use. You have the option to add items before or after each term or remove first words before alphabetizing. You can strip HTML, ignore cases, capitalize the first word, reverse the list, or remove duplicates automatically. Sweet!
As a library director, I find myself in the middle of conversations I would never have ever thought I would have. In the last few weeks I have discussed organizational charts more than I would ever have though possible! And in several different contexts!
Anyway, Cogmap is an online organizational chart wiki that shows you the org chart for companies. Because it's a wiki, you can contribute your own information, update entries, etc. This is the place to come to find out who has what position in a company, whether it is to register a complaint, pay a compliment or network with a peer.
And if anyone wants to talk about library organizational charts? I am ready!
Stateline.org is a site from The Pew Charitable Trusts that started as a resource for journalists covering state government. However, it has grown far beyond that, and is a great resource for citizens looking to keep up with what is happening at a state and federal level. The site offers daily state news, federal news that impacts state government and policy, and in-depth Backgrounders that offer background information on complex current issues. One of the best features of the site is the RSS feed section. You can subscribe to general news feeds, news on specific issues, or to feeds that address only a specific state. This is really a great resource for anyone to keep up to date on issues that impact their lives.
Somehow autumn and spices go hand-in-hand in my mind. Perhaps its the cinnamon in the pumpkin pie, the sage in the stuffing, or the mulling spices in the hot cider. But this is the perfect time of year to highlight this very cool Encyclopedia of Spices from The Epicentre. Click on any of them and you will get an image of the spice, information on how it is cultivated and where it grows, how to store the spice, how to use it, and any medicinal properties it might have. Yum!
The New York Times has started offering a beta of My Times, a customizable front page for the newspaper. You can add the sections of the paper you are most interested in, read other RSS feeds, find out the latest news, and much more.
I have tried several of The New York Times recent endeavors online. My favorite remains the one that you had to load a reader to see. It was free for only a short time, and I'm not sure if the for-fee version is still around. I loved that it imitated the paper format so well. But this one still offers the access to content and a lot more of it. I just miss that slick interface that the reader offered.
I had never seen Very Short List before. What a great idea. They email you one choice thing each day. It could be music, an interesting article, website, online video, almost anything at all. You sign up and get that email each day, 5 days a week. What makes a site like this work is the taste of the people selecting the links. And this one works for that very reason, impeccable taste. Set aside a little time and take a leisurely tour through their archives filled with all sorts of things worthy of your time.
Mango Beta has now launched. It offers online language classes for many languages done in a very friendly style. The languages include Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Greek, and English. You have to register to use the site, but registration is as simple as your first name and email address. Your log in is your email address, so don't use a wild fake one you won't remember!
The slides they show are very easy to use and you have the option to go as slowly as you like without rewinding. Just click on Replay to hear the entire slide again or you can click on individual words to hear their pronunciation again and again. Even better, there are text bubbles that appear and coach you on how to use the interface so there is little chance of being lost.
At the beginning of the web, there were many foreign language sites around. But they slowly disappeared. This is one of the few I have seen that does it this nicely and with so many 2.0 bells and whistles. Does anyone else have favorite foreign language sites?
The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper is a really nice site filled with links to other online resources on the author. Readers will especially enjoy the graphic representations of Cooper and visiting the James Fenimore Cooper Society site which has his works available online. Quite a nice collection of resources to explore.
TasteSpotting is an eye-popping food resource. It offers links to some of the top food blogs online, each accompanied with a mouth-watering photograph. If you are a foodie or someone who just enjoys drooling on your keyboard, this is the site for you.
Snooth is a site that offers you personalized wine recommendations. You rank the wines you like and dislike, and just like Netflix, you will get personalized recommendations of new wines you will enjoy. Also, you can do a keyword search without registering and find wines that way. Any search can be refined by setting the amount you want to spend, the vintage, the type of wine, region, and varietal. This will lead you to individual wines, each with a Snoothrank that shows how others have rated it and comments about the wine. Very 2.0 and a very nice site to demo the concepts of 2.0 to patrons because they are put in terms that are not geeky or technology oriented.
Lime: Healthy Living with a Twist (don't you love the name?) has a very nice collection of meditation rooms for every taste. You can float in space, spend time in the forest, listen to burbling water, and many more. Definitely something to have at hand during budget time.
You can run them right from the website, download them for your iPod, or subscribe via iTunes. The rooms have sounds, music and images.
Wowio is a site that offers free ebooks available for download. There are the many classics that one would expect to find, but you will also see books from the last few years included in the collection. The best place to find the newest titles is by clicking on Latest Releases. But the collection can also be searched by title, author, ISBN and keyword. Additionally, you can browse by categories which are wide-ranging and interesting.
I also appreciate the site's attention to detail and feel. It has a modern vibe, photos of the book covers, and features like top download lists that make it feel both welcoming and trendy.
Seafood Watch offers information on how you can make the best choices when you select seafood. And the choices are weighted not only for mercury content, but especially for the health of the oceans themselves. The site offers information on how your choices impact the environment, what you can do to help the health of the oceans, and a handy printable guide for you to carry with you when selecting or ordering seafood.
Hostelz is a website that reviews hostels around the world. The site is very large with almost 23,000 hostels in over 6400 cities. You can search by city, country or hostel name or browse by an area. Once you are looking at a specific hostel's entry, you will find you can book it online, get directions, read a description from the hostel itself, view the official Hostelz review, and also read multiple reviews from people who have stayed there.
DIY Life is a site that offers the best DIY projects on all sorts of subjects and for all skill levels. The projects include hobbies, crafts, home improvement, home, family and tech. I also appreciate that it is not just physical projects but also offers tips and secrets on a wide variety of topics.
Local farmer's markets and grocery stores in the summer offer a cornucopia of fresh vegetables. But how do you know what is at its peak of freshness? Here is a website that offers a buying guide for vegetables. May the fresh be with you!
This site offers a large collection of religious podcasts from a wide variety of denominations. Podcasts are listed by denomination and there are also more general categories such as religious news, spiritual podcasts, youth religious podcasts, and sermons.
Citizenship Easy is a site that offers information on becoming a U.S. citizen. You can print out the new application for citizenship, learn about the test, and even study online for the test with sample questions. I do think that it would be helpful to have the site offered in multiple languages, especially Spanish, but perhaps that is planned for the future.
Vegetarian Lunchbox is a collection of recipes that you can take with you for lunch. You can find sandwich fillings, breads, salads, and soups. The site has a blog, kid-friendly recipes, and even smoothies.
360 Cities is a site that offers 360 degree photos of cities around the world. Immerse yourself in Syria, Prague, Moscow, Venice, Vienna, LA, or Belgrade. More cities are being added as well. The site can be slow to load, so be patient. The crisp, clear quality of the 360 degree photos are worth the wait. You will be able to rotate around, look high and low, and really get a feel for the space.
Eventful is a site that lets you learn about a wide variety of events happening in your community or elsewhere. You can search by what you are interested in, limit it to a certain city or state, and then decide on specific dates. Or you can browse by category of events that include animals, art, books, music, performing arts, movies, business, and politics. You can also see popular venues and find out what is happening there. To top it all off, events can be exported to your calendar if you are using Outlook, Yahoo! or Google. Sweet!
WisMoms.com is a new site for Wisconsin mothers to connect. It offers local news, blogs, events, posts, and much more. You can share pictures, thoughts, ideas, concerns, and use this to really meet other mothers with similar interests and issues.
Fisssh is another interesting new search engine. It does not only a search of the web, but also returns results from Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, blogs, videos, podcasts and more. The results are presented in a newspaper like fashion with the top results from various sources on the same page. You can also limit the search to specific areas like news, blogs, videos, podcasts, jobs, and shopping.
Travelistic offers online videos from travelers. The videos can be searched by destination or keyword, browsed by using the map interface, or you can take a look at the most popular places as well. Join the community and you can contribute your own travel videos to the site.
QueryCat is a search engine that searches a database of frequently asked questions (FAQs). Put a question into the search box, and you will receive links either to the answer of that question or to related questions. You can also search by keyword and get a broader list of related FAQs to look at.
This is an interesting search engine because of its focus on questions only. It returns very different results from other search engines and could find a niche, especially among reference librarians.
The American Association of University Women has a very nice map that offers information on the pay gap between college-educated women and men. You can view the national figures or see what is happening in your state. It is particularly frustrating to see that even college-educated women make $16,000 less each year than their male counterparts.
Also remember that today is Equal Pay Day, so it's the perfect day to examine what is happening with women's pay in this country.
Insiderpages is used by Google to pull up local information on communities, but you can also head straight there to do your own searches. You will find photographs, reviews of restaurants and businesses, and advice seekers and givers. Sign up for an account and you can contribute your own opinions of the great places in your area or the worst.
Powered by ScribeFire.
From modern websites to ancient ones:
The Tale of Genji has long been one of those books that I have always meant to read. I have read part of it and wrote a college paper on the section I had read. I remember it as being one of those books that change the way you see yourself and your world. The ancient Japanese appreciation of poetry, words, art and nature subtly color your perceptions. I will eventually return to the world of Genji and this website gives you the opportunity to view the world of Genji and better understand and visualize the setting. It's just as gorgeous as my imagination, which is saying something!
If you wish to see how your imagination compares, you can read the full text of the Tale here.
Yahoo! Podcasts is a site that offers a great list of podcasts. You can search by keyword, find recommended podcasts, find popular casts, or explore by categories or tags. If you are iTunes adverse, this is a handy site to find a list of podcasts. If you do use iTunes, it will still work well for you, since you can choose to subscribe via iTunes right at Yahoo. Pretty slick!
If I had patrons asking about where to find podcasts, I would direct them here. It is user-friendly, filled with graphics, and allows you to immediately start listening to podcasts without having to subscribe.
Trippish offers a service that I haven't seen on a map site before. It combines driving directions with weather information. This is great for anyone going on a long-distance road trip, because it offers a glimpse into what sort of weather you will be hitting on your journey. Want to avoid a large city during a downpour? Worried about snow in the mountains? This is the site for you.
Definitely one to recommend to any RVers you have in your community.
Good-Tutorials offers over 13,000 Photoshop tutorials. Everything from the basics to fancy effects are covered in easy-to-follow tutorials. Recommended to any library that uses Photoshop.
Calorie Count is a site provided by About.com that offers access to calorie information on a wide variety of foods. It has general foods, and then also offers information on specific brands and restaurants which is really helpful. Activities are also given calorie burning information. Additionally, you can join the site and discuss health issues, tag websites, create a to-do list, and much more.
Reuters Africa offers African news. You can read by individual country, see the latest headlines as well as the top news stories. Additionally, there is investment information, RSS feeds, and interactive TV.
Personal Google Search Engine is pretty clever. You can retype over my Menasha Public Library title, and create your own. Once yours is typed, you get your own URL for that title. Nice and easy!
Thanks to I Want To for the link.
Kosmix is another search engine with its own unique spin. It offers a suite of five specialized engines: Health, Video Games, Finance, Travel, US Politics, and Autos. Click on the engine you want to use, enter your search terms, and you are led to a list of results. Along the left-hand side of the page, you will see different categories to choose from. These are specialized categories depending on the specific search engine you chose to run. They break the results of your search into handy sections of interest. This is definitely a search engine worth trying out. If you are looking for specialized results in any of their categories, this may be just the engine for you.
Farecast is a travel site that offers very different information for those traveling by air. You can still search fares as with most sites, but their best feature is their airfare predictions. If you have any flexibility in your travel, you will want to take a look at what the chart looks like for airfares. Amazingly, the search I put in showed that tickets would fluctuate as much as several hundred dollars within a few days! Recommend this one to your library patrons who struggle with larger travel sites to find the fares they are looking for. The graphs make it so much easier to understand!
The New York Times Reader takes Microsoft technology and creates a very interesting, intuitive interface for the newspaper. It is so slick! Yes, you have to download the software and probably some Microsoft updates to run it, but I found that it is worth it. The reader is set up to function just like a print newspaper with sections and articles, but without all of that folding and refolding. You can quickly move from one section to the next, turn pages, read from one article to the next, or just pick out the headlines that you are most interested in. The reader doesn't offer content not available on the Times website. What it improves is the feel of the interface and ease of use. Give this a try if you read the New York Times often or even occasionally. I think it is worth the download.
Using movie ratings to decide if your child should see a movie is a very risky business. To take some of the risk out of the decision, you can visit Kids-in-mind, a website that offers ratings of movies based on sex/nudity, violence/gore, and profanity. Each area of concern gets rated on a 1 to 10. Add to it the detailed reviews and you get a fairly comprehensive look at each film. They review all sorts of movies, not just those specifically for children. Recommend this to concerned parents or adults who don't want sexuality or violence in their films.
Gamevial offers free online games. They include Flash and Shockwave games with sports, puzzles, exploration, arcade, and classic games. Make sure you download the Shockwave player before you start trying to play.
The Presidential Timeline of the Twentieth Century offers an interactive timeline filled with digitized content from the collections of twelve Presidential Libraries. The site includes Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Senior and Clinton. It is an intriguing mix of dates, factual information, digitized documents and photographs.
SoundtrackNet is a site dedicated to the music of movies and TV. They offer reviews of soundtracks, lists of the best soundtracks of 2006, interviews with composers, and news. Additionally, they offer a podcast that you can subscribe to via RSS.
yourminis.com is a site that uses Flash to allow you to create your own personalized webspace with content and links to popular online sites, RSS feeds, podcasts or videos. It is easy to use, allows you to import (and export) your OPML (or blog feed list), and lets you add individual blogs or subscribe to a collection of themed blogs. This is a very simple and graphic way to start reading blogs and may appeal to a different group of people than Bloglines does.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers an interactive timeline of art history on their site. You can look at the timeline by periods, view special topics such as regional art or different media, and browse by specific artist or subject.
There are some sites that embody the power of the Internet. nuclear NIGHTMARES is one of these. It is a photographic and informational journey through the aftermath of Chernobyl 20 years later. Each photo has captions that you find by putting your mouse on the bottom of the image. This technique is very powerful, allowing you to see and absorb the image before reading the text. Beware, this site will darken your day with their power.
Splashr.com is a slick way to interact with your Flickr photographs. You can create a presentation of photographs by selecting photos from your Flickr account and then deciding how you want them to display on the screen. You can do Flash frames, HTML slide shows, film strips, postcards, mosaics, and more.
Practically Edible claims to be the web's biggest food encyclopedia. The site offers gorgeous photos of foods, lengthy articles on specific foods' history, storage and preparation tips, plus recipes and information on cuisines from around the world, both modern and historical. This is really the place to go for concrete information on food.
OK, this one had me chuckling. It's a Cliche Finder where you can insert any text and it will highlight the cliches in the paragraph. You don't have to even visit their site to do it, just drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar and you can gleefully highlight cliches any time you wish.
Letterpop is a free, easy-to-use newsletter creator that doesn't require any downloads. The documents are hip, photo-filled, and friendly. The interface is very simple with great themes and templates. You can choose to use your own photographs or you can use sample images that are provided. You must register on the site to use your own photos.
I recommend this site for anyone who wants to throw together a party invitation, a department newsletter, or for a small library who would like to produce a glossy email newsletter. It is slick and very simple to use.
Via I Want To.
The Maine Historical Society presents a comprehensive website on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, his work, family, life and work. The site features many illustrations, digitized documents, and bibliographies for more information. Recommended for high school and adult research.
The WGBH Forum Network has a marvelous collection of online webcasts both live and historical. They are currently featuring Martin Luther King and artificial intelligence. Lectures are available via podcast as well with a subscription that gives you a full-length lecture each week. You can also subscribe via RSS feed and get either the new lectures or the podcast. The lectures can be searched by keyword or browsed by categories such as art, business, environment, politics and poetry.
I have a real addiction to reading and books that is at its worst when I enter a used book store. TomFolio is a website for a cooperative of used book sellers. You can browse, search, find autographed copies, and more. Of course, it doesn't have that amazing smell of well-loved books... Gotta go to your public library for that!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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 offers online drawing lessons for beginner through advanced artists. Learn about perspective, crosshatching, squirkling, shading, and much more.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am sure that few people have a family filled with food sensitivities like mine is. But I do know that others struggle with food-based allergies as well as general allergies. In comes the free href="http://www.allergycards.com/">AllergyCards.com that allows users to create an allergy alert card to carry with them. It tells the severity of the allergy, the exact allergy, has extra space for more details, and then has an emergency contact for exposure.
As for my family, we could just make this a holiday craft and each fill out our very own!
The Best Media in Life is Free is a site that links to the best in free online media from free audio book to e-books to music. All free and legal to use.
What I appreciate most about it is learning about new websites that offer free content to visitors. As a librarian, I am always looking for new options for online content that is legal for people to access. This is a treasure trove.
Nielsen EDI - Box Office Charts is a handy way to find the real-time box office results for movies playing in the US and Canada for the weekend. The top ten is listed in millions of dollars, plus they also tell you the number of weeks on the chart and their cumulative earnings. Not a vital site, but one that will be appreciated by film buffs. Oh, and librarians doing DVD selection will find it handy as well.
We have all heard of Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia, and now there is Wiktionary. I'll give you one guess what it is.
The interesting parts of Wicktionary are that it offers dictionaries in many languages, a word of the day, and can be browsed or searched. They currently have over 300,000 entries in 389 languages. And they are looking for volunteers.
SourceWatch is a project from the Center of Media and Democracy and the Sunlight Foundation that focuses on influence in public policy and public opinion from PR firms, lobbyists, and others. You will find up-to-date news, a
Congresspedia which is an collaborative encyclopedia on Congress, and the Spin of the Day.
Yesterday I posted about budget travel sites, but this beats all. CouchSurfing is a network of people around the world who are interested in finding a free place to stay when they travel. People open their homes to one another and host travelers. They have over 135,000 people signed up at the site, 38,000 people have reported success in couchsurfing, and 210 countries are represented by members!
