This is Stumble Upon! I love this tool. Basically, it is a toolbar that you download to your internet browser. They have you fill out a brief questionare about your interests before you start and then voila you are ready to stumble! The program places a toolbar with a "Stumble" button in your browser. When you hit the stumble button it will bring up a random website it thinks you might like. This is GREAT if you have hours to kill hanging around on the internet (as I frequently do waiting for my husband to get home from work). It'll bring up anything from games, news websites, cool pictures, health and fitness articles -- it just depends on what you like! Once the page comes up you can give it a thumbs up (meaning you like it and would like to save it to your favorites) or a thumbs down (which will guide stumble away from similar pages in the future). For those of you who like to procrastinate or love coming upon those unique web pages, Stumble is for you!

As far as my reward for all this hard work :) -- I want a flash drive for the Sync in my new car!! :) :)

Digg

I was a little confused about how this website was set up at first. It seems like the "Tops in all Topics" list should be featured (rather than the most recent), instead of being like an afterthought in the right hand column. But once you learn your way around it's rather addicting. Just one quick question:
Does anybody get this? I do not.

The article I found most interesting I'm not going to post on here due to it's political nature and the fact that it is grossly offensive. Still, I wouldn't have stumbled upon it on my own so digg brought it to my attention.

This website, however, is great. How clever and amusing. :)

My Goodreads!

I LOVE this website! :) I signed up for a bibliphiles account awhile back and it was so tedious to add books and not very user friendly in gerenal. Goodreads is easy! I also love having access to so many reviews. I can only read Sarah's recommendation so many times before I run out of things to recommend myself! It's nice to have a central location with a wide variety of reviews that aren't coming from the publisher or the bookseller.

I also joined the Latin American literature group because I love Latin American lit and since I got out of college haven't been able to find a good source to find new recommendations to read. Once I burned through all of Allende and Alvarez I started feeling lost. Now I have a whole new group of friends to get suggestions from!

Goodreads! YAY! :)

I'm with Sarah. This IS the most fun of the Things we've done so far at least. Puzzles. Stamps. Canvas panels. Andy Worhol. Dice blocks. The list goes on! This was one of my favorites:


http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/jigsaw.php

The website kept asking me to sign in to flickr or to create an account. Being at the library, I don't have personal pictures available so I didn't want to create an account. Some of the features would let you randomly choose pictures from flickr, others would not. If you had a flickr account with lots of pictures on it this could be really cool.

This program can really help in just day to day library stuff. Think of how much cooler our posters for programs can be! Professional looking advertising can really make a big difference in drawing people in to the library. At least I know I'm a lot more likely to remember and be interested in a program with a poster that looks polished and well done.

Oh . . . mashups . . .

Truth be told, I found this overwhelming. Getting lost in demos and random unnecessary information . . . then I found MEMRY. http://www.pimpampum.net/memry/enter.php I love playing games online, especially simple, mindless games. This one is fun because you can enter a tag (a subject) and it'll pull pictures from Flickr. It's set up like the old school memory games we used to play when we were kids. Unfortunately, sometimes the pictures seem to have nothing to do with your subject. But, if you search the same subject several times, you will get different pictures each time. Either way, it's fun and it'll burn quite a bit of your time if you let it.

I also loved bubblr. http://www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/index.php You can create your own comics using flickr photos. All you have to do is search a subject and then add the bubbles.

Flickr makes me wish that I carried my camera around with me everywhere I went. Truth is, I don't even own one so that might be rough to do. In the age of camera phones, it's easy enough to capture some of those random moments in life, but to capture them well? That's still an accomplishment. This is exactly what my complaint is about Flickr's "interestingness." It's wonderful to have a website that makes it easy to share photos with friends and family, but let's not recognize people for taking a blurry picture of their best friend with their iPhone. Let's continue to honor people for learning the skills and taking the time necessary to take a truly unique and beautiful photograph.

I think it was a great idea on Flickr's part, to highlight certain pictures for recognition. Maybe we should just make the rules a little more stringent. It seems as if maybe we're only going based on how many tags or how many comments any given photo receives, not on merit. Let's forget "interestingness" and focus on things that are actually interesting!

*this post is far more bitter sounding then I meant -- it's just the end of the day :)*

Interestingness . . . are you sure?

So I'm bumming around on Flickr learning about "interestingness" (as much as it pains me to use the word) and having a great deal of trouble understanding by what standards these photos are being judged.

For instance:

This picture is not interesting. It is every high school student's facebook profile!

Or this:

It's a lovely picture, but there are 120 just like it in the Vogue sitting on my desk.

Now this:

This (by Glockoma) is a beatiful AND interesting picture. It shows skill, forethought, uniqueness. These are the kind of photos that deserve to be highlighted on Flickr.