Del.icio.us and Us

I've been looking at the L2LCPL account links and found some very useful and timely information: under "Online Reference-Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki," I found a section called "Libraries Using MeeboMe for Embedded Chat." The UC Berkeley link has a tutorial for using Meebo which is nice because we will be using Meebo for IM at the Ref. Desk soon.

On a lighter (not calorie-wise) note, I like Del.icio.us better than Rollyo for organizing theme-based links like "food" and "travel" (and, of course, "pets") because it's a little more sophisticated, but both are useful depending on what you want to do.

Rollyo and Restaurants

I discovered Rollyo yesterday and it has some real potential for replacing little bits of paper with URL's written on them. In keeping with my theme ("road food" with detours) I selected a partial list of my favorite restaurants on both coasts for my searchroll. Here it is: http://rollyo.com/meerkatshouse/meerkats_road_food/

One drawback is that some of my favorite restaurants, especially in northern New Jersey (like China Paradise, Pompton Queen Diner and Don Pepe's don't have websites!) Another weak point is that the links in the searchroll don't seem to be live: you have to cut and paste them one at a time into the searchbox (unless I missed something!)

Library Thing Around the World

I checked out "Library Thing" today. I selected several random libraries around the globe to see who would have books on Boston Terriers: University of California had 2 (only 2?), LIBRIS in Sweden had 2, National Library of Scotland had 1, but University College in Cork did not have any. None had any "other members," which is understandable since these are not likely titles that promote discussion in any way. (I will look for different titles to add, maybe on the subject of "Bitter Cinema.")

Random Kitten Generators and Such

This is from www.randomkittengenerator.com. (Hmmm, I'm noticing a trend here! )








On a less serious note (i.e., no photos of relatives ...) here is another good image generator: it is called "Random Movie Generator" (found at http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/)
For me, it created "Apocalyptic Werewolf." Very scary! I also discovered a related link for a blogsite called "Bitter Cinema." (at www.bittercinema.com) Both are very compelling, especially for movie buffs who like to travel.

Many Feeds

I went to some of my favorite newspapers' sites, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, South Florida Sun Sentinel, LA Times, among others, and found that they all have the RSS symbol somewhere on their page. The types of feeds that you can subscribe to pretty much coincide with my interests, like "Travel," Food," "Pets," and "Strangest News Stories of the Day." I also checked out Feedster, Topix, etc. I liked Topix the best because local news displayed at the top of the page and then various interesting topics are displayed across the bottom under "people reading, talking, editing." I told my friends about it and they were very enthusiastic about the feeds, and feeding in general. But then, they got tired and wanted to take a nap (as you can see.)