No doubt many of our US readers celebrated Thanksgiving last week; if you hosted the dinner or even participated in a “potluck” you may have put a serious dent in your grocery budget. Should this be the case, mygrocerydeals.com, a website that makes it easy to scan all the grocery store sales in one place, might come in handy.
Though it might not be worth driving all over town to save $0.10/pound, sometimes the stores I don’t go to regularly have “loss leader” sales that are too good to resist. Since I don’t get the newspaper, I could either check each individual store’s website, slooowly paging through the electronic versions of their paper fliers, or go straight to mygrocerydeals.com where I can sort by category (produce, beverages) or individual store, and even search by keyword if I’m looking for something specific.
There are several other features (like nutritional information and printable coupons) that I haven’t found particularly useful, but the ability to look at all the store circulars in one place has made mygrocerydeals.com part of my regular grocery shopping routine.
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Published by Michael on November 28, 2007
Categories: Maps
I stumbled on this great little change in Google Maps when very recently trying to give a friend directions to my house. I have only lived here for 3 months and when I queried gmaps to see it for the first time I was led astray. Not too far, but about a block in the wrong direction. While on the phone with my friend I looked again on Google Maps for my address getting ready give them the “right way” from the misleading destination. To my surprise there was a new link on the dialog box over the supposed location of my house.
It said “Edit.” I blinked a few times and the wheels in my head started turning and I got more than a little excited. I quickly reined myself in, not wanting to get ahead of myself. I kept my friend hanging on the phone, in silence, as I clicked on Edit and was delighted to see the dialog window change and include an option “move marker.” This required me to sign in to my Google account, but then allowed me to drag the marker to the proper location of my house. Voilà! If a move of more than 200 meters is required, the change does not take place immediately, but is reviewed by someone at Google and then released.
Now my location has the standard info in the dialog box, in the correct place on the map. In the image to the left, you will notice a “Last edited by mi…” and a link to “show original.” If someone does incorrectly move an address, you’re always able to see the original. This whole feature is excellent, what we should have been able to do all along. Nice work, Google.
Here’s a link to their official page about the location editing feature. Included is a YouTube video that shows just how to do it.
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As Hannah noted yesterday, I have been struggling a bit with a new computer set up. I like to think of myself as someone who is patient with computer glitches, but the truth is, I’m just not. I was used to working with one machine and haven’t exactly taken to the new one yet. It isn’t one thing, but the cumulative effect. For example, figuring out a few minutes before my shift that I had not reconfigured my browser to work well with the collaborative virtual reference software. Or, finding out that I don’t have software I’m accustomed to using for certain things. On top of that, I’ve been trying to learn some simple programming and I’m uncertain whether it wouldn’t work because of something I did, or something on the server beyond my control.
So, today I was going to review Touchgraph, a visualization tool, but when my PowerBook would not play well with Touchgraph and needed a Java update, I found it all too much. I developed a case of blogger’s block that exploded into the room and drove all other living beings out. Thank goodness Google still works. Because I no longer wanted to write a post, I went off in search of something to to help. Via Lifeclever, I found out about WriteRoom (Mac) and DarkRoom (PC). As I type this, I see electric green letters on a black screen. And nothing else. WriteRoom quiets everything down to words on a screen, to help a writer focus on the words. No formatting, no font choices, no tables, graphs, charts or images. No e-mail alerts, chat requests or additional windows beckoning me to play Scrabulous on Facebook. It’s quite mesmerizing, and calming at the same time. I feel much better now. WriteRoom has a free thirty-day trial, after which the software is $24.95. So perhaps you will save it until the day you really need to focus on writing only. Who knows, you may decide that writing is better with no distractions, and you will whine when you find out WriteRoom is not on your new computer.
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Poor Margaret! Last week she got a new computer at work; however, the downside to this was that her old computer had tons of cool programs on it (from a previous owner) and the IT people didn’t think that all of these cool programs should make the migration over to Margaret’s new computer. One of the programs she lost was SnagIt, a photo capture and editing tool she had always bragged about (okay, I’m stretching the bragging part a little bit - Margaret doesn’t really do that), and I admit to having been a wee bit jealous.
Well, luckily for me (and Margaret) you can now download a free version of SnagIt. This post over at Digital Inspiration describes how to do it. This isn’t just a free trial version, you will receive an email with a key code to enter it so that you can keep it forever. Okay - so the catch is that the free version is a little outdated, and of course they want you to think that if the free version is so cool you might want to buy the latest version, but the free version still has lots of neat features - you can capture a scrolling website (which means you can capture an entire homepag - not just what fits within one screen), you can emboss, add beveled edges, arrows, textboxes, resize, and easily save as a JPG. So go for it - download the free SnagIt and enjoy screen capturing like the pros.
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Published by Laurie on November 25, 2007
Categories: Books
Last week Amazon launched their new e-book reader, Kindle. Attached is a video about Kindle from the Wall Street Journal. I’m not sure who is going to buy the Kindle with a price tag of $399 (including wireless connectivity), plus $9.99 per e-book, but Amazon is doing a good job of creating a lot of hype about it. I’m curious to know if any of our readers have used one or purchased one? I wonder if the screen really is easier to read than other e-book readers? Is the price worth it? Who is going to splurge for a $399 e-book reader?!?
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So you thought having an avatar displayed while you’re IMing with your patrons was cool? Well, with TokBox, you could skip the whole hiding behind your sexier, slimmer avatar thing, and just talk to your patrons (via the web of course) face to face. All you need is a microphone, webcam, and of course, a computer (but that goes without saying).
TokBox is a free service that allows you to place a video call from any website. Once you sign up, TokBox gives you a link, you give the link to your friends (or embed it on your website for your patrons to follow), and voila! you can see and talk to whomever you wish via the web. Following the general theme of late, this of course means that you can embed a TokBox link on your Facebook page, or any webpage you have control over. Maybe we could even talk Laurie into putting a TokBox on the infodoodads page (nah, that’s going too far).
A caveat - TokBox is (of course) in Beta, so the quality may still leave a bit to be desired, but this is definitely a direction the web is heading, so don’t get to spoiled by that hip avatar of yours.
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Building on Laurie’s post about the new Facebook pages for businesses, libraries, and other places, my post discusses the JSTOR search application that can be embedded onto a profile. (Login to Facebook to view or use the application.)
If you’re a Facebook follower, fan, or junkie, you may have already seen this app, featured on fellow librarians’ pages. The JSTOR search application lets you place a JSTOR search box on your institution’s Facebook profile. It’s as simple as that. I easily walked through the steps to add it to The Valley Library profile and to my personal page. Now any users from our institution who visit The Valley Library page can jump into a JSTOR search and be authenticated to our subscription.
I think this is cool because it helps us take the library and embed it outside of the library — virtual or physical. Even though our users may not want us clogging or polluting Facebook and other social networking spaces, I’m curious to see if they will take advantage of this placement. How often do peoples’ behavior and what they say they do match? Minimally, I think the search box may raise JSTOR’s profile and that seems like a good thing. Wouldn’t using JSTOR over the general web be preferable?
We’ll see how many people decide to mix research, personal, and fun activities. I think it’s worth putting out there because it took literally less than a minute to do so. Whatever searches are done will be worth that time.
I’m curious who will be next to create a Facebook app for searching. Who would you like to see?
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I check Zillow at least once a month, wondering if my house has gone up or down in value. I also check all the recent sales around my house to see how the market is doing. Now, there is a game for people like me, the real estate obsessed, called Realius. I found out about this new game in the latest issue of Newsweek, which describes Realius as the real estate version of fantasy football. Of course, I asked myself, “How in the world could a real estate game be anything like fantasy football?!?” This question was enough to pique my interest — I had to investigate.
First I created a login and user name. Next I was prompted to pick a location (only California communities).
According to Realius the object of the game is to “accrue points and win prizes” (although I could not find a list of prizes anywhere). To play Realius: look at the pictures of a house, the description, a map, and recent sales in the area, then guess the value. Points are earned by guessing the Realius price (the Realius price is the average of other players’ guesses).
I have to say I was hooked from the beginning (this house), because I hit the price on the nose! Yes, I’m obviously obsessed with real estate (and no, that price you see above, $440,000, is NOT my guess). I’m excited to see how this game develops, because I think it’s fun, but I still can’t figure out how it is anything like fantasy football!
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These days just about everyone has a social networking website to suit them. I recently ran across this one which suits me just fine. Coastr is an emerging social networking site that puts all of the focus on its primary subject: beer. Not only is the site an excellent source for reviews and ratings of beer, but it connects users who share common favorite beers.
If a favorite beer of yours is not on the list, you can easily add it by entering the name of the beer, the brewery, country of origin, brewery website, and personal tags you would like to apply to the beer. Once done adding the beer, you can add a rating and review to share your experience with others.
As you can see in the screenshot of my profile below, it shows individuals I match with on beer tastes. Don’t let the zeros after each username deceive you, this is not the number of beers in our lists but the number of reviews we have contributed. Since I’m relatively new, I haven’t contributed yet. Below that you see my “wall of beer” along with a link to the RSS feed of my list.
Another feature of Coastr is to track places where you like to drink beer. I could definitely see looking at this before traveling so I can scope out the best places to grab a brew. It mashes up the addresses with Google Maps to show each pinpoint on the map, as well as a list for a specific city. Like the beer list, if you don’t see your favorite places, you can add them yourself! Enjoy!
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Notate is a web-based tool for annotating web pages. You can create and display notes, tag your comments and questions, highlight text, attach additional images and documents, and make links to show connections between ideas. You can also invite others to share in the discussion. Notate seems ideal for journal groups where students and faculty collectively discuss articles. For example, this PLOS Featured Image could be used as a springboard for discussion, as could the article it came from:
Users sign up for an account and download (IE 7) or drag (Firefox) 2 buttons to their bookmarks (no Safari, so far). To begin using Notate, you navigate to a web page you want to annotate and click on the Snap button to capture the page. Then the Notate 2.1 dialog box comes up and you can add comments, questions, replies, tags, highlighting and additional documents. Notate also allows you to create wiki-like pages where you can view all your snapshot pages, notes and tags, and to which you can add additional subpages.
If you want to check out Notate without registering for an account, try Textensor’s Sandbox area.
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I’m completely fascinated by online social-networking and in the near future I’m giving two conference presentations about Facebook. My colleagues are aware of my research interest in Facebook and this week Michael informed me that Facebook had released their beta version of Facebook Pages. According to PC World, 100,000 Facebook Pages were made in the first 24-hours of release. To explain Pages in a nutshell, their purpose is to connect businesses to their customers. Of course, librarians wasted no time creating Pages for their libraries — check here for the group Librarians Using Facebook Pages and the Page I created for the Valley Library at Oregon State University.
You might ask yourself, “How are Facebook Groups different than a Facebook Pages?” Let me explain a bit further. The average Facebook user joins a Group simply as a way to show support or unity with a group of people. Once you join a Group, you have to visit the Group site to see if there are any updates or changes. I assume most people are like me — I join a Group, like “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert,” and read the Group’s page the same day I sign up, and then I never look at it again. It would be too annoying to check every Group every day, so I simply don’t check any of the Groups at all.
Enter Facebook Pages. When I join a Facebook Page, I become a “Fan” of the Page and I don’t have to check the Page for updates, instead all updates are continually fed to my Facebook Newsfeed, which I, and other active Facebook users, check on a daily basis. Also, Pages allow you to add different Facebook Applications to the Page — although I’ve noticed most of them are not working yet (blame it on the beta stage). In the future, it should be possible to add Meebo or the JSTOR Application to the Page.
To create a Facebook Page you need to login to your profile and go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Businesses” link. Then select “Facebook Pages“.
Reminder: Facebook Pages are still in the beta stage and there are some bugs to-be fixed. For example, when I entered the hours of operation into the Valley Library Page, it erased the hours every time I updated a different section of the Page. After entering in the hours three times I gave up.
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This week I’m breaking an Infodoodads rule. I’m posting about a service that may not always be free. The service I’m writing about has both paid and free elements, but, I thought it was amazingly cool so here it is. 
One of my favorite features is that as an RSS feed it shows up in my 
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