Nomao calls itself a “web 2.0 recommendation service for places and events,” but it’s also an easy way to create a map widget for your blog, website, or even your Facebook and MySpace profiles. Just pin your places and you’ll be given the option to export your map to your blog. You can choose your color (nope, orange isn’t the only one, just the best) as well as a few other customized display options, and when you click the “export” button you’ll see a whole list of exporting options from Typepad to Blogger to Flash. Nomao’s interface is available in several languages and the user community is very international so it could be a good way to find local recommendations on your next adventure as well, wherever it may be.
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Our friend and colleague, AMD of info-fetishist.org, blogged about a timeline creator called Dipity. Her post reminded me that I wanted to check out options for creating timelines after a student asked about chronologies at the reference desk.
Thus, I learned about xtimeline, where you can explore existing timelines, create your own, share timelines and chat with others about their or your timeline.
The quality reflects the democratic spirit of the site, anyone can create a timeline using whatever sources they choose. For example, most of the content for the Virginia Woolf timeline comes from Wikipedia rather than a mix of sources. For those looking for a scholarly timeline, I wouldn’t use this as your only source.
xtimeline is easy enough for a class to use for homework or for a in class activity. I made a quick timeline for infodoodads to test out xtimeline. The creator is clear and easy to use and you can choose to use the regular or quickly add events feature. You can embed photos, flash or videos, though I stuck to photos. The text editor uses standard tools for editing content and inserting web links. Timelines can be made public or private and discussion can be open to the public or limited to editors. Overall, fun tool and easy to use.
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Just the other day, someone came into the library looking for sheet music. I wish I had known about Mutopia then; I might have been able to use it to find what was needed. Mutopia is a growing collection of sheet music editions of classical music for free download. And while it’s great to have a searchable database of downloadable scores, the Mutopia Project is also interesting because it encourages people to make their own arrangements, transpositions or editions of musical scores that are licensed for such re-mixing, or that are in the public domain. Composers can contribute new scores, but to do so they must apply metadata that would make a librarian proud. I wonder if that will be a barrier to contribution. Another service that the Mutopia Project offers is to have sheet music printed and or published through Lulu.
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Keeping your options open? Looking for the new big thing? LinkUp offers a way to search the jobs that don’t show up in Monster or other big job sites. I was initially really excited about LinkUp because well, you know, I’m graduating later this year and am scouring the web for librarian jobs like you wouldn’t believe [personal sales pitch: if you’re looking to hire a fabulous young librarian who has a good head on his shoulders and makes killer brownies, send me a note: infodoodads.michael@gmail.com] and keep seeing the same jobs recycled in the same places.
However, once the results showed up I was a little disappointed. A search for “librarian” in the location “Arizona” brought up 2 results. Both were for corporate positions, which is interesting, but one of the links wasn’t even valid anymore. I know for a fact that there are more library-related positions available than that. Changing librarian to library produced many results, but mostly software engineer positions–not something I’m qualified for, yet. So if you are a software engineer, this could be an excellent tool.
The user experience exists in a tabbed browsing system. Your results are in the first tab and any jobs you view from those open in new tabs–all within the webpage, not your browser tabs. I really enjoyed this feature a lot. All in all, the interface is simple and very useful, but the search engine obviously needs some more refinement.
Aside from the job search, they offer a resume storage/submission system. It appears to be fairly standard, in comparison to other sites though it does offer a tracking feature which would be convenient if applying to many jobs in the same time frame.
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I’m a longtime user of Photoshop, but I have to say that picnik offers almost everything I need, and it’s so easy! Once you upload a picture, you can edit (color, red eye, contrast, levels, etc) and create (add text and images, color the photo, fade the edges, round the corners, etc). I uploaded a simple color photograph of my husband and quickly made the following changes in less than 10 minutes! I love all the font choices (I’m a font addict). This is the BEST free photo editing software I’ve found…enjoy!
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Lest you think nothing productive can come from Twitter, I want you to know today’s doodad is one that came to me in a Twitter conversation I had with someone I’ve never even met in real life (thanks alundstrom!)
The Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight sections of a web page, then save it for your own purposes or pass it along for others to see. You can begin by simply pasting a URL into the box on the homepage, but I had the best luck with the bookmarklet, and there’s also a Firefox extension to make highlighting while browsing easier. Once you’re on the page you just highlight with the mouse (like you’re going to copy something) and it automatically highlights what you select. When you’re done, you’re given a URL to share your marked up page. Really, if you’ve ever used a highlighter you know pretty much everything you need to know. Seems like this could come in pretty handy for email or IM reference!
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Need some cash and don’t want to deal with a bank? Are you a freeformer? Or are you looking to invest in a worthwhile business or person building their dream? You can turn to Zopa, “where members who invest help members who borrow”. Started in the U.K., Zopa has branches in the U.S., Italy and Japan.
Zopa’s tagline pretty much says it all. They match people who have money to lend to people who would like to borrow money. Both parties have an opportunity to meet their goals and more. It’s the “more” that originally caught my attention. I was drawn in by the possibility of low interest, easy to obtain loans for people wanting to fulfill a dream or for those simply wanting to pay off higher interest debt.
Looking a bit closer at the forums and feedback, I’m unsure if this potentially great idea and helpful service actually works as well as the enticing marketing purports. This seems like any other service that one would use where getting a referral, talking to others’ about their experiences and learning more about the organization is time well spent.
Another similar service in the U.S. called Prosper is available. A primary difference between the two seems to center on how interest rates are determined which I had a tough time figuring out. Both services seem to offer about the same rate. Prosper uses a bidding process for profiled borrowers and lenders and Zopa uses profiles for borrowers and CDs for investors/lenders.
At this point my not-so-financially savvy head started to spin. Both services seem like they could provide a good opportunity and like any financial decision each participant will have to decide what level of risk they are comfortable with.
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[swf]http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/383425/load/BwB6pNlyBefzxEER.swf[/swf]
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Traveling and you don’t quite trust the hotel alarm clock which you aren’t sure you set properly? Add a safeguard and use Wakerupper as your backup alarm. Not only good for waking up, you can use it as a date/time alarm for everything, even years in advance. They just implemented the ability to pre-record a voice message that will be played when you receive the alarm, or, it can text-to-speech a preset message for you as well. I could imagine myself using the text-to-speech for a grocery list that will “alarm” when I get off from work. Alarm + information = pretty cool.
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Once again Google is walking the fine line between creepy and cool. This time it is with their release of (the beta version) Google Health. The cool parts? - good summary pages of health conditions, links to searches by people with similar search interests to yours, links to forums on related health topics, the ability to find other online health support options, and an overall simple to use interface (but what else did you expect from Google?). 
The creepy parts? - okay these are all in the “it could go either way” category, for example if your medical records reside with a select group of providers you can download them into your Google Health account. You can enter in information about yourself (weight, height, medications, conditions) to help beef up your Health account. Granted, when you log into Google Health with your gmail account you need to agree to a number of conditions regarding privacy, but it’s still hard to feel totally safe uploading your medical records to a Google account (and I’m not usually very skittish about this sort of thing).
Google Health will definitely be a interesting player in the health search field. Whether their individualized profile system takes off will be a fascinating look into how users feel about how well their privacy can be protected on the internet.
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Awhile back Kate wrote a very popular post about Scratch, online software for creating video games from scratch. Since there has been so much interest in Scratch, I thought folks might also like to know about Fyrebug. Fyrebug is a little bit different (not quite as complex as Scratch), but still very fun. You simply choose the style of video game you want to create. Next you are given a basic “template” where you can switch out the pictures/icons/stuff to whatever you would like, including images you upload yourself. I had fun choosing images for my paddle game.
I originally uploaded the widget for the game directly into this entry. Although it looked great, it seemed to bog down the site…so, if you want to take a look, here is a link to the little game I created.
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Brand tags is a “collective experiment in brand perception” that collects the first word or phrase that comes to peoples’ minds when shown a particular logo. The tags for each brand are displayed by size to indicate their popularity and to give you an overall feeling of how the public views that particular brand. 
Brands as diverse as NPR, Miller Lite, and Splenda are listed (and let me just warn you that a few of the tags are…not very nice.) Some of the more popular tags for Google are shown in the graphic here–everything, everywhere, and evil–but the largest word, not surprisingly, seems to be “search.” That or “god,” they’re neck and neck. You can check out all the included brands as an alphabetical list, and there’s even a sort of game where you can guess the company from its associated tags.
Searching by tags is also an option; it’s interesting to see which brands are connected to the tags “information” or “books” or even to the concepts of being “credible” or “trustworthy.” It would be fascinating to see how people would tag the library.
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