Links

There are 24 posts filed in Links (this is page 3 of 3).

Cool things I’ve run across recently:

By no means is this an all-inclusive list.

http://www.pat2pdf.org/ – This site lets you download a whole U.S. patent in one pdf file, as opposed to the official registry’s method of one page at a time. I made a couple of our researching faculty members really happy with this link.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/scout.php – See which of your Flickr photos have been featured on the Explore page. Four of my year in photos project made the cut! (On a related note, I’m going to revive that project for 2007)

This primer/guide has been invaluable as I start to think about getting an HDTV. So many acronyms and numbers! Unlike a lot of more technical tv choice guides, this one is anchored with a dose of reality.

Beth of LibGaming invited me to iLike, a social recommendation engine for iTunes. It takes up a bit more of my screen real estate than I’d like, but otherwise seems pretty useful so far.

I got an iPod Nano! (Just the 2gb version, that’s still far more music than I can listen to while running.) Combined with the Nike pedometer sport kit and an armband, it has completely changed the way I exercise. The online stat tracking and comparisons with friends is really addicting. Plus, I run outdoors more now that I can keep reasonably accurate track of how far I’ve gone. I may write more about this at some point.

Lastly, I recently got to try the Nintendo Wii at a store. Now I’m going to have to buy one. Even a simple driving game is addictive!

eBible

The other day I received an invite to the beta release of eBible.com. I’m really impressed!

The site’s core functionality of full text bible searching isn’t anything new. Instead, the difference is in the details. Users can tag verses, and browse the tags others have assigned. Different translations of the text are displayed side by side, and commentaries dynamically show up next to the relevant passages.

Unfortunately, eBible does not contain the popular New International Version translation. But I have heard before that NIV is copyrighted, and rather expensive to get the relevant rights, so this is understandable.

I have one minor quibble that doesn’t really impact usability of the site: the bookmark functionality is redundant when tagging is available. I would much rather assign a tag like ‘bookmark’ to a verse than have to view my tags and bookmarks in separate sections of the site.

eBible is not yet accessible to the general public, but if you’d like one of my three invites just leave your e-mail address in a comment.

Google’s Related Links

I’m still alive! Just very busy.

Today Google added a “Related Links” box that anybody can embed into their site. I’ve added it down near the bottom of my sidebar (for now) if you want to check it out.

Mostly I was just curious what Google would pull up as recommended from parsing my site. Right now its one news story about national library week and a couple of random library-related blogs.

I guess you can think of the service like the Adsense program, only you don’t get paid when people click the links. But on the plus side, these are ‘real’ links instead of ads. And meanwhile, our Google Overlords get to harvest even more data 🙂