I will return to blogging after the holidays. May your holidays be filled with candlelight and love. And hopefully we will get some snow yet! Gray clouds and rain are just not right for a Wisconsin Christmas!

Medicine.org offers information on diseases and conditions, health news, active discussion forums, and a section on general health concerns and issues.  The lay out of the site is clean and clear, with the sections neatly laid out and accessible.  I also like the way they provide the most recent content and the most active forum topics prominently.  Additionally, there is an RSS feed for their content.

VideoJug is a site that offers informational videos made by regular people.  You can learn how to eat sushi, how to survive the holidays, how to make specific dishes, beauty tips, DIY, and much more.  You can suggest a new subject for them to make a film about and rate the existing films.  The films have printable instructions for you to use as well.  Very slick!  

Dorling Kindersley now has DK Clip Art available for FREE!  Most of the images are done in their distinctive clean style of a single object on a white background.  Sweet!  Point kids doing PowerPoint slides for class here, use it for your library websites and publicity, and share it with people creating documents of any sort.  It is great to have quality images available for free!

Babble is a website for urban parents. It offers columns, feature articles, blogs, information on products, entertainment, and travel. It also offers a community for you to belong to where you can comment, post, and interact.

An interesting tidbit from SixWise tells us of a study that shows that Those Who Read Fiction Are Better at Reading People. Interesting!
I do think that it does follow logically. The whole reason to read fiction is to empathize with the characters. Nonfiction can be read for that reason too but also for many other reasons. Personally, I am a fiction reader but also enjoy nonfiction about specific people, especially memoirs. Empathy all the way baby!

VideoTabsArchive lets you learn songs for the guitar through videos of the fingering.  You can search the video collection by song or artist, browse by most popular, most recent, and highest rated.  And of course you can rate the videos yourself. 

I have always loved browsing collections of recommended websites. cool site collection follows in the tradition of Cool Site of the Day from way back at the beginning of the web. This new site has screenshots, visitor ratings, and an RSS feed. Web 2.0 strikes again!

CozmoTV is an alternative to YouTube.  They offer accounts where you rate the shows you like and then it will recommend other videos to you.  You can also save video clips to your account and see the most recent videos you have watched easily.  The best part of CozmoTV is their channels, allowing you to quickly find subjects of interest like Monty Python, cute babies, adorable kittens, or amazing car videos by simply browsing. 

StumbleUpon, one of my favorite web services has added an additional feature: StumbleVideo that works the same way StumbleUpon does for websites except it has video clips. You can give any clip a thumbs up or thumbs down and limit what you view to specific categories. The more you rank, the better the recommendations are.