Google Maps has announced a new feature, Street View which lets you look at street-level photos for select locations. To access Street View, you can watch a quick demo video or just put in a search for a large city like San Francisco or New York and click on the Street View button that appears at the top of your map. Very interesting stuff and a nice addition to the Google Maps service.
Tageru is a very interesting search engine that is specifically for searching some of the hottest tagging sites online. You decide which of 43Things, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Furl, Wink or Wikipedia to search. The nice thing is that you start typing in your search term and it generates a list of similar tags. This is very important with tags, because there is no standard subject headings. Some people will tag an item with book, other with books, other with literature, etc.
Easy to use, fast and powerful, this site is a great place to go to find tags you are interested in on some of the top sites.
BeeThere is an online concert guide. You can search by city, event, artist or venue. Or create an account and enter your favorite bands (even upload the artist names from your iPod) and then you can notified in time to purchase tickets for related events.
Instant Bull is a Web 2.0 stock information site filled with all sorts of links to sites, stock information, message boards, and much more. Simply enter a stock symbol or company name and discover the most recent news coverage about it.
Fortuitous is a fairly new blog that offers great insights into different subjects. Two recent ones are on community and web apps. The posts are long, interesting and worth the read. But my favorite part is their design with everything at the bottom of the page rather than the top. Very refreshing.
You are all going to get so very tired of me talking about our new website, but because it has been such an undertaking and it is about to debut, please forgive me. 
One thing that we are spending quite a bit of time with is the clip art that we choose to use on our posts. ImageChef will be a fun way for us to create customized, funny, hip graphics for our site. ImageChef lets you customize the graphic, choose the size you want and then has HTML code you can insert on your site! If you are looking for classy graphics that will reflect the time-honored bastions of your library, don’t bother to look here. If however, you have a teen section to fill with hip graphics and you don’t mind the fact that they are a bit cheesy, look no further!
Ooo! This is one that you just have to try out! Musicovery lets you run a radio by selecting the genres of music you like and then choosing from a continuum of Energetic, Positive, Dark and Calm. Then you get a morphing cloud of choices. Click on one you would like to hear and it immediately becomes the center of the cloud and you see more related songs. And best of all, you get to hear the songs you want. Not suggestions of things like the songs, but the actual songs. This rocks! Literally.
Nikon presents Universcale. This visual tour of our universe is graphic and fascinating. Start in the extremities of space where the size of heavenly bodies is staggering. And travel through to the microcosm that takes a microscope to explore. Amazing stuff that once again speaks to the power of the online medium.
You Could Write a Book is a site that brings authors and those interested in becoming authors together. You can find information on publishers, upload your writing for criticism, join the social network at the Author’s Studio, and much more. If you have always thought of writing a book, this is a great place to network and find necessary information.
This is the site we needed when we were building our new library website! It has a collection of recommended library websites that show different styles, options, features, etc. Exactly what any website committee needs to get their creative juices flowing and to start lots of debates among members. Bookmark this one if you will be starting a website redesign soon, and who isn’t!
