Alltop is a fascinating site where top sites are grouped together into easily browsed categories.  Start at the front page and you can either search topics by keyword or browse alphabetically or by larger categories.  Once you find a topic of interest, you will find yourself looking at the most recent posts from many of the top bloggers on that subject.  

Be aware that the placement on the page can be rather odd.  The top children’s lit blogger is really low on the Children’s Literature page.  But the selection of blogs is incredibly wide ranging.  If you pause your mouse on any entry you get a sample from the beginning of the post.  Definite click savings!

If you have staff or patrons who don’t get RSS feeds, this is another way to get them reading blogs.

I kept on seeing keyboardr mentioned on PopURLs and other hot spots.  I even pulled up their front screen and then wasn’t inspired to put in a search at the time.  Well, I was so wrong!

Meet a search engine that is easy, incredibly fast and offers you many search engines in one handy place.  The searches start when you start typing, not when you hit enter.  Very nice!

You will find results from Google, Google Blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google Images.  You get the top results in each of them. 

Now, are you ready?  The best part is that you can move around the screen with your KEYBOARD!  Just use the arrow keys and hit enter when you find the one you want to go to.  Sounds insignificant, doesn’t it?  But it is great!  You just have to give it a try.

Looking for some good items to highlight on your library’s blog?  NPR has some great ones:

Listen to the 2008 National Book Award Winners: Winners for fiction, nonfiction, youth and poetry read aloud from their work.

The Year’s Best Gift Books is filled with art books that will have you reaching for the books through your screen.

The Environmental Working Group is offering this cosmetic safety database.  The database has over 40,000 products that they compare with 50 toxicity and regulatory databases.  You can search by product, ingredient or company.

Why is this important?  Because under federal law, companies can use almost any ingredient in personal care products AND there are no pre-market safety test on them! 

This is a great site to share with teens and adults. 

I am honored to be a part of the WiLS Library Open Source Webinars series. My presentation on the Social Library and Its Tools is scheduled for 2:00 pm on December 2nd. 

I’ll be focusing on Twitter, Delicious and FriendFeed primarily.  I got trained to use the Live Meeting interface today and my only worry now is how it will feel to do a presentation without a group of people looking back at me. 

So feel free to join me!  You can register here.

When I was a young library student all those many years ago, I worked as a runner for WiLS.  I retrieved items from the Engineering Library and the Law Library on the UW-Madison campus and loved it.  I’m glad to be able to continue my work with the wonderful people at WiLS.

Google is now hosting millions of historical photographs from the LIFE photo archive.  Photos date from the 1700s to today and most have never been published before.  The interface is nicely designed with a keyword search.  You can also browse by decade or look through some of the compiled categories. 

Definitely one to link to on your recommended websites!

Monty Python is getting revenge on all of the people who have posted their videos up to YouTube.  And it is the best revenge ever!  They are starting their own YouTube channel.

So if you are a fan, make sure you click over and at least view the introductory film on how they are taking the best of the best in good quality and giving them to us for free.  So there!

I had great fun yesterday doing a class on Vista for patrons.  I am the only person in the library still running Vista on my own PC, so I was the default choice to do the class.  As I explained to my group, I am also the most stubborn person on staff, so that’s why I refuse to switch back to XP.

I started by speaking about the challenges of Vista and then went through the "Features".  There was a lot of interest in the Photo Editor that is included as well as the Ease of Access center and Speech Recognition.

I will warn anyone doing a class on Vista that my Sidebar disappeared and reappeared at the most inconvenient times.  Eventually we got it to work so that they could see how to add new gadgets and remove them. 

As with any computer class or Windows software, it is best to approach it with a sense of humor.  The best part of the class was laughing together about 5-hour support calls, the Gates empire, and the potential of Windows 7.

It was a wonderful way to spend a wintry afternoon.