I’m always dubious when a new video site comes online.  But Reddit.tv which is linked closely with Reddit the “what’s new online” service offers just the top videos of the day in a friendly package.  You can merrily move from Best of the Web to Music to Politics without ever using your back button.  Just click on the new category.  Below the main screen, you will see the other top videos for that category.  Click and watch.

What makes me even happier is that they have partnered with TED to bring the hottest TED videos to the service.  Sweet!

This is a perfect service to show to those new to online video.  Yes, it will have the strange stuff, but it is much more user-friendly than the vastness of YouTube for a beginner.  It works well for veteran users as well because it just pulls the top videos of the day.

I’m more than a little bit of a recipe freak.  I collect them, file them, drool over them, and then make a handful each month.  Well, I have just found the perfect search engine for my recipe addiction:  Food.com. 

It searches for recipes across all of the big recipe sites.  So with simple keywords you can pull up any recipes you wish.  Download their toolbar and the functionality is even better with a recipe box that you can access from any recipe website, saving recipes of interest with a single click!  Just think of the files and files and files of recipes you can create!

More professionally, I know that one of the big question types we got when I used to work a public desk was for recipes for specific foods.  Often with a little twist that made finding the recipe a bit of a challenge.  This would be my first stop as a search engine for those queries. 

Want to find other Tweeters who are interested in the same subject?  Twy out Twibes where you can either cweate a bwand new Twibe or join an existing one.  (I promise I’ll stop that now.) 

The opening page is a little confusing.  Most people will be interested in joining existing Twibes which you can find here.  In order to use Twibes you must click on the green start button and link your account in.  Which is done on the front page.  Then it takes you to a page where you can recommend the people you follow.  Cute, but not as helpful as the Twibes themselves. 

There is one caution.  You may find literally hundreds of more people to follow on Twitter! 

The Fox Cities Book Festival was an enormous success this year. Beautiful weather, incredible speakers, brilliant authors, and a supportive and enthusiastic community added up to pure magic. As President of the Festival this year, I was so pleased to see a lot of the changes we made from the first Festival worked! And because we are people who love to plan, discuss and think, we are already talking about how to make next year even better – a conversation that started before we even finished all of the events this year!

The Board is made up of what I like to call strong personalities, myself happily included. We are all passionate about what we are doing, what we each have to contribute, and making this the best Festival we can. It is the Board that makes this happen, their character, their giving nature, their belief that if we come together we can make something incredible. I will take strong personalities any day.

Now as I sit and think back over the last several days of hard sometimes back straining work, I keep thinking of a moment I had with one of our Chairs, Will Bloedow. We discussed why we were doing this, Will grabbing a quick lunch in the children’s book area and me rushing about restocking the piles of books. I told him that I did it because it is a joy. Hard yes, challenging definitely, but pure joy not only to see come to life but to work on with such intensity with such great people.

Joy.

Pure, crystalline joy of doing something that brings a community together, gets everyone talking about books and reading, and has us laughing and crying together.

At the end of one program, a colleague asked me how it was going and I told him how busy and chaotic the time ahead was going to be. His reply, “Well now you know better than to do this next year.” I must have looked completely stunned by that response. I recovered enough to say with some indignation that I had not only been part of it last year but planned to do this for many years to come. He misunderstood my explanation of the hurdles yet to come as a reluctance to run the race. One wonders how many races he has not bothered to even attempt.

There are so many things that are worth the time and effort, the care, the sweat. Some of which can be seen as a burden. But this is not a burden I take on. It is a joy that I embrace and will continue to for as long as I can.

As I have mentioned before, I’m a bit of an online music nut.  8tracks offers a service I haven’t seen before.  They do playlists or mixes that their members put together.  You can listen to a mix, create your own, or happily browse around the site dipping in and out of mixes. 

To get a sense of how much fun it can be to listen to a mix, try out Music that Makes You Feel Important.  Perfect for when you need a pick-me-up or when you are conquering that next online dungeon. 

Over the years, one of the things I have continued to believe is that public libraries need to be much more aware of open source software.  And as this latest financial crisis seems to have libraries firmly in its path, this might be an ideal time for libraries to turn to open source for the savings alone.

I would advocate that additionally, libraries and open source theory go hand-in-hand.  It just seems like a natural pairing to me.

OSTATIC is a site that will be helpful if you are interested in taking a look at some of the open source options out there.  There is an OStatic blog, software list with ratings and reviews, and a place to ask questions.  It is a nice place not only to begin but to continue to visit to keep up on OS options.