Image via CrunchBase

I am in love with a new browser!  I’ve been using Chrome exclusively as my browser for a few weeks now and could not be more pleased.  Here are some of the things that make Chrome my favorite:

1. Very fast.  It starts up faster and loads pages faster.  Yeah!

2.  Increased vertical screen space.  Because there is no top menu for File etc, there is a lot more space on the screen.  I also appreciate that the Tabs go way up on top.

3. Really clean design.  Very simple and uncluttered design that is like breathing fresh air after being inside for awhile.

4.  Great plug-ins that really work and are more easily installed than Firefox’s.  Plus some of the things you need to download on Firefox are already enabled here on Chrome.  This includes Netflix’s streaming software.  Yippee!

Now for some small touches that really make a difference:

1. When you open a new tab, it opens next to the one you are currently in.  Meaning that it does not open way at the tail end of all of the tabs you have open so you get to arrow right to find the tab you wanted to open.  Or if you are like me, so by the time you get to that tab you can’t remember where you found the link.

2.  Built in translator.  Very slick.

3.  Find feature is the best I have ever used.  Offers a small drop-down find box, a count of the number of times the term was found, and highlights all of the occurrences of the word.

4.  When you open a tab, it slides open.  When you shut it, it slides shut.  Small touch, but I noticed it immediately.

5.  Many extensions appear as buttons, making a lot of my bookmarks obsolete.  I love that.

6.  Home page can be set to a collection of the top most-used websites.  Plus you get a list of the most recently closed tabs.  Or you can easily view a full history from there. 

Have you tried Chrome yet?  What do you think?

TwitCritics offers real-time movie reviews and ratings compiled from Twitter.  The reactions to the films are scored as either positive or negative which results in a percentage score.  The higher the score, the more positive the reviews are.  Here is an example of what it looks like when you look at a specific title:

You can see that they nicely link to the official movie website, Wikipedia, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes.  You can then read the individual tweets about the movie. 

I’m looking forward to seeing more of this happening with Twitter.  How about book reviews?

This is a great link for Friday, because you just might have time to enjoy it this weekend! 

Clicker is a website that serves as a guide to Internet television.  They index all broadcast programming online, creating a one-stop place to find all of these shows, including web originals. 

The site contains 450,000 episodes from over 6,000 shows.  Plus they have thousands of movies and 50,000 music videos. 

Their opening page is welcoming with a slideshow of new and hot shows.  You can easily search by title or browse by categories like animation, arts, documentary, kids and many more.  You can also limit your browsing to specifically TV, movies, music or web originals. 

Nicely, they have also implemented a wiki where fans like you can contribute content about your favorite shows.  You can also create a playlist of your shows so that you see new episodes as they are added.

If you are looking for a way to post easily to multiple social networks, this is the site for you!  Ping.fm allows you to post to a wide variety of social sites, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Delicious and Flickr.  Nicely, the updates work with iGoogle, SMS, instant messengers, and email too.  You decide which sites get the update, or you can select to update all of your accounts. 

They also have a handy toolbar that works on both Firefox and IE.  It allows you to easily ping from any site you are on. 

Definitely a service worth trying out to see if it will save you time and effort. 

I have been blogging for seven years now.  Which amazes me.

This is the first year that I am really disappointed in the way I blogged here.  This last year has been more scattered for this blog than ever before.  I am posting less frequently, which frustrates me immensely.

I find myself wondering if readers would rather know about great websites or great articles. 

Do those newer What I Read Today posts work for you?  Or would you prefer I focus on a single article at a time?

I’m eager to hear what you would enjoy reading about.  And I make you and myself a pledge to try to post more frequently.  If you’d like to see what other things I do online, the best spot is my Twitter account at @tashrow.

For awhile I wondered about just doing Twitter instead of blogging, but having done this for so long, I find myself unwilling to give it up.  I also appreciate the space to breathe here, a podium to shout from too.

So thank you for continuing to read despite my lapses in blogging.  And please, let me know what you think would improve this blog.  I’d love to hear your opinions.

TrekEarth is a website that celebrates our world through photography.  You can search the photographs by keyword, browse by themes or categories, or take a look at the featured photos.  This is a community, so you can share your own photographs and offer critique for others. 

For traveling, this site is wonderful.  Often you wonder what an area looks like, and this site offers dramatic photographs of areas around the world.  In fact, it can be hard to turn away and easy to be drawn into a part of the world you have never investigated before.

Here are some of the articles online that I’ve been lingering at lately:

Offline Book “Lending” Costs US Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion exposes the true reality of librarians as contraband dealers.  We have lived in the darkness too long! 

I consider Another Black Eye for the Seattle Public Library’s Administration to be a must-read for library administrators.  The power of social networking cannot be controlled in the same way internal dialogue and complaints can be.  That should force every library administrator to be more careful when dismissing staff concerns.

10 Ways Leaders Can Use a Flip Video Camera will have you thinking about uses for videos in your library.

Testing out The Twit Cleaner, a service that analyses the people you follow to see if any are spammers, no longer active, or perhaps even too active and drowning out others.  As long as you are following less than 2000 people, you can have them unfollow people for you!  If you follow more than that, the report itself is still free but unfollowing costs a small fee.

Thanks to Twitip for the recommendation.

This blog and I are taking a long holiday break until January 4th.  See you then! 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS and thanks so much for reading.

Finding the right picture for a blog post can be time consuming.  Not only do you have to find the right image, but you also have to make sure you are using legal images.  Even if your image is one that is legal to use, Creative Commons will require that you attribute it to the right person.

Enter Sprixi, a site that helps you search for images and then creates the right attribution statement for you.  You can either use the image and statement as one file, or get them separately for more control over how they are shown on your blog.

This is a super idea for bloggers and an ideal site to demonstrate what correct usage of images should look like.

Here’s an example of an image and attribution (done in an elegant way):