LibraryThing

For anyone pining for a book club, without the time or the contacts to join one, or someone just looking for recommendations for a good read, LibraryThing has a lot to offer. The site provides information about millions of titles, including reviews and links to similar books. It offers connection to other people with similar reading taste and a system for keeping track of the books you own.

Today, I checked out reviews on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as well as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The reviews are uneven in quality, often sketchy in content and merely providing a opinion about whether or not the book was enjoyable without developed reasons for why it was. Still, with enough people contributing to the discussion, you start to get an idea about a book.

I am a lucky woman. I belong to a relaxed book club where discussion is wide ranging. It flits from the book chosen for the meeting to any good book we have recently read (digressing along the way to families and current events). At work, I have Terrill Budd, my maven for quirky good reads and films. And generally, the CPL work culture is a place where good books are shared.

While it's not a substitute for readers' advisory, it is a place to start.

Google Documents

Google Documents offers a nifty way of working on a collaborative document or presentation. It is also a boon for accessing work-in-progress, using different computers at different locations - no memory stick needed, no need to attach a document to an email (a multi-step process when you store documents on the I drive at CPL).

Access to technology is becoming more democratic with the development of online productivity tools. In recent times past, expensive software was required to provide the applications that are now available online for the taking. Part of the appeal is the collaborative way the products evolve.

Who would choose an expensive networking system when you have free access to an online solution?

Flickr and Youtube and Foodies

For some time now, I have been thinking about writing a food blog, and if I ever finish paring my life down to manageable levels, it could happen.

There are a lot of them out there. Some are astonishingly good and others are very, boringly bad and self indulgent. Then, there are those that are just plain freaky. I visited one "food" site where the author devoted an entire blog to killing a snake in her garden. If you are as pretentious as moi, you know which side of the scale I am aiming for, which of course keeps me from moving forward. The potential for egg on the face is enormous.

Flickr is a goldmine for anyone thinking about writing food and punctuating the text with pretty pictures. There are many ways of searching which produce quite different results, for example, food and produce or vegetables and eggplant.

With Youtube, cooking becomes comic entertainment. Try "cooking with Christopher Walken" for some unconventional advice and hilarious parodies.

If you are going to be bad, you may as well be funny.