LenEdgerly.com

Here are some internet pearls I've found using StumbleUpon in the past week or so:

Wisdomquotes.com - an incredibly extensive list of quotes, by categories. From the Christmas group, I found this one from Garrison Keillor: "A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together."

The PocketMod - clever transformation of a single 8x10 piece of paper into a daily organizer.

Starbucks Drinks Simplified (Kinda) - precise descriptions of everything you can order at Starbucks.

Fine B&W photo of a train in a snowstorm.

The Age Project - people upload their photos, and you guess how old they are. One click and you find out how close you were, and they find out how old they look to lots of other people. Weird, but oddly compelling. I just posted my photo and will be interested in the results, which appear here:


Benjamin Krain Photojournalist - beautiful and arresting photos of the Katrina aftermath.

A Bandwidth Meter - shows how fast your internet connection is.

The Beauty of Mathematics - cool tricks with numbers.

Wikitravel - a wikipedia creation in which users generate travel-related content.

Google Book Search - enter a search word and find any book that contains it anywhere in its text. Incredible and almost scary. Try entering your name and see what comes up!

PODCASTS

When I searched on the tag "Podcast" I stumbled upon the following podcasts which I'm adding to my iTunes podcast directory for further exploration:

The Best of Ideas, hosted by Paul Kennedy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). So far, I have listened to the third of a three-part series on declassifying Cold War documents, which was fascinating and very well done.

Open Culture - an absolute treasure trove of podcasts, organized by categories. Just now I found one and subscribed, a feed from the Council on Foreign Relations. Others include podcasts from The Commonwealth Club Radio Program, and the Guardian Unlimited podcasts

Enough! This perhaps gives a feel for how powerful StumbleUpon is as a tool for finding new websites worth bookmarking and returning to. The installation and learning of the interface are not for the faint of heart, and I've only begun to feel comfortable with it, enough to know I will be returning often to stumble upon new delights.

Sunday, December 24, 2006