Sometimes I find myself thinking about strange things. Today, I was reading an old article from ALA that used the word snarky in the first paragraph and inspired this post.
For reasons I don’t entirely comprehend, I love the word snarky. I love the brand of humor it inspires, I love characters who could be described by it, I love the way it sounds. Weird, ne? So, I find myself curious. Does anyone else have a favorite word? If so, what do you like about it?
Michael McGrorty muses about the nature of blogs and writers and what happens when the twain meet.
I think I’ve finally managed to find a media collection application. It’s a little web app called Listal that’s currently in an open Beta phase. Like so many other social tagging collectives, Listal allows users to compile lists of DVDs, books, music, and computer games that they own or wish they owned. Each item links to a summary, pertinant stats, and links to other people who have included that item in their list. Unlike another app I looked into, Listal also allows sorting, custom lists, and some other neat little features that I haven’t run into yet.
Because it’s still in beta, obviously there are some quirks left to iron out, but thus far, I’ve been pretty impressed. The only thing I can really complain about at this point is the fact that sorting and display settings aren’t saved anywhere and default to a list of items, sorted by date entered, which isn’t very useful to me. This has been mentioned on the forum once already, and I added my voice to it as well, so we’ll see if anything gets changed in the future.
Anyway, one of the neat features that I really like is the “frequency cloud” of directors and actors that is available on the DVD Home page. I really can’t tell you why Keanu Reeves tops our actor list, but .. there you go, an interesting tidbit about our movie collection. Another neat thing is the ability to display your collection with emphasis on the DVD cover image (kind of reminds me of the output from Delicious Monster, which Brendan had suggested before). Also, supposedly there are some bookmarklets out there that take advantage of some Amazon API functionality to easily add items, but I haven’t been able to find them yet. A couple of bookmarklets are available that you can use, while browsing Amazon, to take advantage of Amazon’s search capabilities.
I’ve only been signed up for a day, but this is the slickest social media collection management application (oi what a mouthful) that I’ve seen thus far (I have to rule out delicious monster only because I don’t have a Mac, and I couldn’t find anywhere that it would run on anything but). The interface is clean, relatively intuitive, and pleasing to look at. The navigation generally makes sense, and adding items is pretty easy, even if you have a large-ish collection. I haven’t played much with the rating or tagging stuff yet, but both ideas seem to have potential. Creating custom lists is really simple as well, and you can easily add descriptions for each item within the list as well as specify the ordering (I think). There aren’t currently any hooks to display data in another site (like a blog), but there are rss feeds available, so I think it shouldn’t be too hard to work something up. My only regret currently is that I didn’t find it sooner - Listal’s been up since August 29!
Take a look at my collection if you like, and let me know if you start one of your own!
I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yesterday. It was a very quick read for me, covering maybe 6 or 8 hours total, despite it’s 600+ pages. Overall, I’m pleased with the book. It answered a number of questions, as was promised, but it introduced more than a few new ones, so I am a bit dismayed that I will have to wait however long to read the next (and last) book in the series. I’m going to get a bit more specific about what I thought, so consider the cut below your major spoiler warning - don’t click on the rest of the post if you don’t want to read about what happens.
(Continued..)