Blogs

Before you forward that email check these sites. Urban Legends Reference Pages (aka Snopes) and TruthOrFiction.com. They let you quickly check for the truth about those email pleas for help, unbelievably cheap offers, virus warnings, myths, hoaxes, and just about anything that seems too good/bad to be true.

Check out this New York Times article on the decline of handwriting skills since the advent of the keyboard. The article requires registration; go to BugMeNot if you aren't registered already. Have your handwriting skills declined? Mine certainly have!

Each year, Yahoo! picks what they think are the ten oddest, most fun or most interesting sites of the year. Here are the 2004 entries. A few faves: Animals on the Underground, which finds the shapes of animals in London's Underground maps. And there's WordCount, a site that ranks the 86,800 most commonly used English words. I tried "whoopee" and found that it is number 53,526. "To" is number four. And the number one word is...drum roll...

The United States' 55th presidential inauguration takes place tomorrow. In light of this historical event, we thought some handy links to interesting resources would be timely. For starters, see how well you do on this Inauguration History Quiz, from the Washington Post (I got 7 out 10 right - looks like I could use a refresher Civics course).

The Public Library Association is breaking ground with the first official library association blog at an ALA conference with their PLA blog. Check in here (or add it to your RSS feed -- see the LII's About RSS if this is new to you) to find out what's important and see if you know any of the librarian bloggers.

I found this study, Academic Ranking of World Universities - 2004, mentioned in a recent New York Times article on the decline of foreign graduate students at U.S. universities. Check it out. California has 3 universities in the top 10, 6 in the top 20, and 10 in the top 100.

The American Library Association's RUSA (Reference and User Services Association) has compiled a list of the Best Free Reference Web Sites of 2004. If you haven't taken a look at this list yet, please do! You may be pleasantly surprised that you're familiar with a number of them, but I guarantee that one or two will be new to you!

Manybooks.net "contains more than 10,000 eBooks formatted for reading on your Palm, PocketPC, Zaurus, Rocketbook, or Symbian cellphone." Most of the etexts are from the Project Gutenberg archives, which digitizes older literary works that are in the public domain. I've begun my reading of French lit by downloading Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Proust's Swann's Way.

It's called ObjectGraph Dictionary, and works a lot like Google Suggest. As you type in a word, suggestions will appear in the box below where you are typing. What's neat is that you get not only the words, but their definitions. Two dictionaries are used: a regular dictionary and FOLDOC (Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing).