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Digital Sandbox: Feeds, Firefox and Fiscal Prudence

Inspiration: 

Gary Price’s talk on Beyond 23 Things.  Price helps to put out http://www.resourceshelf.com  and http://www.docuticker.com

I especially thought readability was interesting, as well as a wiki of library sites for mobile devices

RSS feeds:

One of the easiest ways to subscribe in Outlook is to find the RSS button (the orange one with waves)

 and choose the Outlook option.  For more information, try typing RSS in the help bar at the top right of Outlook. Many sites, including this blog, have a twitter account that can act similar to an RSS feed.  

Firefox plugins:  

Under Tools, go to Add ons, and search.  Alternately, you can go to Firefox’s add-ons page to search for more. Some favorites are AnyColor to change the color of Firefox, Capture Fox to record my screen, Delicous.comEchofon (a twitter client) and YammerFox (for Yammer.com), Zotero.org’s plugin, and Hyperwords.

Hyperwords is an extension that will let you select text through the right-click, and do insane amounts of stuff to it,  such as search, reference, highlight, buy, share, translate, tag, and otherwise destroy the world.  If you do a Google search of something like “best firefox add-ons” you may be surprised by what’s out there. If you don’t have Firefox, I suggest you get it. Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s Safari are two other alternatives to Internet Explorer. 

Suggesters:

LibraryThing, where the unsuggester is a great bit of fun. On a more serious note, what you are seeing at work in these suggesters are millions of bits of data at work. Showing relationships among data has proved to be quite profitable.  Bookmooch is the site where you can swap a book for free, and Book Thing is the place in Baltimore where you can get free books!  Also, Better World Books raises money for global literacy through selling books.

On to Shopping!

ShopLocal and PriceGrabber were two sites reviewed. ShopLocal is for goods when you want to actually go to big box stores like Target and Walmart, while PriceGrabber will compare online stores. Remember to check for reputation when shopping online. And never buy before Googling for a coupon.  RetailMeNot saved me 75 dollars on a Zipcar membership for about 5 minutes work. For services, Angie’s list and Washington Checkbook were two good sources.  Shop.com was a site where with one login you can buy from many different vendors. Etsy is a site where you can purchase handmade items direct from the makers.

Photo editing:

We also looked at Picnik as a photo editing site.  Look for an upcoming sandbox on all things photographic. From software to websites to storage and retrieval.  Photoshop Disasters was the cream of the crop for bad work in Photoshop. Definitely worth a laugh or two.

Remember, there is a site for virtually anything out there!   And Go2Web20 is one great place to see hundreds of web 2.0 tools and applications.—Richard Naples

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