BookYap: Book Recomendations

I am about to start using a new web application called BookYap. Put simply, BookYap is an application that recommends books based on criteria you enter. There are over 650 000 books in its database, so chances are it will find a book for you.

You can search for a book by using keywords or the filters it has available (based on personality types). By becoming a registered user, the application learns more and more about you and your reading habits, improving the recommendations it makes for you.

Books appear with thumbnails of their covers and book ratings. A brief description appears by hovering over the thumbnail. You are able to interact with the application and associated community by sharing books you have read and your reviews of them. There is connectivity with both Facebook and Twitter also.

You are also able to add books to a reading wishlist if you like. Books can be purchased from Amazon when you choose a book to read.

Visit BookYap at:
http://bookyap.com/

 

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Mylifelisted.com

Mylifelisted.com is a social network where members can list, count and share their life experiences. It seems a little odd perhaps to make lists of your experiences – what you’ve done, when you’ve done it, where you’ve been and what you’ve achieved – but it may be a useful way to remember your life to some degree. When you add locations on a map, add photos and comments, add the names of people who shared your experiences, the lists you form begin to take on even more meaning. So perhaps mylifelisted.com could be a helpful and useful way to remember your life.

Mylifelisted.com has only just begun and I have only just signed up, so time will tell as to how useful a site it is. I’ll give it a try anyhow.

http://www.mylifelisted.com

Diigo

Diigo has been about for some time, but I have only just registered an account. I use Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and the other bookmarking and surfing web applications/social networks that I have posted about in recent weeks, yet diigo adds another element to my web adventures.

Diigo is a social network sharing site, in that you can share the bookmarks/favorites that you save. But the new element that diigo gives me in my surfing the net is that which I have at hand when I am reading a book or magazine offline – a highlighter and the ability to add notes to the written page (which in diigo is done via a sticky note that is attached to the page you are on). I can then return to the page I am reading with a bookmark as it were attached to where I got up to (by way of a sticky note), highlighted sections that were of particular interest to me and the ability to share what I have added to that page by way of my highlights and sticky notes. It is also possible to take a collaborative approach to this sort of online research by creating a group of users within diigo.

I can see diigo becoming a very important research tool that I will use for many years to come.

Visit diigo at:
http://www.diigo.com

Blogging with Tumblr

It’s no secret that I use wordpress.com a lot for Blogging. I have close to 10 Blogs/sites hosted at wordpress.com. These days there are a large number of Blogging platforms to choose from – many of which provide a very easy and simple user experience. My platform of choice remains wordpress.com, though coming in at a very close second is tumblr. I do have a tumblr Blog which is called ‘Daily Dribble,’ which is a Blog that captures posts that I don’t post elsewhere. I love to Blog and often find myself thinking that I’d like to post that website/article/thing somewhere, but it doesn’t quite fit into what I’m doing on any particular Blog that I have set up – this is where my tumblr Blog fits. It captures this overflow if you like.

There are many things to like about tumblr, apart from the fact that is very simple to use. You don’t need to be a HTML expert to use it, though you can use HTML for your posts should you choose to do so. Since I like a certain formatting appearance I choose HTML mode for my posts and it really is quite simple to do (if you know a little HTML of course). If you don’t know HTML tumblr remains very easy to use and is one of the very simple Blogging platforms out there for people just getting started in Blogging or for those with more experience.

I also use the Chrome browser from Google and the little Chrome Extension I have for posting URLs straight into tumblr (with the post) is a fantastic way to add content to my Blog. You can also set up your tumblr Blog to post straight  to your Twitter account or to Facebook, which is all very convenient.

There is so much more to having a tumblr account – all worth checking out at:

http://www.tumblr.com/

My tumblr Blog is at:

http://particularkev.tumblr.com/

Add Chat to a Website

If you have a website and would like to add chat to it – check out Chatango at:

http://chatango.com/

Rollyo: Create Your Own Search Engine

If you have a website and would like to create a search engine just for it, you can use Google of course, or you can use Rollyo. But more than that, with Rollyo you can add whatever sites you like to the search engine. This is a great little idea which I intend to use in the future (when I get around to doing so).

Check it out at:

http://rollyo.com/index.html