Do you love reading the news online but are sick of the crazy and often irrelevant commentary that so often follows it today?  Anyone who is wondering what is wrong with the world today just has to look at the lack of civility when it comes to how people comment on news sites.  There is more of the angry, the misinformed, and the off-base than there is of comments from people who care enough about the news to have an open and civil discussion.  Well, don’t give up on the online news yet.  Just change how to get it and share it.  Take a swing at Pinyadda and unlock the delights it has in store for true news hounds!

Pinyadda is not your run of the mill news aggregator.  No sir!  This fantastic site let’s you have your news and share it too.  When we say “share it”, we mean thoughtfully, respectfully, and openly with a community of news readers who care about comment and conversation just as much as you do. 

Pinyadda is a news aggregator with an interesting social twist.  Yes, you can follow and add news feeds from all kinds of sites.  Pinyadda will bring your feeds to you organized by site and topic.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the site does.    Using their unique “Pin It” feature, you can share stories with other Pinyadda members and add your own commentary, thoughts, or reaction.  They can respond and a real, meaningful conversation starts.  You can follow users with interests similar to your own and they can follow you as well.  This lets like-minded users see what each is pinning.  You can even use Pinyadda to “pin” news stories to your Twitter and Facebook feeds!  You are in the driver’s seat when it comes to what you do with the news that matters most to you.

As with all emerging social network systems, Pinyadda is also developing its own incentives system.  By pinning stories, you earn points and unlock badges.  There are also badges based on the number of pins you make.  Pin stories from the same sites repeatedly and you become an ambassador to that site.  Pin stories repeatedly from the same topic and you become an expert . . . or “maven” in Yadda-speak.  You have to defend these titles, however, by continuing to pin stories, lest they be taken away.  This keeps the interaction flowing and meaningful.

Pinyadda is a bold, new concept for news lovers – one which the iBraryGuy team has come to really appreciate.  You see, we love news and need our fix.  However, we can do without “the crazy” that is online news comentary these days.  Pinyadda is our new home for meaningful interaction when it comes to the stories that matter most to us.  Won’t you join us?

There are few certainties in life.  However, among the known definites are death, taxes, and the mark-up on text books.  Anyone going to school to these days knows just how expensive school books can be.  One almost needs to take out a separate loan to just buy texts.  Chegg is a hot new site that actually lets you “rent” the books you need for the semester at great rates.  In today’s economy, this is a true back-to-school boon!

Chegg’s model is simple.  Go to their site, search for the textbooks you need, and then rent the ones that are available for just the semester.  Why rent, you ask?  Have you seen the prices of new textbooks these days?  With Chegg, a one semester rental costs a fraction – yes, A FRACTION – of the cost of buying that textbook new.  Most of the titles the iBraryGuy team tested came in at less than a third of the retail buying price.  That is some serious savings!

Chegg not only ships you the books directly, but even sends you the return label to send your books back at the end of the semester.  It does not get much easier than that!  Chegg also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.  Return your books within the first 30 days of receiving them, for any reason, and Chegg will refund every penny.  Pretty cool.

Chegg accounts are free to create.  You only pay when you rent.  For those of you using iPhones, the company offers an app that lets you search and rent textbooks while on the go.  Oh!  And for those of you with old college textbooks sitting around . . . Chegg also buys used books.  Not a bad proposition in today’s economy!

Don’t look now… But sometime very soon, a word that probably never knew nor loved is about to become extinct.  Every year, hundreds of words fade forever from English parlance.  Friends, you have been asked to save the whales and save the planet.  Today, the iBraryGuy team is joining with the awesome folks at Oxford Press to ask you to SAVE THE WORDS!

Save the Words is both an interesting initiative and really cool site from the folks that bring us the venerable Oxford Dictionary line up.  Fun and informative, it challenges users to adopt an endangered word and make it part of their usage.  The idea is to keep that word from disappearing forever.  How serious is the extinction of words, you may wonder.  Well according to Oxford Press, only 7,000 words now account for over 90% of what we communicate on a daily basis!  What is happening to the rest of the millions of words in the English language?  Other than simply taking up space within the crammed pages of the biggest, most comprehensive dictionaries, they are fading forever into obscurity.

Save the Words invites you to adopt one of these words and stem the tide of our dying language.  The site is loaded with some of the most obscure and often difficult to pronounce words we have ever seen.  Half the fun was just trying to say them!  We could have spent hours scrolling them all.  Each word is accompanied by its definition and a sample usage sentence.  Using Save the Words, you actually sign a pledge to adopt and make use of the word you choose.  And it is FREE!  When you adopt word, you get a certificate of adoption and the option to buy a t-shirt with a picture of new bundle of linguistic love on it.  🙂

In the months to come, we here at iBraryGuy are going to give a little boost to Save the Words by featuring an endangered word weekly.  We hope that before you bring a new word into existence, you will consider one of these orphaned words for adoption.  That’s right.  You heard it here.  Why not make word adoption, your first option.

Happy Friday!

In a much anticipated announcement yesterday,  social networking powerhouse Facebook fired another shot hear around the world.  Make that the online world of “checking in”.  With the unveiling of Facebook Places, the company enters the hot and volatile war for geo-location supremecy.

Facebook Places is designed to let users include their location in their status updates, using the GPS on the user’s smartphone.  Whether you are going to work, the movies, or lounging at home, you can let your Facebook friends know where you are.  Apps like FourSquare (the current king), Gowalla, and Brightkite already do the same and are wildly popular.  What makes Facebook Places such a threat to the market however is the sites already eye-popping number of users.  Facebook comes out of the starting gate playing to an almost captive audience of a half-billion users!

Facebook Places also has some tempting features for those who like geo-location.  First and foremost is that your location is added directly to your Facebook status.  we all know how important those status updates have become.  Second is a unique tagging feature that lets you tag other Facebook friends who may be at that location with you.  It’s like an instant party invite to other friends who may be in the area.  Finally, Facebook Places has privacy in mind in that only your approved friends can see where you are.  The Facebook team were ready with the great features on day one.

Facebook Places is immediately available in the USA and will soon be coming to other countries.  It will be interesting to not only see where this goes, but how the competitors will respond.  With the explosion of the geo-location craze, the world just keeps getting smaller.

RSS and news aggregators are a dime a dozen these days.  From sites that bring all your feeds to one place to RSS readers that you can install on your smartphone.  There is a veritable cornucopia of apps from which to choose.  Some are complex to set up and many require some sort of membership.  For those looking for an easy, yet powerful solution to handling RSS and news aggregation, look no further than FeedKiller.  It really is . . . well . . . killer!

FeedKiller is a sleek, no nonsense site that allows you to take your favorite feeds and combine them into one.  You name the resulting feed and choose all of the individual feeds that go into it.  You can even specify how many stories from each of the individual feeds should be ported into the resulting combined feed.  It cannot get much easier!

FeedKiller is free to use and appears to be ad supported.  There also does not appear to be a limit to the number of feeds you can add.  The only thing the iBraryGuy team thought could make it even more killer would be the ability to modify a combined feed after you have created it.  It seems to us that you simply have to start over each time.  Luckily, as we said, it is so easy to use.

Take FeedKiller for a spin today!

Can it be that one of the most hyped new tools of the year has already met an early and untimely demise?  According to Google’s blog, the company has decided to end support for the much-anticipated and, apparently, hardly used Google Wave.  What can we say besides, “Google Wave, we hardly knew ye!”

It seems like just yesterday that the iBraryGuy team was using every social networking tool available to get one those exclusive invitations to Google Wave.  It was rumored to be the tool that would forever change the way we communicated.  Better than e-mail, better than chat, said eager-eyed technophiles.  When we finally got our invites to Wave, it felt like Christmas.  Just a few weeks later, after struggling to understand how Wave worked and looking fruitlessly for ways to incorporate it into our lives, we shelved it just like those Christmas toys from our youth.  Apparently, we were not alone.

On the company’s blog, Google Vice-President Urs Holzle wrote, “. . . Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.”  He further announced that Google would discontinue development of Wave before the conclusion of the year.  The site is to stay active through year’s end and the code behind Google Wave will be made available via open source for those who wish to work with it on their own.  Wave was home to a series of innovations.  From real-time sharing of images and media to spell-checking that actually worked by understanding the context of a word as well as the word itself. Sadly, these improvements never quite caught on with users.

Google Wave did have its fans . . . just not enough. We here at iBraryGuy certainly gave it our best try.  However, from its busy, clunky interface to its confusing system of gadgets and bots, we just never got it.  For its part, Google says that it has learned a lot from its great Wave experiment – lessons that it plans to put to good use in the development of its next social networking project.  For our money, they are alluding to the company’s rumored challenge to Facebook, the so-called “Google Me”.  Like Google Wave, this yet-to-be-seen innovation is generating a great deal of buzz.

Oh . . . and speaking of Buzz . . . we can only hope that it is next to go.  😉

Ever since the dawn of the Internet, our world has become increasingly and more rapidly interactive.  Today, laptops, smartphones, and now e-readers and tablet computers are turning everyday activities into multi-sensory experiences.  Books, movies, music . . . it is all online and in the palms of our hands.  The new frontier seems to be a landscape in which all of these media types are combined into a single, self-immersing package.  Pioneering that future are the folks at Vook.

What is a “Vook“, you ask?  Well, imagine combining video and book into one pretty, portable package.  Heck, don’t imagine it . . . visit their site and give it a try!  Vooks are a wild, new innovation that takes the text of a well-written book and blends it with high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story.   The videos actually enhance what you are reading and you do not have to switch platforms to watch them as you read.  There is even a sweet, social dimension to vooks.  As you are reading, you can  connect with authors, others reads and even your friends through social media.  This too is made to be seamless!

Vooks are acurrently vailable in two robust formats.  There is a web-based application, suitable for use on any internet-connected computer.  No software is required for this outside of your brwoser.  There is also an app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. With the web-based application you don’t have to download programs or install software.   For you Apple fans, there are free previews that you can download to your devices.  For those using the web version, free previews are available right on the Vook site.

Vook prices are comparable to the current prices for most e-books.  The selection of available titles is a little stark at this time, but it is growing.  We see a great deal of potential in vooks, especially when it comes to how-to guides, reference materials, and children’s works.  In fact, the selection of kids’ vooks already contains some classics that are sure to delight the little ones.  You can help ensure the future of this start-up by visiting their site today and giving your first vook a testdrive!

If you love books as much as we here at iBraryGuy do, then you know just how hard it is to part with ones that you have read.  Throwing away a book is NEVER an option for us.  If you are like us, then you probably would rather see your used books end up in the hand of people who will enjoy them as much as you did.  With BookMooch, you can trade books with other avid readers in a fun online community.

BookMooch is not like other book sharing sites.  Whereas many others work on the honor system, this one runs on an actual points system.  You earn points by entering books into the database and offering them as giveaways.  You earn even more points by actually sending them out.  The points you earn can then be “spent” to acquire books from other Moochers.  You have to give books to get them.  In fact, BookMooch’s rules require that you give away at least one book for every two that you receive.  It’s a pretty cool system!

International sharing is not only permitted on BookMooch – it is encouraged.  You actually earn more points for sharing your books internationally.  You can request books from other countries and even in other languages.  Another neat feature of BookMooch is the “Wishlist” that allows you to specify the titles in which you are interested.  As you earn points and the books on your list become available, they will be sent to you.

BookMooch is free to join.  You can donate points to charity and even help support the service by purchasing books from Amazon via links on the site.  So do not throw away your old books or let them languish on dusty shelves.  Share them with BookMooch.  You will make someone’s day and maybe even save a little money in the process.

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Bookmarking.  We all do it and it can be quite a burden.  For most of us, it is a constant process of selecting, organizing, tagging, reorganizing, retagging . . . well, you get the picture.  Bookmarking for most of us has been a great deal of work.  Thanks to Historious, it no longer has to be such a bear.

Historious is nothing short of bookmarking magic.  A few easy steps are all that stand between you and a searchable archive of your favorite sites.  It works something like this:

  • You find a site you like.
  • You bookmark it to Historious using a bookmarklet or browser extension.
  • You use Historious’ built-in search to recall the sites you have bookmarked.

Voila!  It could hardly be any easier.  Historious saves a copy of the site exactly as it exists when you bookmarked it.  This is perfect for those of us who like to bookmark particular stories.  You do not need to organize or tag your bookmarks as Historious takes care of all the indexing in the background.  It actually allows you to search the full text of the site you bookmarked.  So you may only a remember a few words or part of the title, but Historious will still find your site.  Try that with standard bookmarking applications!

Accounts on Historious are free.  You just need to register.  The bookmarklet is easy to install.  If you are using Google’s Chrome browser, there is a Historious extension that you can add to it.  You can even add Historious to your browser’s list of search sites.  Simple, elegant and powerful.  That is Historious.  We love it!

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Change is once again afoot in the hallowed online halls of Google.  Not everyone can see it just yet, but Google’s popular image search is getting a pretty radical makeover.  Here’s what is going on . . .

Google’s image search has been around for quite awhile now.  Popular, it has remained fairly untouched over the years.  Most folks have gotten used to running the search either directly in the image search interface or switching to it from the main Google search page.  The standard results have long been a page of 10 (though you could change it to be as high as 100) image results.  Each image was neatly framed with a little big of info at its base.  By the end of the week, however, this will have changed for everyone.

Google’s new image search results page is still clean and neat.  It is just . . . well . . . BIGGER.  The image results now appear without the bordering frames in what is often referred to as a “lightbox” format.  Instead of the standard 10 images or limit of 100, users can now see up to 1000 images on their results pages.  Gone from the main screen are the notes and text that used to appear beneath each image.  To see these, you now have to mouse over the image.  It is a bold new look to say the least.

Google’s new image search is really something to behold.  Though it may be visual overload for some, the new results interface is really quite slick and well done.  Best of all is that even at 1000 image results on the page, your results will still load as quickly as ever.  By the end of the week, the new Google image search will be available to all.  If you cannot see it yet, do not fret.  Your feast for the eyes is coming soon!