Do you like privacy? Do you shun surveillance and eschew spam? Do you like simplicity? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’ll love DuckDuckGo.
via The Best Search Engine You’re Probably Not Using | Gizmodo
The closure of Google Reader has put a spotlight on RSS and apps that people use to help make their way around the long tail of internet content. Lumi is tapping into a similar concept, but taking a very different approach.
RSS requires users to proactively select sites and information they wanted to track online — and some might argue that this proactive, sometimes technical element is what has prevented RSS readers from really going mainstream. Lumi, meanwhile, has been created with inactivity in mind. People can do nothing and still get relevant, current content delivered regardless, using algorithms that track where you travel online to provide links to what else you might like to see.
As long as you have downloaded the extension, which monitors whatever else do you on your computer, “you don’t have to do anything extra,” Stiksel told me in an interview. “You don’t click buttons or subscribe to new feeds. You can go away for two weeks and it’s even more fresh when you return. Because the system knows more about you.”
This is what lumi looks like. The sidebar menu will disappear once you scroll off of it. Lumi reminds me of Stumble Upon, except at the content-specific level, rather than the website-specific level. Unfortunately, lumi is not recognizing my version of Safari at this time though it supposedly does recognize Chrome, Firefox and Safari, so the extension could not be installed. A cool and colourful new content discovery web service!
However you choose to approach content in your web work, the lowly lorem ipsum text has certainly inspired a myriad of similar versions. In this post, we cover the most unique and humorous lorem ipsum text generators available, with a preview of each included.
via 56 Unique Lorem Ipsum Generators | Mashable.
Fun just to see all the unique options. My favourites:
How about using auto-generated text that will actually make people love your project even more? With Cupcake Ipsum, you can create a sweet, sugar-coated paragraph of text:
“Cupcake ipsum dolor sit. Amet I love liquorice jujubes pudding croissant I love pudding. Apple pie macaroon toffee jujubes pie tart cookie applicake caramels. Halvah macaroon I love lollipop. Wypas I love pudding brownie cheesecake tart jelly-o. Bear claw cookie chocolate bar jujubes toffee.”
17. Yorkshire Ipsum and Sagan Ipsum.
This is the perfect lorem ipsum generator for Yorkshire folks, and you can even fork and contribute to it on GitHub:
“Ee by gum. Nobbut a lad. Tha daft apeth. Nobbut a lad nobbut a lad mardy bum any rooad by ‘eck. Tell thi summat for nowt soft southern pansy. Where’s tha bin ah’ll gi’ thi summat to rooer abaht tell thi summat for nowt aye. Soft lad t’foot o’ our stairs. Big girl’s blouse will ‘e ‘eckerslike nah then is that thine ne’ermind wacken thi sen up.”
Inspired by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, Sagan Ipsum is a space and cosmos-related dummy text generator:
“Apollonius of Perga extraplanetary. Tingling of the spine. Orion’s sword, rich in heavy atoms cosmic ocean astonishment encyclopaedia galactica tesseract two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets are soflty dancing, rich in heavy atoms the only home we’ve ever known how far away.”
Taking the “Follow, follow, follow.” advice to the next level: I subscribe via RSS using Feedly (previously Google Reader) to over one hundred blogs related to my curation topics. I have found this method the best way to stay current with news, events and topics of interest.
Your blog is the space where you show the world the things that make you tick. You put together stories and images that entertain and enlighten, and invite your visitors in. It’s your own carefully designed museum-living room-coffeeshop packed into a screen.
Some rooms feel a bit cozier, though, with a choice item from the flea market or the antique store. Likewise, your blog can come to life with some well-chosen materials you’ve collected on WordPress.com (and the web in general). Many bloggers are already curating thoughtful content on topics as diverse as design and science — here are some ideas on how best to find and present others’ materials on your blog.
The WordPress.com community creates, collectively, over a million posts every single day, generating an endless wealth of information and opinion. This shouldn’t deter you from looking for content to enhance your blog. On the contrary, you…
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Japanese merchandising company Sanrio is making its debut at San Diego’s annual pop culture expo this year, complete with a Hello Kitty graphic novel, a fan hub and pop-up shop at Petco Park’s Comic-Con Interactive Zone, a fan-fiction contest, a booth on the convention floor, Comic-Con-exclusive collectibles and appearances by Kitty White herself.
Headphone maker Sol Republic made an exclusive infographic for Mashable that breaks down some of the recent trends in music discovery, including social listening and streaming services. via How We Discover New Music Today [INFOGRAPHIC] | Mashable.
To see a list of music discovery and streaming services check out my resource page here on The Modern MLIS. Warning…it’s long!
For the full article see: Google Launches Interactive Tour de France Gaming Site | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.
An interesting new interactive concept from Google that furthers the idea of gamification. Cycling and Tour de France enthusiasts will find this website fun and educational. Users are able to navigate stages of the 2013 Tour de France and explore the whole event. I would recommend viewing on the tablet or mobile device as the interactive experience is unwieldy on the laptop using a trackpad and some pages take time to load completely.
A perennial topic of conversation among people who debate literature on the Internet is the relative importance of books as physical objects. Foremost among defenders of the printed book are those who extol the sensual pleasures of reading—the feel of the pages, the heft of the object, the smell of the paper—and maintain that it is impossible to experience those pleasures digitally.
In a related, but separate, camp are those attracted not to the tactile pleasures of books but to their beauty as objects.
via Internet Book Fetishists Versus Anti-Fetishists | The New Yorker.
infophile 