Category Archives: Internet

FTRW 2008 – Rotten.com

One of the semi-frequent questions/complaints I get from our branch librarians is how to deal with patrons who are looking at pornography.  But during my training, one branch librarian mentioned that she'd had an incident with a patron looking at something much much worse: rotten.com (I don't usually do warnings on my blog but I'm […]

Think Facebook Is The Only Game In Town?

It is in Canada but this map of social network popularity around the world shows there are a number of other services that are popular depending on where you are in the world – MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, etc.  (via Reddit)

The Demographics of Search (and A List of The Internet's Most Popular Sites)

TechCrunch recently had a story about a new study which found that  lower-income people tend to prefer Yahoo! and higher-income people prefer Google.  (Shea's reading over my shoulder and goes “That's funny – I didn't know anyone preferred Yahoo!”)Anyhow, that made me think about the “Everything You Wanted To Know About the Internet (But Were […]

Automated Genealogy

Just the other day, I was thinking to myself “with all the social networking sites out there, when is somebody going to design an online genealogy site that works in a similar way – you enter the information you know about your family and ancestors and then connect to other family members who have entered […]

Friday Late Link – Free On-Demand Music (Feb 9, 2008)

I was going to link to a list of the symptoms of severe food poisoning and leave off at that.  But after sleeping sixteen hours out of the last twenty-four (I won't get too graphic about how I spent the other eight hours but you can imagine… …I'm feeling a bit better so I decided […]

We Get Questions, Lots and Lots of Questions

Just finished trying to help someone update their profile on VampireFreaks.com (half successfully, half not – I figured out how to add a background image rather than a solid colour and to add an embedded music player as well.  But I couldn't figure out how to place the music player where the person wanted it on […]

Silent Banker Trojan?!?

So I was giving my standard “these days, buying online or doing your online banking is as safe, if not safer, than doing it via a real world transaction” line during a public Internet session the other day when some old guy puts up his hand and goes “What about that Silent Banker virus they […]

Friday Fun Link – Well Done Books (Feb 1, 2008)

Gives new meaning to the phrase “cook book“.  And pretty much any site's even more fun when viewed with this.

One Red Paper Clip Redux

It's a bit ironic that the town I visited today for Internet training happens to have a small place in Internet history itself.  But other than a brief discussion with the branch librarian about the events of the last couple years since a young man from Montreal was able to execute a series of online […]

Friday Fun Link – Three Useful Sites (Jan 25, 2008)

One of the things I'm trying to do while on the road training branch librarians and the general public about the Internet and computers is to go beyond the usual suspects (Google, Wikipedia, Flickr and so on) to share some more obscure sites people might not have heard about but which are really interesting or […]