I thought the Soviet states gained independence fifteen years ago. Anyone? No? Guess I'm alone in that belief. (In other words, revisiting RSS...)

I used Bloglines' search tool, Technorati, Syndic8, and Topix to locate feeds. Bloglines and the two "t"s were the easiest to use, by leaps and bounds. I still don't understand what I was looking at in Syndic8's search results, and the main page was clunky and looked like its HTML had been written by a fourth-grader. I liked the range and organization of Technorati's results, and I appreciated the thoroughness of Topix. The Bloglines search tool allowed me to locate some interesting blogs, including The "M" Word - Marketing Libraries and Tame the Web: Libraries and Technology. I also found the New York Times Book section through a Bloglines search.

I would like to note that I did not add any of these to my Bloglines newsreader account because of my strong anti-newsreader leanings, which I mentioned earlier. But I suppose that's all right; it was not part of the explicit assignment for us to add them to our accounts, only to explore them.

new fascinations

Another film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano? I'm seriously hoping this could this be a new trend...

No. 8 of the library things: LibraryThing

Doing this from the hotel in Pennsylvania...

Went to LibraryThing and created an account. Added five books to my "library" (just a few favorites, notably Bandits by Elmore Leonard and the Rebecca Miller's screenplay of The Ballad of Jack & Rose). Unless something is wrong with the site (as it was while I was signing up), this should be my public shelf.

LibraryThing was interesting. It reminds me of the Shelfari and the Visual Bookshelf applications on Facebook. My Visual Bookshelf keeps track of books I've read, books I'd like to read, and books I'm reading now. It operates by the same principle as LibraryThing, pulling most of its data from Amazon.com. I can write reviews, recommend books to friends, and even buy books directly from Amazon through the Facebook application. My Visual Bookshelf currently contains 104 books, but I add to that whenever my friends add books to theirs. = )