Item 17: Cool Stuff

Spend a little time checking up on sites you visited or joined earlier. Try to find people in your MySpace, Facebook, or other account. Look up stuff in Technorati, and comment on people's blogs. Or, check out some of these sites, and form strong opinions about them:

The Blog Readability Test - If you put the URL of your blog into the search box, you can find out what level of reading ability is needed to read your blog. Once you've gotten your level, you can get a little badge to put on your blog to let your readers know.

Sketchcast - draw pictures, record the process of drawing, and make a little movie of the whole process. Sounds strange, i know, but some people think better with pictures.

Scrabulous - This is a site where you can play games with other people online for free. The game is suspiciously like Scrabble, but is called "Scrabulous." If you have a Facebook account, you can get a Scrabulous application for your account, and play with other facebook users. Video games like this are integral to the internet and technology, and most of them are not what people tend to think of as "video games" (violent, with people shooting each other). Most games are simple and straightforward and familiar, like Scrabulous or solitaire.

Speaking of online video games, you can improve your typing skills over at Wordshoot, a game where you are continuously being attacked by people and tanks and things. Each attacker has a word next to them, and approaches you at a steady rate. Your job is to type the word next to each attacker and hit Enter before the attacker gets to you. By doing this, you shoot your attacker and continue with the game. No, it's not very graphic - the characters are about 2-3mm tall.

Yahoo! Answers - On the 10th day of every month, librarians around the world do something called "Slam the Boards!" where they sign on to places like Yahoo! Answers, and answer questions for people. There are multiple reasons for this - first, people out there are asking questions. Librarians and people who work in libraries are good at answering questions. Second, a lot of the people who answer questions on Yahoo! Answers are not good at answering questions, so the people asking the questions end up not getting goo answers to their questions. So, go show them how it's done! Sign up for an account, look for a question or two that you can answer, write a nice, concise answer, cite your sources, provide links to more information, and submit it. You might not be the first person to answer the question, but if you take a few moments to make a good answer, you could be the "best answer" and get some points! What do the points mean? Well... not much. But they're points! Everyone likes points, right?

Pick one or several of these strange tools, and try them out. If you have trouble with making them work, make a note of it. In your blog, talk about what things you tried and what happened.