This week’s Website of the Week is www.poems.com. It is run by an organization called Poetry Daily, and they feature a new contemporary poem every day.  The daily poems come from new books, magazines, and journals and are a diverse sampling of the poetry that is being published right now.  It seems like most of the poems that people read are older “classic” poems that are taught in schools.  Poetry Daily helps expose people to some of the thousands of fresh and relevant poems being written today. 

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The special Valentine's Day Website of the week is www.acme.com/heartmaker.  You can create your own customized candy heart pictures. Just type in some text and pick the color and you have a cute customized graphic to share with your friends.  There is also a link to see recent hearts made by other people and some of them are really funny and creative.  Your hearts can be cutesy, loving, or just plain mean, the possibilities are endless!

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The Website of the Week is www.classof2k8.com. This website features 28 authors whose first novel for teens or kids comes out in 2008.  Fourteen of the novels are for young adults, and this website is a great way to learn about books that don’t have the name recognition of an already-famous author.  They have a blog to let you get to know the writers more personally and get lots of information about the upcoming book releases.  There are also contests and reading guides that will be updated throughout 2008.   So if you want to be on the cutting edge and discover the next J.K. Rowling before everybody else, check out this website!

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This Wednesday’s Website of the Week is www.etsy.com.  It’s a place to buy and sell anything handmade.  If you make any kind of craft, it’s easy to set up your own shop and sell your stuff.  They have everything from knitted socks to hand poured soap to toilet decals.  It’s easy to spend a lot of time browsing this website because they have a lot of ways to find exactly what you want.  You can view items by color, search for crafts made locally, or use their customized gift guides.  I think that my favorite feature is the Treasury section, where users can compile lists of their favorite items that follow a certain theme, like Pirates or Paris.  If you want to support some creative crafters by buying their unique stuff or just look at some crazy crafts, etsy.com is a fun website to visit. 

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This week’s Website of the Week is www.timeanddate.com.  Have you ever wondered exactly what time the sun will set? Do you want to know what day of the week your birthday will be on when you turn 21? Or when you will be 10,000 days old? This website helps you find out all of these questions and a lot more.  It has time zone, date, sun, and moon calculators.  One of my favorite features is the customizable countdown for whatever date you are counting down the seconds for.  I also love the day and night world map, which shows the current position of the sun. 

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This week's fun website is http://www.drawingnow.com/.  It's like a virtual art teacher with video tutorials that teach you to draw animals, people, and cartoons.  The step by step instructions are easy to follow, and can help even bad artists (like me) create great drawings.  There are lots of different tutorials, but the biggest sections are popular cartoons and anime/manga tutorials.  Whether you like Spiderman, Spongebob, or Naruto, there is a tutorial for you! 

If you enjoy drawing anime and manga, come to the library's Anime Art Club.  The next event is January 15 from 5-6:30pm in the Lingo story room.

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The Website of the Week is Flip.com.  On this site, you can put together pictures, video, and music to create your own digital flipbook.  After you make a profile, you can also make friends, join groups and send messages to other Flip.com users.  Some of the flip books that people have created are really great, so it's fun to browse and see what they have come up with.  This one about body image is one of my favorites, but there are a ton about a lot of different topics.  Flip.com also has themed contests with prizes like a makeover from Guess clothing company, a private concert, or your name in a new YA book. Click here for more contest info. Make sure that you share any awesome flipbooks that you make with us!

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This Wednesday’s Website of the Week is www.strictlynophotography.com.  It is a collection of pictures that were taken at places where photography is forbidden.  These rebellious photographers ignored the “no photos” signs and snapped away, then posted them on the website for everyone to enjoy.  You can view the forbidden photos by category, including “Art”, “Government”, “Religious”, and a lot more.  You can also post your own pictures, as long as they were taken at a place that does not allow photography.

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This Wednesday’s Website of the Week is http://cuteoverload.com/. It’s a blog with a collection of really cute photos and videos, mostly featuring kittens.  Even though the captions are pretty cheesy sometimes, the pictures are adorable enough to melt even the hardest of hearts.  So if you need some sweetness in your life, click the link and get ready to say “awwwww…”

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This Wednesday's Website of the Week is http://www.kissthisguy.com/. It is an archive of lyrics to songs that people have misunderstood.  The name of the site comes from the commonly misheard Jimi Hendrix lyric, "'scuse me, while I kiss the sky."

Most of them are really funny and some are pretty embarrassing for the person who made the mistake.  You can browse the top rated misheard lyrics or search by song title or artist.  After reading through them, I think that I like some of the mistakes better than the real lyrics.  For example, someone thought that the Ramones song, "I Wanna Be Sedated" was actually " I Want a Piece of Bacon."  I do love bacon, but that's just funny.

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This Wednesday's Website of the Week is www.Says-It.com. This site lets you create your own funny graphics by adding whatever words you want to their existing templates.  You can put your name on a concert ticket, spell out a funny message on a church sign and do a ton of other stuff.  When you’re done, you can save the image and use it for anything you want.  The possibilities are endless, so get creative. Please post your great ideas for creations in the comments below!

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Thinkaboutyourdrink.com

A new study What America Drinks, is a comprehensive analysis of U.S. beverage consumption. It  suggests that making healthier beverage choices could play a key role in the battle against Americans' widening waistlines.

While people trying to lose weight may tend to focus on what's filling their plates, the new study suggests that it's time for Americans to take a closer look at what's in our glasses, cups, cans, bottles and car drink holders, too.

Read the key findings here, especially the results that suggest that sugary drinks like soda pop, sweetened tea and fruit juice are contributing to weight gain for many people. You can also receive a personalized beverage analysis – enter information about what you drank yesterday, and get recommendations and advice.

The National Milk Mustache "got milk?" Campaign is shining the spotlight on the importance of healthy mother daughter role-modeling with an ad featuring superstar Beyoncé and her mother, Tina Knowles. The celebrity mother-daughter duo are partners in the House of Dereon/Dereon clothing line and strongly believe in passing down good habits from generation to generation.

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One of the fastest growing online hangouts for teens is Gaia Online. Derek Liu launched the original site, Go-Gaia, in 2003 as a forum based website with an anime link list. (For more information, read the Big Boards’ interview.)

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A few weeks ago word got out that the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking is about to take a space flight!  This is remarkable in many ways.  Dr. Hawking has suffered with MND (motor neuron disease) for four decades and yet has lectured and written about physics and space and our place in it all these years.  His weakened body rides in a wheelchair and he needs a computer to communicate well, but he is now about to TRAVEL INTO SPACE !

Continue reading "To Infinity and Beyond!" »

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