What you don’t know you’re missing

I have been thinking lately about how my bloglines page has become my dominant portal of information. For people who are still uninformed or completely naive about the wonders of the blogosphere, I came up with my three solid reasons to jump on the blog bandwagon and join in the community fun. Aside from the obvious reasons of being in-the-know about things that interest you and networking with other bloggers, here is what you’re missing…

1. Free Stuff (seriously) – Getting my daily dose of good indie music I’ve never heard is one of the highlights of my day. At HearYa, they know good music and they want you to know it too. I can usually look forward to a free MP3 (or three or four) of songs by an artist who is trying to get stuff heard, and I can go buy more if I really like it. I can’t say that I’ve been disappointed yet. I also signed up for my free subscription to Nylon Magazine (at least a $25 value), an offer being advertised only to readers of the Urban Outfitters blog. I know it sounds like I’m an advertisement, but why not take advantage of stuff people are giving away?

2. Sales You Wouldn’t Have Heard About – If you’re one of the millions of people who do most of their shopping on the Web and you always wish you had those discount codes that go in the boxes at check-out, start subscribing to some feeds. I’ve found more codes and sales from subscribing to SheFinds, Shopperism and Savotron (to name a few) than any Saturday newspaper ad insert. It’s like signing up for those annoying store e-mail lists, minus the annoyance of a flooded inbox.

3. Better time-wasters – When YouTube gets boring and you’ve run out of online games to play during slow days at the office, you can count on blogs to save the day. Rolling Stone’s blog recently posted the Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz. Do you know how many songs on The Beatle’s Abbey Road album are credited to George Harrison? I didn’t think so.

Mapping!

I finally took some time out to play with Wayfaring.com and created a map of places that I’ve lived while in college in Gainesville. It actually got me thinking and I didn’t realize that I’d gotten the chance to live in two different dorm buildings and two different apartments. It didn’t feel like I had moved that much but I guess I did. It also made me very nostalgic and sad that I’ll be graduating soon with no clue what I’m doing afterwards. I think I’m going to take a lot of time over winter break refining my resume, re-doing my portfolio Web site and really getting my LIFE organized. I know that process alone will get me more motivated to start applying for jobs all over. Of course I’ll be taking the GRE soon, but it wouldn’t hurt to start networking and what-not. I almost lost track of the purpose of this entry, which is my map!
I tried to add a little bit of data to the waypoints, including the year(s) that I lived there and who my roommates were. I’ll have to think of some other cool places to map soon too.

New Web Project: The Young Mansion

After finally getting my butt in gear and finishing up a simple Flash site for my sister’s boyfriend’s mother (6 degrees, I know) and her customized school-spirit shoe business, ItsaShoeThing.com, I’m so ready for a new project.

Right on cue comes a new client (how fun for me to be able to say “client!” Makes me feel very legit.). The historic Joseph Young house in Hollywood, my hometown, is up for sale again and the homeowners just happened to have their kids pictures taken by my sister. In turn, they saw her site, loved it, and hired me to build something similar to showcase their home. The house has real estate listings on the Web with a few pictures, but what he and I have in mind is something much more visual, focusing on the tiny architectural details that are tucked in every corner of that house that no one would notice from any real estate site.So far my dad and sister met with the realtor and took some great shots of the place. My job starts now, and I’ll keep my progress up to date here. Big props to my sister Courtney, we’re really working as a team on this and it wouldn’t be happening without her help. I’m really honored in a way that little ol’ ME got scooped up to build this thing. I just hope my work stands up to the challenge!

We have liftoff!

For a moment today I was sad that I would be at work at 11:38, when the space shuttle Discovery would be taking off from Cape Canaveral. Then I remembered how good Florida Today is with their online multimedia having to do with the space program. I thought for sure I could maybe dig around and find a web cam of some sort and get a glimpse of the launch. What I found was even better! Right there on the homepage was an embedded Windows Media stream of the shuttle launch, LIVE! It was great, complete with mission control commentary and a full-screen option that didn’t mess up the browser view or anything. Just below the video, there was a section of very cool interactive Flash features that were fun and informative to click through. They really know what their readers want, and did an awesome job serving it up today.

Read blogs please!

Why don’t more people use Bloglines? I’ve tried hard to get my friends and family to sign up for the RSS reader service, but to no avail. I’ll never traditionally “bookmark” another page ever again, and I don’t know why anyone would want to. If you haven’t tailored your own RSS reader and personalized your feeds, do it. It’s super simple and you’ll never go back to the old ways, I promise you.

This leads me to the latest feed I’ve subscribed to that I really enjoy lately. Yahoo has been doing a series of videos called “People of the Web”. The stories they find highlight people, some famous and some not, who are using the Web in unexpected or unique ways. One interesting segment told the story of the founder of FarmersOnly.com, an online dating service specifically for people living in more rural areas, with similar interests in farming, agriculture and the “cowboy” way of life. They are short videos, but surely the stories have plenty of journalistic value and are told very well. I get excited when my Bloglines tells me it’s updated!

Find a feed that you like that will light a fire under your rear to setup RSS. Use Google Blog Search or Mozilla’s Sage RSS add-on, to find people writing about ANY topic you could imagine. Check out what other people have on their Bloglines. It’s addicting, but do it anyway!