Study shows 95% of all email is spam

An amazing study conducted by Barracuda Networks showed that 95% of all email sent in 2007 was spam. This is up from 70% in 2004. It seems that as one side of the spam war attempts to make more clever spam filters, the spammers use technology to go around those filters. These figures are truly amazing. What amazes me more is that ANYONE would buy ANY product or service they learned about via spam. Someone out there must be buying or spamming would not be profitable.

Email services vary in their ability to weed out the spam. In my personal experience, Google does a much better job than Yahoo of getting rid of the junk and NOT deleting the emails I want to receive.

Read more about the spam study in this cnet article.

Trading Card Maker

I absolutely love the online Trading Card Maker from Big Huge Labs! This is an amazing free service that allows you to create customized trading cards quickly using your own images. Then, you can save your creation and even print it out to share with others. My first creation was used with a photo I had taken and uploaded to Flickr. The web page can automatically link to your Flickr site, so this is another plus. To the left is the first card I made in a matter of minutes.

Happy Holidays from Epcot

I used Flickr to post photos from this weekend's visit to Epcot where I enjoyed their Holiday Storytellers. Each country featured a costumed character sharing the Holiday traditions observed by their people. If you have never been, I highly recommend it for the entire family.

Here are just a sampling of the storytellers:

United Kingdom

Japan

Canada

Germany

Italy

Searching for Blogs

I used a handful of blog search tools to find information about library programs. My results certainly varied! I conducted a simple unscientific bit of research by searching for the words library program. Here are my results using the Bloglines web page: http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=library%20program&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m
There sere several useful links there. Many of the links pertain to specific adult or childrens library programs.



When I attempted to access Feedster, I was greeted with the screen shown at the right:


Apparently Feedster is going through some sort of major update. Did someone buy out Feedster? Is Feedster totally changing their format? Is Feedster in the midst of a major upgrade or expansion of services? Only time will tell.




The search for library program using Technorati yielded thousands of hits. Since the site has a technology bent, many of the hits had to do with "software" programs. Most of the hits did not seem related to libraries at all. See the results here: http://www.technorati.com/search/library+program?authority=a4&language=en


The Synidic8 search page returned only 3 hits!
http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=library+program&ShowStatus=all


Topix provided the most satisfactory list of relevant hits about library programs:
http://www.topix.com/search/article?q=library+program


My best results were achieved by using Google's Blogsearch:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&q=library+program

Really Simple Syndication

I really enjoy RSS feeds! Keeping up with news, technology, and local happenings is a passion of mind. RSS feeds make reading the news so much more efficient. I don't have to open up each individual web site and comb over other stories that I have already looked at. A feed aggregator such as Bloglines does all the work for me. The Bloglines web site was new to me, however, I had used Google's RSS service called Google Reader. Although Bloglines does a nice job of making the start-up process easy for new users, I find that Google Reader's layout is more streamlined and easy to use.

RSS aggretators are a great example of how technology can actually make us more efficient!

7 1/2 Habits for Lifelong Learning

Check out the tutorial here for the 7 1/2 habits for successful lifelong learning. The habit that is most challenging to me is #3: View problems as challenges. If I don't watch myself, I can find problems frustrating because I just want to accomplish my end goal. However, it is good to remember that problems are part of the learning process. The easiest habits for me are number 6: Use technology to your advantage and 7 1/2: Play! I absolutely love playing with new gadgets and software, so I tend to automatically gravitate toward the latest and greatest technologies.

A journey starts with a single step

This blog is for practicing new web 2.0 technologies and sharing my discoveries along the way.