I have a love/hate relationship with Weather.com. On one hand, it’s easy to remember, and they usually have fairly accurate forecast information. On the other hand, they are LOADED with ads, and bury the information you’re looking for pretty deeply on their site. They obviously know they’re the #1 location for weather online and try to get as many ad views as they possibly can by making you dig to the data you’re looking for. They launched a nice feature the other day though, that I would put into the love category. They are now providing an interactive weather map combining weather information from the site and the drag-and-drop type map that are all of the big direction sites use. I’ve wondered why it has taken so long for something like this to appear given that pretty much all mapping sites are using this technology now. It only makes sense that it finally makes its way into weather maps. You can now zoom into street level maps with animated radar or cloud data superimposed over top. It’s definitely a welcome improvement to the static image radar images we’re used to.

Do you ever just think to yourself, “Man, I wish there were some site out them there Internets that I could see a collection of weird ebay auctions and videos recently removed from YouTube!” Your wish has come true! King Nutter is just that site. They have a random hodgepodge of crazy ebay stuff, and the most random collection of weird videos that you’ve seen. This is the kind of site that makes the Internet the wonderful place that it is.

The International Toy Fair in New York just ended yesterday. I’m sure there were a lot of cool toys at the fair, but one caught my eye for obvious reasons. A company called Steve Spangler Science released a new toy called the Mentos Geyser Tube, which is basically a little plastic device to easily create the Mentos + Diet Coke geyser effect. This looks very similar to what was used for the famous Eepybird Mentos fountain videos. According to their site, Steve Spangler Science is trying to get a patent for the device. This thing will definitely make it easier (less messy) to create Mentos + Diet Coke fountains!

I’ve been a fan of Lawrance Lessig for a while. He is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. He is a large proponent of Copyright regulation, and was one of the founding members of the Creative Commons license. He has recently put together a great presentation for a proposal for how to handle “Orphan Works.” The video below does a better job of describing it than I will, but in a nutshell, The US Copyright Office has issued a report on the current issues of “Orphan Works,” (content that is still technically under copyright, but the copyright owner are either very difficult, or impossible to locate). This proposal is a great step in how to deal with them. It’s a little long, but definitely worth watching if you have any interest in this.

Lessig also hosts a few other video presentations on his site discussing similar topics.

As sort of a New Year’s resolution (which I rarely do), I decided I wanted to track all the books I read in 2007, and maybe longer. I thought to myself, “there’s got to be some sort of software or website that does this kind of thing,” After doing a lot of digging, I didn’t come up with a whole lot. I found a few pieces of software that would keep track of media (CD’s, DVD’s, books, etc.), but they were more for a home library, and geared toward checking out pieces of your own media to your friends. I just wanted something that would keep a limited amount of information about what books I’ve read, and when I’ve read them. Anything else on top of that would be a plus. There were a few online apps that one could install on a server that kind of did this, but they were either way to simplified (just storing title and author), or they were like an online version of the media tracker, being more like check out management software. I was beginning to wonder if anything like this existed out there, or if I would need to write something myself, when I ran across a cool site called LibraryThing. The best way to describe it is that it’s like Last.FM for books. It does the few things that I wanted, and a lot more. I can track my books by all of the information I was looking for, and it allows me to rate them, and review them as well. It also has a nice social aspect to it as well. It compares my books to other people’s books and makes recommendations based on what other people with similar tastes liked.

LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 60 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, “tag” books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection.

If you want it, LibraryThing is also an amazing social space, often described as “MySpace for books” or “Facebook for books.” You can check out other people’s libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

So it turns out LibraryThing is just what I was looking for. I think it will be interesting to see how many books I get through in a year’s time.

This past fall, I finally made the jump to Netflix (yah, I know… what took so long?!?) after paying something like $6 for a new release at the local video store. I had eyed the service for a while, but paying for that video was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anyway, I’ve been very happy with the service for the past 6 months. Delivery is very quick, the website is very intuitive and works very well (they’ve got all kinds of cool AJAX stuff going on). All in all, Netflix has been great, and there isn’t a DVD that goes by where I regret making the move away from the local video store at all.

Sometime around the middle of January, Netflix launched a trial of a new “Watch Now” service that allows you to instantly watch movies online via the Netflix site. Being the happy Netflix user that I am, I jumped at the chance to try their cool new addition. Well, turns out I wasn’t special enough to get to use it. I kept getting a message that the “Watch Now” feature would be rolled out on a limited basis and would be fully launched in June. You can image how disappointed I was. Then when listening to the Buzz Out Loud Podcast, I learned of a little trick to get myself into the limited release of the new “Watch Now” feature. If you log into the site and type “downloads” into the search bar, you’ll get a message (Looking for our instant watching feature?) that takes you to a page where you can activate your account for this new feature. Well, I did this, and kept getting the same “coming in June” message that I’d been able to find before… hmmm! Then after a little digging, I found another tip that said the new feature only worked in Internet Explorer, which I try to stay as far away from as possible. So I fired up IE and low and behold, it worked… almost. I had the new “Watch Now” tab in my menu, but trying to actually watch a video gave me several crazy Media error messages. Well, after a little digging and an e-mail to Netflix they got me straightened out. Turns out Netflix uses Windows Media DRM (IE & Windows only!) for this service and there were a few hiccups, but I seem to be straightened out now.

Now that I’ve got the service up and running, things are working pretty well. The pricing is nice. Since you are obviously a Netflix subscriber if you’re trying this, the pricing is pretty much free. The new instant watching service is tacked onto your account as a feature. You get however many hours of video watching as dollars per month in your subscription. So if you have the 2 at a time unlimited subscription for $14.99/month, you get 15 hours of instant streaming movies per month. The movie selection is a little lacking. I’m hoping this is just due to the service still being in limited release. There are still a good number of movies available though. As for actually using the service, after the initial hiccups everything has been working smoothly. You pick the movie you want to watch and simply click the “play” button. It pulls up a new viewing screen with your typical video playback toolbar (also includes a full-screen mode) and after a few seconds to buffer, the movie streams to your computer. The quality is what you’d expect from streaming video. It’s not super great, but it’s really not that bad either. I’m sure much of the quality is dependent on your Internet connection speed. I’d like to try this out on an HTPC, and see how it looks on a TV screen, mainly because I don’t have a couch in front of my computer monitor.

So far I’ve been happy with this nice new Netflix feature, minus the fact that I have to use IE for it. It’s a nice add-on for a service that I already enjoy. I don’t think I would think as highly of it if there was an additional charge for viewing online. The fact that it starts streaming quickly (no waiting for a long download), and is available on just about any (windows) net connected computer is a really handy feature for Netflix. I could see taking advantage of this when I’m between mailed DVD’s or even on vacation, or at a friends house when we want to watch a movie, but don’t want to go out and get one. Netflix has definitely positioned instant watching well to making it very useful, and to get people to subscribe to their bread-and-butter online rental service. It easily blows the current collection of online streaming rental services (don’t get me started on Unbox again!) out of the water.

Hacking Netflix has put together a nice screencast of the entire “watch now” process.

Who doesn’t love a good YouTube lip-sync of a popular song?!? Well you can thank your lucky stars… there is now a way to find them by searching a particular artist! iLoveMusicVideo.net will give you a long list (depending on the singer) of YouTube videos from whatever artist you’re looking for. It’s not only great lip-sync videos. You’ll also get the real music video too if it’s up there. The thing that makes this site cool, is that it will hook to your Last.FM profile (if you have one), and automatically bring in artists you listen to.