You have to register, of course. Once you’ve done that, you get a Flash application that allows you to build charts/diagrams using drag and drop images from a variety of libraries, including people, flowcharts, networks, office equipment, etc. Dotted blue lines appear and disappear as Cacoo shows you how your new images line up with other images that you already have in your chart area.

Once you have an image in the chart window, you can resize it, rotate it, add text, etc. There are also tools for rotation, arranging, layers, etc. A line tool makes connecting images very quick and easy. Once the Flash was loaded I experienced very little lag in using it. Here’s a screenshot of some different elements from the libraries connected together randomly.

Once you’ve created your masterpiece, you can save it to the service (a simple checkbox allows you to indicate whether you want your item to be public and gives you the public URL) or you can export it to the PNG format. There’s also a Share window that lets you invite other people to use and work on your diagram; you can either search Cacoo IDs or send invites to specified e-mail addresses.

Between the easy-to-use text and connection tools, and the lines show you how your new elements are lining up with everything else, I am extremely impressed with Cacoo. I am not at my best with these kinds of tools but Cacoo was intuitive and when I got stuck, a right-click or closer look at the menu usually set me on the right track. The only tiny little thing is that sometimes the English on the menu isn’t quite perfect (nulab is based in Japan) but who cares? It was never enough to make using the service confusing. Highly recommended.

The new Bing Video is available at http://www.bing.com/videos/browse. Here you’ll find videos from Microsoft properties, but also from other places like ABC, Hulu, and YouTube. You’ll see tabs for Editor’s Picks, hot clips, what was on TV last night, etc. You can also, as you might imagine, do a search.

I did a search for Federal Reserve (dunno, feeling kind of boring today) and got over 50,000 results (yow!) from a variety of sources including YouTube, MySpace, USA Today, rediff, and CBS News. Results are shown on a grid with a thumbnail, source, title, date, and duration. Click on the thumbnail image to get an embedded viewer with a place for ratings and comments (I didnt’ see any comments on the videos I watched.) You can also hold your mouse over a video to get a popup of detail and an animation of the thumbnail — very cool.

There’s also a list of the most popular videos and an “Up Next” tab. The videos in the “Up Next” tab seem to be related but I can’t figure out how it’s being populated; I don’t know if they’re related, or if they’ve showed up in playlists, or if they’re what other people are watching, or what.

Like YouTube, Bing Video has a quicklist feature that allows you to build a quick queue. The queue page shows you a playing video, what’s next in your queue and details about what you’re playing. Something it doesn’t show — and I don’t think YouTube does either — is the total duration of the quicklist. Am I weird for wanting that? It would be nice to know if I have enough time to watch what I want to watch.

I was impressed with how many results I got with a Bing Video search, and the player is easy to use. It’s not going to take the place of something like Clicker, but it’s a nice aggregation. Well done Bing.

If you’ve ever used a Google Map you’ll be able to use this one. Enter in a zip code and Google will refresh and zoom with a new map view and a list of places offering flu shots. Icons show you whether the shots offered are for seasonal flu, for H1N1, or both.

Doing a search for Athens Georgia found only six places total at this writing offering flu shots. The first one, a KMart pharmacy, is offering both seasonal and H1N1 shots. The rest of them are offering H1N1 shots only — and all of them are marked “Temporarily Out of Stock.” (In case they did have stocks of flu shots, the application includes contact information with address and phone number. The KMart listing also had pharmacy hours.)

Of course if you do a lookup on Google Maps and five out of six available locations are out of the shot, you might not feel like this app is going to do you much good. Google Maps also offers with this application pointers to state boards of health which might have listings themselves. (Georgia has an H1N1 provider locator here.)

The URL of the collection is http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/graypc/. You can search by keyword, browse by topic (countries, people, or subject), or browse the whole collection. I looked at the topic and decided to look at airships. There are only three under that topic but they have title, subject note, and sometimes a description.

Take a look at this collection which actually offers front and back views of six different cards, showing dirigibles, biplanes, monoplanes, and a couple of incredibly steampunky-looking destroyers. You can drag to move the views and actually move in pretty close. The view pages also have details about each postcard including publisher, dimensions, and publishing date (though these are not precise for the ones I looked at.)

Pretty cool! Now if I can just be a little more timely next year…

There’s currently a special on the $100 a year subscription fee — if you sign up before the end of the year you can get a subscription for $80 a year. You can also get a “guest pass” if you want to try the service before paying for it. Using a guest pass I logged in to check it out.

As noted in the first paragraph there’s a limited number of places Food Hub is currently operating. Further, Food Hub currently only covers the following items: meat, seafood, fruits, vegetables, and herbs & spices. (Additional products, like drinks and processed foods, are coming soon.) If you go to the browse area of Food Hub once logged in, you’ll see 69 available companies. You have the option to filter the viewed companies by buyer or seller (there are slightly more buyers) or by type (farmers, fishermen, ranchers, grocery, etc.)

I did a search for apples and got about a dozen results. One of them, Sun Gold Farm, is a seller and has a page on Food Hub at http://food-hub.org/users/view/360. The page shows what the farm grows, when the produce is available, and terms of purchase like minimum order. There’s also contact information for the farm including phone number and Web site. Another result, Portland Public Schools, is a buyer and has a page at http://food-hub.org/users/view/699. This page contains information on what the buyer wants to buy, contact information, and payment information (Net 30, etc.)

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can set up a want list with deadline, which other members can view.

You can get more information about Food Hub at http://food-hub.org/pages/faq. There’s also information on the parent company, Ecotrust, at http://www.ecotrust.org/foodfarms/.

While some of the photos would be considered sensitive and might be found disturbing — there’s an autopsy photo among other things — most of them are mundane, consisting of images of houses, book depositories, etc. There are some interesting highlights, like a photo of a book seized from Lee Harvey Oswald’s home (1984), fingerprint cards, what appear to be pro-Cuba advertisements, and a variety of personal photographs.

Each image has a larger image with details including location, creator, and a brief description. There’s a “full record” option that has more metadata as well. In all the images I looked at, multiple image sizes were available; many of the images had huge versions (over 1000 x 1000 pixels) available for perusal. Results also include a full citation and a mechanism for sharing images with a huge number of bookmarking services
and social networks.

Warning once again: some of these images are hard to look at. But there’s plenty of material that’s of historical interest here.

Google Translate is available at http://translate.google.com/. The site now translates as you type; set translations from English to Spanish and “my hovercraft is full of eels” becomes “Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas” even as you type. (Even though it’s spontaneous, it *IS* still machine translation, though, so it won’t be perfect.)

Google Translate is also offering transliteration for Arabic, Persian, or Hindi. You can type the words as they sound and translate them into native script. For other non-Roman languages, you can specify to “show romanization” to read the non-Roman text written phonetically in English.

Finally, when you are translating other languages into English, Google will show the translation and a speaker icon. Click on the icon and a text-to-speech voice will read the translation for you. So “Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas” turns back into “My hovercraft is full of eels” spoken by the nice computer lady.

The front page of the site lets you look for content in a variety of ways: you can browse by show title or by category, or look for Web originals, TV, movies, or music. I decided to look for comedies and got a screen that looked like this:

Not only are there new and popular comedies, but you can filter your result to find only those comedies from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. You can also filter just for movies or for original Web programming. I took a look at the comedies available for the 70s and was presented with a list of shows that included Saturday Night Live, WKRP, Electric Company, Sanford and Son, and Rhoda. I was confused to note that some of the shows listed included the number of episodes available as 0. Why list them, then?

I took a look at Barney Miller, which has 70 episodes available online and its own page, which looks like this:

The show’s page lists the episodes with air dates, titles, and brief descriptions of the plot. The screnshot will take you to view the episode — in this case on Hulu. Show information has a space for external links and additional information, but none of the shows I looked at had additional information added.

Since I watched way too much TV in the 70s I went and took a look at the Web originals instead. Here I found content in a huge number of categories, including news, art, drama, documentary, business & finance, etc. Like the TV episodes, these series had episode listings, descriptions, room for editing, etc.

While this site was packed with listings, and actually reminded me of some TV shows I’d forgotten about, I couldn’t imagine using it as I watch TV. I need an easy way to connect my computer to my television to make the most of Clicker.com. I don’t think we’re quite there yet — or did we get there and I missed it?

The site is divided into several sections, including works (yes, including Treasure Island, and every one I looked at had the entire work available for reading), biography (extensive!), photography gallery (from age four to his death, funeral, and tomb), student resources, a journal devoted to RLS studies, and even a community for those interested in RLS.

Don’t miss the “More” section on the navigation bar, which will point you to more information on RLS, including museums, libraries, a link list, an extensive list of critical works, and a list of derivative works (man, look at all the comic books and graphic novels!)

This is one of the most dense single-author sites I’ve ever seen; check out the sitemap and you’ll see what I mean. Lots of great information and resources here. And to top it all off: an RSS feed! Great stuff.

From the front page you can learn more about the project and get an overview of the people involved, or browse the database by geography or species. There’s also an option to browse by catalog index number. Browsing by geography (you can choose east or west hemisphere) I started with Hawaii and was presented with over 70 results, from a sea slug to the “Humbug Dascyllus” (and a picture of Mr. Wang and his family!) The images are presented in a gallery of thumbnails, three to the row, with information on the common and scientific name of the item pictured when applicable.

Clicking on the image gives you a popup window with more information about the species represented: date collected, where and when, latitude and longitude, kingdom/class/family/genus/species, and catalog number. There are also arrows for browsing through the other items in the search results.

If you’re looking for a keyword search check out the view by species page. Here you can search by common name, display by scientific family, look at the whole catalog, or search by keyword. A keyword search for turtle found six results, five of which were the “Green Sea Turtle”.

These images are great and I liked the fact that you could browse by both species and geography. But the site seems to be image oriented; there’s not much additional text information on the species that I could find. How about hooking up DAMSL to Wikipedia, or marine information sites from other universities?