50 Book Challenge and the Viral Nature of the Internet

I belong to a lot of Yahoo Groups on a lot of different subjects: reading groups, magick groups, D&D groups, Comic Book groups, you name it. Very often, someone on a group will write, "Hey, check out this [web site/forum/service/book/group]." Of course, being a curious person, I'll have to go check out the web site/forum/service/book/group, along with anyone else who received the same email. Now, I'm not talking about the email that says something like "Ultra low prices on Viagra!" or even the annoying emails from well-meaning people who are trying to increase traffic to their web site or other Internet entity. Personally, when I find something cool online, I email people I think will care about it and might enjoy using it. Then they do they same thing, sending the information out and infecting others with the mostly benign virus of pop culture. That's what I'm talking about. There is no cure and we have been assimilated, like it or not.

So if you're here, it means you like some of the things that I like. Here's a list of things I've found that I like that therefore you might like, too:

http://bibliophil.org/default.asp

Keep track of your book collection, rate and review books, swap books, make friends with other book lovers.

http://www.hsx.com

The Hollywood Stock Exchange is an online game. You buy (pretend) stocks in real actors, films and directors and the stock values are based on real movie deals. I've been trading on the exchange for a couple of years now. I'm losing big on the Harry Potter movies, but my Keanu Reeves stock is making a killing. Who knew?

http://www.livejournal.com/community/50bookchallenge/

The 50 Book Challenge is Live Journal Community that challenges members to read 50 books in a year, which is more than 4 books per month. I'd better get on it!

Gmail and Firefox

I am a big fan of both services. Gmail is such a great free email account that I've stopped using all my other personal email accounts. I love being able to use Google to search my emails, I love having emails sorted by threads and I especially love having 1 gig of storage space for my emails.

I was skeptical of Firefox as a browser, because it was surrounded by so much hype. But after a serious virus problem on our computer, we switched and I have no regrets. It has neat add ons, like the weather updates on the bottom tool bar, keeps visited on web sites on tabs in the same window for easy reference and is just easy and convenient to use.