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September 7, 2007

Blog Mash Ups

Since I've been giving Chris Higgins all my ideas, I'll borrow one of Rich's which he made in a comment yesterday --

"I imagine Wonkette only with all the pictures replaced by those from Cute Overload. How's that for a concept?"

That, my friend, is BRILLIANT. Can someone please make that happen with RSS feeds or something?

This reminds me of some of my mash up ideas, which I'll get back to later.

Posted by mary at 7:30 AM | Comments (2)

September 6, 2007

Praise for Chris Higgins's MentalFloss Bloggins!

One of my excuses for not blogging more lately is because every time I have a great idea about something bloggable, I give it to Chris Higgins rather than blogging it myself because he's actually paid to blog, and he generally does a better job, anyway. Zip codes? Coyle and Sharpe? That was me.

However, it's worth noting that Higgins has some very good -- even great -- content of his very own, so much so that Mental Floss has become one of the first three websites I look at every day. At first I thought the site was a little corny, but I have grown to like the low-snark, high-science ratio.

I've been thinking lately about snarky and sarcastic sites versus sweet and sincerely sites lately. Like, do you know of any sweet and sincere political blogs? Or any snarky and sarcastic craft blogs? I haven't read any, but maybe I need to get out more. I get really tired of snark sometimes.

Anyway, Higgins regularly links to his MentalFloss entries over at Chrishiggins.com (about every Sunday), but some of my personal recent favorites have been:

Please make a note of it!

Posted by mary at 7:43 AM | Comments (2)

September 1, 2007

More Conversational Icebreakers: Occupational 20 Questions and Website Poll

LegumeFarm.jpg

Occupational 20 Questions

Even I'm strongly committed to finding alternatives to asking strangers what they do for a living, I've found occupational 20 questions is good and somehow less offensive way to kill time at parties. You can even get to know something about the person you're talking to without feeling all awkward, and it's a game that requires that you not know the person you're playing with. I've bragged more than once that the first time I played this game, I guessed "youth pastor" correctly after 17 questions! Sadly, ever since that early victory, I don't think I've guessed correctly once. I keep getting stumped by answers like, "legal copying manager"! But I'm a lot better at inventing games than playing them, so probably you'll do a lot better.

Here are some good questions to get the ball rolling:

Note: it's not really "cool" to ask things like, "do you make more than $50k a year?"

What Are the First Three Websites You Look at Everyday?

This question is becoming less relevent as more people use RSS feeds, but even so, I still tend to favor clicking on my RSS links in a particular order. It's a question that only works for people who spend a lot of time clicking on things, obviously.

(I'm putting common answers below the fold so you can think about your answer without being influenced)

(p.s. photo is a farm display made up primarily of grains and legumes from the Wahkiakum County Fair, which was excellent.)