And you thought blogging was a recent phenomenon (Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com) If you're a woman and a blogger, chances are you've already heard of the BlogHer conference, which starts today in Chicago. If not, it would be worth your while to peruse their site, as they provide a nice central locale on the Web for a vast number of women bloggers (and even a few men, as well!). This year's agenda looks worth the trek to the windy city, with topics including business, privacy, sexuality, branding, and a host of educational "geek labs." Of course The Spark has several women bloggers, and I decided to take this opportunity to find out what women here at Yahoo! are blogging about (Yahoo! has more than a dozen blogs in the U.S. alone), and discover staff favorites. You’ll find women blogging on the Yahoo! Answers blog, as well as the Buzz Log, Shine, and Yodel Anecdotal, inspiring curiosity and conversations. In their off-hours, Yahoo! women blog about knitting, public transit in San Francisco, and finding the cutest things on the Web. At least one even blogs in French! And what women-authored blogs are Yahoos (who are online a lot) reading? The topics run the gamut from the traditional "ladymag" fare of "Jezebel" to Maud Newton’s musings on literature and Jackie Clay’s advice on homesteading. And several staff members rely on "Cake Wrecks" for a daily laugh. It’s nice to be reminded that the online community of women is alive and well, and that it extends into realms beyond "mommy-blogging" (er -- not that there’s anything wrong with mommy-blogging ...). Suggested Sites... BlogHer's Blog Directory - browse blogs in twenty topic areas. How Do I Sell Advertising On My Blog? - About.com interview with BlogHer presenter Lynn Truong. Yahoo! Moms Video Channel - Yahoo! video coverage of the BlogHer Conference. Yodeling Mamas - Yahoo's very own mommy-blogger hub. Best Female Bloggers of 2008 - year-end round-up of some standout bloggers on various topics, from thefrisky.com.

Directory categories: Blog Directories, Women and the Internet, Mommy Blogs, Cyberculture, Collaborative Blogs

Archived under: Blogs, Chicago, Conventions, Cyberculture, In Character, Internet, The Spark, Women, Yahoo!

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"All aboard!" The "MUNI Diaries" logo Muni Diaries – whether you live in San Francisco and ride its slow and human-stained MUNI buses and trains or not, you can still be amused, shocked, and/or disgusted by these fascinating tales of the publicly-transported in all their tired, smelly, and crammed-together glory. Populated largely by user-submitted content, the "Muni Diaries" blog shows public transportation for what it is: a strange social experiment, a fecund human Petri dish where the rich and poor, the young and old, and the healthy and sick cram together with all the nudity, violence, vomit, and sexual indiscretion that keeps the riding citizens endlessly entertained -- and always coming back for more. SticK – because quitting smoking, saving money, or exercising regularly is hard, StickK.com has devised a web-based method to help you keep the achievement of your goals on track. If you set a goal and do not achieve it, StickK.com will charge your credit card accordingly and send the money to a designated recipient. I Do Now I Don’t – these pre-owned wedding and engagement ring auction sites are becoming quite a burgeoning little industry. Every time I see a new one, I think, “Oh, that’s kinda funny,” until I start looking at the pictures of the rings and thinking about the stories of heartbreak that many of them hold, and then it just starts to seem sad. "I Do Now I Don't" also sells wedding dresses, which makes sense because teardrops can usually be washed right out of most fabrics. Airfare Watchdog – a new take on the airfare-deal-finding website, "Airfare Watchdog" provides you a list of surprisingly-inexpensive flights to and from various destinations with limitations on travel dates and times. If you’re just looking to get out of town and you’re flexible on your dates (or even your destination), a quick browse through their daily list of fares might be of interest. Cat Workout – sites like this really make me want to lose my job and hang around my house all day coming up with funny things to blog. "Cat Workout" helps users see the real value in having a cat: you can save money on exercise equipment! Having a cute little kitty in my arms while I’m doing “European squats” would not only provide me with soft and fuzzy joy, but would also provide the resistance that I need to maximize the effectiveness of my workouts. Suggested Sites... Muni Diaries - SF Muni adventure blog with stories, news, videos, and commentary about the bus-tastic San Francisco Municipal Railway. Get Muni news and submit your own Muni adventures, photos, videos, and stories. SticK - enables users to form commitment contracts to help them achieve their personal goals. These goals may be to lose weight, run a marathon, exercise regularly, quit smoking, or a personalized goal. Cat Workout - work out with these cat workout videos. Exercises include leg lifts, European squats, biceps training, and more. Airfare Watchdog - alerts consumers to fare reductions, airline discounts, and other unusually low airfares from a wide variety of sources. I Do Now I Don't - buy and sell pre-owned wedding rings, engagement rings, jewelry, and wedding dresses.

Directory categories: San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI), Personal Growth, Airfare Consolidators, Cats, Online Jewelry Auctions

Archived under: Air Travel, Animals, Auctions, Blogs, California, Cats, Cities, Commuting, Diets, Exercise, In Character, Internet, Motivation, Recycling, San Francisco, Shopping, Smoking, Trains, Transportation, Travel, Weddings, Yahoo! Directory

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(Photo by Edenpictures) The purpose of the first World Information Society Day in 2005 was to raise awareness about what the Internet and other communication technologies could offer to societies and economies, and to help bridge the digital divide. A year later, the day was combined with World Telecommunication Day (which had been celebrated on May 17th since 1969) to mark both the founding of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention in 1865 (back in the good old days of the Morse Code). Although this blend creates the tongue-twisting name World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, the blend makes perfect sense and also eliminates potential confusion between Information Society Day with the legendary 80s band. Access to information is increasing globally, thanks in part to such projects as "One Laptop Per Child" and the Technology Access Foundation. As more young people venture onto the Internet, though, new challenges arise. Perhaps that’s why this year’s theme for World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is "Protecting Children in Cyberspace." A couple of decades ago, parents were biting their nails over the mature themes and manipulative advertising their children were being exposed to on television. Today, those worries are multiplied to the Nth degree with the unfiltered realm that must seem to many like the new Wild West. Although the statistics about young peoples' experience online can be alarming, the Internet should not strike fear into one's heart. The key is to be aware of the dangers for kids, and to begin the idea of "communications" with old-fashioned talking. Many kids give out personal information online without understanding the risks. Online predators certainly exist, but cyberbullying is becoming a more common concern, with cases reaching the news cycle by the day. Just as we enjoy having unlimited access to information via the Internet 24 hours a day, this door opens both ways, so kids can no longer leave conflicts behind on school grounds. The silver lining? There are a lot of resources out there for families. Start with the Yahoo! Directory to find organizations, information, and tips for helping your kids navigate cyberspace. Suggested Sites... Yahoo! Safely - tons of information for parents and kids for staying safe online. Child Online Protection - informative brochure from ITU. SafeKids.com - offers great resources, plus a blog with current topics. Internet Safety Technical Task Force - creating a safer environment on the internet for youth. World Information Society Day - links and resources from the United Nations.

Directory categories: Child Internet Safety, Internet Safety Organizations, Internet Blocking and Filtering Software, Children's Internet Privacy, Digital Divide

Archived under: Children, Computers, Holidays, Internet, Kids, Parenting, Safety, Security, Technology, Teens

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Yahoo! Movies Summer Movie Guide A couple months ago, I spat out my top picks for this summer's big movies. Now that the summer movie season is officially here, I'd like to share the best of the season's movie guides that have recently launched into cyberspace, and point out their coolest features: Yahoo! Movies: Our very own movie guide is pretty neato, if I say so myself. It features a horizontal scroll of all the season's movies, starting with this week's releases. All titles can be listed by month, genre, or popularity, we have tons of video clips (in addition to the trailers), and in the top right corner of the homepage is a "Box Office Showdown" with financial results for all the films released so far. Moviefone: Moviefone just loves photo slideshows, so that's what most of their features consist of. Nonetheless, they have some useful ones, like guides for Family Movies, Chick Flicks, and Indie Sleepers. The homepage also has a nifty "Highlights" section to scroll through the biggest movies of the season, and their HD trailers section is pretty darn nice, I have to admit. Entertainment Weekly: EW.com has one of my favorite features -- a single-page calendar of the entire summer. Their guide also includes the magazine's feature articles and several interesting photo galleries (although "Matthew McConaughey, Shirtless: A History" just makes me want to puke, personally). Hollywood.com: Several nice features on this one, such as streaming trailers on the homepage and many cool goodies like the Star Trek Handbook (which includes a face-off between the original cast and J.J. Abrams'), a "10 Characters Sure to Die This Summer" (SPOILER ALERT -- careful with that one), "Celeb Flick Picks," where celebrities tell us which summer blockbuster they're jonesin' to see, and even a (fairly well hidden) "Five Flicks to Skip" list, which earns bonus points for including McConaughey's movie. Fandango: The other major movie ticket service has a decent guide, with some unique features, including a Flash-based summer movie trivia game, several Top 10 lists (such as "Top 10 TV Show Movies"), and a really cool "Road Trips" feature about the filming locations used in "Star Trek" and "Wolverine." Rotten Tomatoes: For you webkids who need your info NOW, the aggregating pros at R.T. have the entire summer schedule on their guide's homepage. Other than the ability to scroll through a quick preview of each film, that's pretty much it, but having the schedule all in one place is actually a very cool thing. Maxim.com: Finally, we have another "I want it all, NOW!" guide with all the biggies on one page, but this one includes all the trailers embedded from YouTube, which is great for some quick viewing. The only problem is that you get only whatever trailers were available when this "Ultimate Guide" was created, so for "Transformers," it's the first trailer, not the most recent one (which some say is not as good as the original teaser, so maybe it's a good thing). There are other Summer Movie Guides out there (see our category below), but those are the best of them. Hopefully they can help you decide which movie to spend your hard-earned cash on. Have fun! Suggested Sites... Apple.com Trailers - watch high quality trailers for upcoming movies -- summer and beyond. Kids-In-Mind - movie reviews for parents, including all the releases, not just family films. Wikipedia: 2009 in Film - all about this year's movies, with a full schedule from January-December.

Directory categories: Summer Movie Guides, Summer Movies, Upcoming Movies

Archived under: Entertainment, Internet, Movie Trailers, Movies, Summer

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Free Napkins It's a bright and lovely Springtime for the Internet. The lines are a-buzzin', the keyboards are a-clickin', and the engineers are a-innovatin'. Here are a few of my favorite websites to recently emerge... FreeNapkins.com is the introductory page for an ad network called NapAds owned by JI Worldwide, Inc. They offer free napkins to their network of bars and nightclubs with their clients' logos and advertisements featured in beautiful, full color, "high-definition" graphics. While advertising on napkins is nothing new, creating an ad network which utilizes napkin-space as real estate to be bid on by a variety of different advertisers takes the former Budweiser-logo-on-bar-napkins model to the next level. So, if you happen to be (or know) a bar owner, get in touch with NapAds for some beautiful, free napkins. I wonder what the next commonplace object to be utilized by advertising networks will be ... Dishware? Cigarettes? Condoms (yikes!)? People? Face.com: Although Face.com is still in alpha testing, I had to give you a little preview of this remarkable new digital image recognition technology. Face.com's Facebook application scans all of the photos in your Facebook account, detects all the faces in them, and then learns to recognize all of the people in those photos so that it can automatically tag those faces with the names of the individuals in the photos. The end result is that you can find your friends in pictures that you didn't know your friends were in. As a Facebook application, it's a fun little novelty, because you don't have to rely on someone hand-tagging a face in a photo in order to know that you or your friend (or even your mother) is in that photo. The image recognition technology used to power this app is pretty astonishing. Imagine what image search engines will be like once the engine is no longer relying on uncertain metadata and can start actually recognizing people, places, and things within the photos. Wow. For more info on this developing technology, check out the Facial Recognition Systems category in the Yahoo! Directory. Continue reading below for more of my favorite new websites... Suggested Sites... ZooBorns - blog showcasing pictures and video clips of the newest and cutest exotic animal babies from zoos and aquariums around the world. Topics - BBC - a full list of topics, nations, people, and subjects from current events and news from the BBC. Garden - Sunset.com - online version of the "Sunset Western Garden Book." Includes articles about gardening in the western United States, recipes, and a searchable guide to what plants grow best in your area. Watch TED 2009 - watch some really fascinating lectures by some really smart people on all kinds of different fun topics from the 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Conference. Making Home Affordable - program from the Federal Government to help homeowners obtain loans and refinance their current home loans into more affordable monthly payments.

Directory categories: Advertising and Promotional Items, Facial Recognition Systems, News and Media Web Directories, Lawn and Garden Information, Buying a Home

Archived under: Advertising, Animals, Brands, Business, Creativity, Cyberculture, Design, Education, Gadgets, Gardening, Government, Home and Garden, Housing, In Character, Internet, Invention, Landscaping, Lawn Care, Marketing, Photography, Social Networking, Technology, Yahoo! Directory

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