I’m jealous of Sarah Brown

Not the chick from “General Hospital” or the “new first lady.” I’m talking about Sarah Brown the person who brought to life Cringe, a monthly reading series in Brooklyn where “brave souls come forward and read aloud from their teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence. It’s better and cheaper than therapy.”

Ok, so that’s brilliant. But in checking out her blog recently, my husband found a section titled, “Text messages saved in my phone, vol. 6.” Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t you? For a full 24 hours now, I’ve been saying things like, “Nachos are almost always better in theory. Like spontaneous road trips” and “Dudes are for jerks.”

 

del.icio.us

I’d been hearing about del.icio.us for years, but never really saw the point of using it. I have bookmarks built into my browser, and if I switch jobs or computers, I can just export/import the bookmarks file. What’s the point of “social bookmarking”? Plus, the URL is really annoying. I can never remember if it’s de.lic.io.us or deli.cio.us or what. And the user interface isn’t really all that user friendly and lack of widespread adoption keeps it from being as great as it could be.

That said, I’ve started using the site a lot more at my current job, mostly for sharing links with a small group of coworkers, and the site is growing on me. There’s one particularly awesome feature that I’d like to share with you, but before I do, consider this a warning: This can be addictive.

It’s the del.icio.us randomizer. It’s the online equivalent of channel surfing a billion-channel TV. Here’s what you do to hook it up:

- In your browser, go to Bookmarks, then Organize Bookmarks

- Click New Bookmark

- Where it says Location, paste this URL: http://del.icio.us/recent?random&min=10

To use the randomizer, just click on your new bookmark. Each time you click, you’ll be taken to a new recently-added-to-del.icio.us link. Some of the links get a bit techie-heavy (lots of stuff about Ubuntu, CSS and Ruby on Rails), but I’ve found a lot of great stuff using it.

 

Time Magazine’s “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without”

On Monday, Time wrote about the “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without.” Meh. Don’t count me in that we. Amazon? Really? I think if something happened to Amazon, I could still live. I prefer Google “Products” search these days (although the old name Froogle was much better). Some of the choices I definitely agree with (IMDB, eBay, Craig’s List, Wikipedia), but other sites get the WTF Face: Yahoo? CitySearch? It’s not 1998 anymore. Freakin’ Netflix?? As a service, it’s great. But as a site-I-can’t-live-without…?

At least Flickr is on the list. Flickr is one site that continually delights me. As of late, I’m digging the maps section, an area where people geo-tag their photos and drop them on the map where the photos were taken, or close to it. The maps interface is a bit clumsy right now, from a usability perspective, but I have faith that they’ll improve it, as they have everything else on the site. I love the limited amount of quality products Flickr has for sale, too — like Qoop photobooks. I ordered one last year, and it was professional-looking, inexpensive, and shipped fast. And it makes a really great personal gift. They give their members credit by not making the commerce options the focal point of the homepage, or any other page for that matter. In fact, while there’s a block of info about products on the homepage by default, members can click to close the commercial message. When you refresh the page, poof! It’s gone. How many websites today will let you control the money-making aspects of the site?

Hmm. Maybe this should have been a post about the “25 parts of Flickr I can’t live without.” I haven’t even started on my favorite groups yet.

 

Clothes Minded

Growing up the daughter of a seamstress, I’ve always been surrounded (and fascinated) by fashion. For far too long, all the sites out there dealing with clothes were e-commerce-based, for obvious reasons. Or the sites were crappy websites for traditional fashion mags (which is another post altogether—why can’t old media learn to embrace the interweb?).

I recently found two fashion sites that I’m absolutely in love with. Actually, one of them I found forever ago. It’s called The Sartorialist. According to the site’s bio, it was started “simply to share photos of people that I saw on the streets of New York that I thought looked great.” Awesome premise. And I love that he (The Sartorialist himself) has no problem just stopping people on the street and taking his or her picture. There’s nothing special about the site itself—it’s a simple Blogger template with minimal whistles tacked on. The content is what makes it work: The Sartorialist has a great eye, and the comments sections of each post are filled with props and further critiques. I can’t look at it every day, though. Makes me miss New York City more than anything else.

The other site that’s a great marriage of clothing, personal style and Web 2.0 is a Flickr group called wardrobe_remix. In it, a bunch of people (men and women, though mostly women) post a photo of what they’re wearing that day, along with a bit of info about each of the pieces of their wardrobe. There are posting rules for the group that, like a good bra, help it maintain its shape: Only head-to-toe shots. No descriptions like “I look fat today but I’m posting this anyhow.”

Only constructive comments. And so on. Unlike The Sartorialist, which focuses more on the high-end, this is a group for anyone who stays awake at night wondering what they’re going to wear tomorrow.

I’ve thought about creating a site, one that’s a big clothing swap with social-networking two-point-oh qualities. It would be like MySpace + eBay + consignment shop; like lala.com for clothes, where money is made per transaction and not based on the cost of the items. Money’s made from advertising, too, but as far as users go, it’s truly a swap/exchange type of thing. Any VCs out there that want to give me a hand??