Temporary email

Phil Bradley has posted a list of Top 20 temporary and disposable email services (and a link to the source - Sizlopedia which looks quite interesting). There are plenty of these things about - with different definitions of 'temporary'.

Interesting things of the week #2

ImageChef - fun image-based message generator, found via Librarian in Black

"The Four Habits of Highly Effective Librarians" - found via LisNews

Dr Phil's test found via Life as I Know it (I'm a 36)

BIALL blog

ACrappySearchEngine.com - bad search results - on purpose - found via Compiler

Portmanteau - When words intertwingle

Interesting things of the week

Visualization of the Day (#2): Wikipedia's 100 Most Visited

Famous Librarians’ Favorite Books: Part 2

How Much Textual Information Do We Consume Daily?

The ladder or the rope? by Hypatia on Enquiring Minds Want to Know

Penn and Teller with houdini at library

National Archives do Podcasts!

IT & Information pros' excessive workload 'a myth'

Lyrics

I work in a law library, and none of the lawyers have ever asked me for song lyrics (boring lot!). But I do look them up from time to time purely for my own interests (and sanity), so I was interested to see that Yahoo had set up a search engine. My usual method was just to put the song title along with the word ‘lyrics’ (or the lyrics I knew) into Google and see what I got.
I’ve had a look at Yahoo Music Lyrics and it is pretty good. As Phil Bradley points out you can’t copy and paste the lyrics, which is a bit annoying. More annoying is the fact that they sometimes asterisk out swearing (and sometimes not), or in the case of Cake’s version of I Will Survive, put in the wrong lyric. So the lyrics are not completely accurate. There are also a few problems with song titles being misspelt, and multiple entries for the same song, and it is not comprehensive - for example, while it lists the album ‘Achtung Bono’ by Half Man Half Biscuit, it doesn’t provide the lyrics for any of the songs, while Kirsty MacColl, Cake and many others only have a fraction of their songs’ lyrics available.
The Guardian has an article that claims this will “drown fans' fuzzy song lines” - but I think this was just an excuse to print some misheard lyrics!

And if the song you want isn’t on Yahoo (and there’s every chance it isn’t), there are still plenty of other lyric sites out there:
A-Z Lyrics Universe - Search by artist or title only. Not very comprehensive.
Get Lyrical - again, not very comprehensive, but you can search by artist, song, album or lyric.
LyricWiki - includes a ‘parody’ genre which seems to be entirely full of Weird Al Yankovic songs. Search by artist or title only.
Metro Lyrics - Search by artist or title or by lyrics. No asterisks.

I'm sure there are lots more.

Links

Some of the useful/interesting things I've come across recently:

URLtea - shorten URLs (via Phil Bradley)
RSS in plain english (via Information Literacy meets Web 2.0)
Converticon -
Helium - 'writing rating and finding articles' (via Pandia)
Blackle - energy saving search engine (google(ish) on a black background)
ITV unveils on-demand play again service (via Guardian)
The Women who drive Library Technology (via Librarian in Black)