Hello everyone. I usually ruminate all deep and stuff on here, but I figured that I would take you on a guided tour of the various doodads that reside in my toolbar. I blame Cam!

LibraryThing

The first and best add-on to my blog. It allows me to catalogue my books and let everyone else know what I'm reading via the highly customizable blog widget. I have mine set to show the five most recent books. Alternately, you could set it to show a random list or a list of books with a certain tag. (Tagging will be explained in the next section) A free account allows you to catalogue up to 200 books.

Del.icio.us Tag Cloud

Tagging is all the rage these days. If you're a geek, anyways. Quite simply, tagging is a way to categorize information. I tag every one of my blog posts with descriptive words which I then bookmark on del.icio.us. The Tag cloud I have allows you to see which tags I've used most often: Bigger fonts=more frequently tagged. If you click on the link in the Cloud or at the bottom of any post, it'll take you to a page where you can view any and all other posts of mine that are tagged the same. And from there you can easily click "Popular" to see what other things out on the Web have been tagged the same way. Careful not to get lost in cyberspace!

coComment

This technology allows me to keep track of the comments that I make on other people's blogs. The sidebar widget also allows anyone reading my blog to see where else I'm reading and commenting. It's a good step to making the blogosphere a little more two-way and relational. Sorta.

Site Feed

I "burn" my site feed through FeedBurner. If you register your site feed with them, it makes it really easy for people to add your site feed to a news reader. Essentially, any site with a feed can be subscribed to via a feed reader. I use Google Reader to automatically check who has made recent blog posts instead of having to check all the different blogs. Click on my site feed and it should help you figure out what's what with feeds and such.

ClustrMaps

This has the most "fun" factor I'd say. Register your site with them and they'll give you a daily map of where in the world people are visiting you blog from! Pretty cool! If you happen to be viewing it today, you'll see nothing because I just signed up for it. Come back tomorrow!

Thus concludes the tour of my uber-geekiness. I hope you endured the ride.