TrendCentral: Fan fiction has long been thriving online in places such as LiveJournal, and now a new online community called FanLib is serving as a hub for all things fan fiction. Site users can post their own fiction, read others’ work sorted by show/book or writer, save specific stories to a customized favorites list, and embed content badges into social […]

Iconoculture: It’s not Wikipedia, it’s a videopedia. At 5min.com you can learn everything from how to make an origami barking dog (useful!) to how to spackle a wall (frivolous!) to how to pour beer (necessary!). 5min’s video player is specially made for the self-help medium — users can switch the player to slow-motion mode or even advance a how-to video […]

BusinessWeek: Anyone who wants to join Xianz, a Christian social network, needs to abide by a set of rules that read more Ten Commandments than terms of use. Rule No. 2, for instance, bars cursing and “derogatory words.” The next one bans name-calling: “You may express your disagreement with someone’s point-of-view, but personal attacks…are prohibited.” Compared with the relatively permissive […]

CakeAmerica is a website that is dedicated to help web users find cakes and other baked products in their localities and empower the local cake businesses to promote and advertise their cakes on the web. The heart of the website is its local cake search. It can find the cake items posted to the website as long as the words […]

TrendCentral: Not since the ‘90s JenniCam craze has a personal webcam attracted so much attention. Justin.tv is the live videostream of Justin Kan, a 23-year-old web entrepreneur in San Francisco who has coined the term “lifecasting” with his no holds barred self-documentation approach. Kan has attached a camera to his head that delivers a 24/7 stream of his life from […]

Janice alerted us to a new online film community Spout.com: The DVD market is, and has been, in constant flux since the talk of video streaming, Netflix and others. In tandem, community sites like MySpace and Friendster are changing the way we interact with the Internet, particularly among teens who are avid users of these sites. At the crossroads of […]

TrendCentral: Art Basel Miami may have been just last month, but the young art world is once again on everyone’s mind. For years now, trendsetters have cited deviantArt, a popular site that provides a forum for visual artists to show their work and receive feedback from the community, as a favored web destination. Now there is a similar new kid […]

Reveries: Forever the word magnet, Google is hoping to piggyback off creative minds with its latest offering, Google Patent Search. Users of the free service can sift through more than 7 million registered patents. One can kill some serious time at www.Google.com/patents. Entering “The Motley Fool” spits back 19 entries. The patent offerings may not have the same kind of […]

TrendCentral: You may soon hear people saying “VM me” rather than “IM me”. Veeker is a free video messaging service that enables a camera phone owner to shoot video and instantly share it with friends. Videos are sent directly to the Veeker site, where, similar to Flickr, the creator can opt to keep it private or to share with the […]

TrendCentral: Taking heated comment section feuds (when readers pick fights with bloggers and other readers in a blog’s comment section) even further, bloggers and podcasters now have the chance to engage in direct discourse with their devoted readers and/or listeners—this time, via live listener call-in segments. Often described as “podcasting 2.0,” a site called BlogTalkRadio enables registered users to schedule […]