I wanted to share a few cool things on the Internet that I’ve discovered recently. I’m usually a late adopter in new technology. The fact that I’ve discovered these things before my parents means I’m making progress on the geek ladder:

• www.squidoo.com This is a site that is a platform for people to show their expertise on a topic (via a lens they build) and help other people wanting to learn about that topic to navigate the web efficiently. You can create as many "lenses" as you want, using some easy templates and building blocks. I tried this out by creating a lens called Living A Whole New Mind, about my journey from left-brained to whole-brained. It’s just a shell at this point but it gave me enough of a taste to decide to return and improve it over time.
• www.flickr.com This is a site where you can upload photos and share them with
  your family and friends. But the best thing is a section to view interesting photos that people have uploaded in the last seven days-the kind that you’d expect to see in an art gallery. What I find really ironic is that I am truly a late adopter in terms of photography equipment–I don’t have a digital camera. Yet I’m hanging out at a site that is all about digital photos. Or maybe it’s not really about that at all.
• www.skype.com Alot of you probably have already used Skype to make free calls
  all over the world. I made my first Skype call this last week to Singapore and
  was thrilled to have a three-way call with dear friends who I have not talked
  to in almost a decade. It requires a headset with a microphone to plug into
  your computer which you can easily purchase at Radio Shack for about $10. The
  quality was a bit unpredictable (the call dropped about 5 times during a
  ninety minute call) but as my friend said, "You can’t complain when it’s
  free."