I’m very lucky to have a fabulous mom. Thanks, Mom.

• The Peacock Guide to Landing Pages: Amy mentions the Twitter bio. My advice is to add keywords important to you and your business plus a couple of fun facts about yourself.
• The Myth of the Sales Page: Right on, Sean! I’m not going to buy something after clicking a link that takes me to the landing page. This is exactly why businesses need to use different social networking tools.
• Effective Networking for Book Publishing: No longer can authors depend on publishers to do the promotion — unless your name is John Grisham or some other hot shot.
• An Open Letter to “New” Writers

• Free Music Archive: Yes, free and legal.
• Paintalicious – Thomas Allen’s Book Art Photography: “Blogzine of exciting contemporary art, showcasing an eclectic mix of underground artists, pop surrealists, emerging and rediscovered counter cultures.”
• My First Dictionary: Dick and Jane style wholesome pictures meet cruel world. For word lovers.
• &, the carrying case; &, the book and &, the tee: Who doesn’t love that gorgeous symbol? [Links: Havi]
• What NOT to get for the baby or toddler

Still can’t write, but discovering great stuff in whiling away the time reading and learning… and social networking…

• Scottish Vernacular Dictionary [Link: Joanna]
• How Alltop Powers Bloggers
• How to Use Twitter as a Twool
• Top 10 Tweeters to follow by subject… be warned… long list.
• Convert your blog into a podcast [Link: Deborah] I’ve added it here. What do you think?
• Real life LinkedIn stories leading to opportunities, 100 Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn, and Success Stories [Link: Scott].
• Pitch Engine: Run your PRs through it. My first PR in PE.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Sequart Research and Literary Organization: “a non-profit organization devoted solely to the study and promotion of the artistic and literary medium alternately known as comics, comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, manga, sequential art, and sequart.”
• Help a friend & her mother. Maybe you can hire her as she’s a QuickBooks pro. Even folks like me who love software don’t like QuickBooks. Took a class and a lot of courage to finally get the hang of it.
• Wonderglen Productions: Satire site a la Christopher Guest, Best in Show, and Spinal Tap. Half the fun consists of trying to figure out who the site’s actual authors and owners are.
• 15-Second Film Festival: To heck with two hour bum numbing movies. Hello, 15-second movies.
• Models made out of books [Link: Guy]. Amazing and detailed work.
• Eyeballing game [Link: Steve]
• Regiftable: Regifting stories.

• The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form
• Thank goodness, the election ended with no run-offs (at least not for my area). But a good lesson to be learned with political signs looking like bad PowerPoint slides. Just like writing for the web differs from other resources, signs have their own requirements.
• Life Is Not an Emergency … Or is it? I love this entry. We need to enjoy our lives and not stick to a movie (life) script all the time. Life should be like a roller coaster instead of a too safe Merry-Go-Round (great dialogue in Parenthood about this).
• What To Do about Looky-Lous. Who cares if we have more “No thanks, I’m just looking” people today or not. Always treat every person as a potential customer.
• Canadian English as Explained by Joe Clark.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• How unique is your user name?
• I want my MTV! MTV opened the world of modern music for me since I could finally see the name of the song and know what I liked. If I liked something I heard on radio, I was out of luck as nothing could tell me the name of the song. Enjoy the MTV music videos of the days old. By the time they captioned many music videos, I was too busy taking care of my children. Too bad, they’re not captioned here.
• Pretty keyboard! And this Karaoke Soap on a Rope is just asking for a lot of bad jokes.
• It’s hard for me to discover new songs because I can’t identify songs on the radio. Karen came up with an ingenious way of discovering new love songs. I have quirky playlists and am not into love songs. But love good song with a strong beat and words that you can hear over the music instead of the music drowning it out. Let me know!
• Gorgeous original photos of Scotland. [Link: Joanna]

• Freelance Writing Fees: Anne Wayman has great series of articles to help writers with their fees. Unfortunately, writers won’t find a straight answer and it’s up to us to figure out our fees. But resources like this can help with the process.
• 70 logo design resources: I love this stuff. It includes books, articles, blogs, and tutorials.
• Visuwords: Online graphical dictionary.
• Uniqlo Grid: Great time waster… don’t go there if you’re busy. Click How to Play to get the details. Just enter a nickname and click Join Now to start.
• GuessTheSpot.com: Can you figure out the famous location or building from an aerial view? [Link: Steve Bass]
• Snopes page on the 9-letter word that appears in the below video.

• Visual Dictionary Online
• The 10 biggest technology belly flops of 2007: Re: #7 — way to go, Wall Street Journal!
• Mint: Manage your money
• Sharpbrains: Exercise your brain.
• Steampunk Flat-Panel LCD Mod: I LOVE this old style monitor and keyboard. Steampunk can put old-style images on different things. Easiest thing to do is look at the photos.
• Advice to the wanna-be freelancer before quitting the day job: As always, Freelance Folder produces another top-notch article for freelancers. Even those already enjoying the full-time freelance life will benefit.
• This Year in Blogs: The Definitive Posts of 2007

I love this word that has the honor of being Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: W00t! It is fun to type and not easy to say (at least, not for me). And of course, we love it when woot.com has its woot off.

Oxford’s choice doesn’t have fun interjected. Its word of the year is locavore. Oxford also lists runners-up.

Webster’s New World new word of 2007 is grass station.

Dictionary.com selects a word of the month, you can see all 12 words of the month for 2007.

On the other end, Lake Superior State University identifies its banished words of 2007. One of those being combined celebrity couple names like TomKat and Brangelina. The Office‘s Michael Scott, in his unwanted toast at his employee’s wedding, announced if you combine their names, they’d be Phlob (Phyllis and Bob Vance).

Roy Peter Clark talks about neologisms — new words. In the article, he tells a story about a child who referred to something as “ginormous” because “It was bigger than gigantic. It was huger than enormous.” The child didn’t create the word as Clark points to the Urban Dictionary — so it’s not impossible for multiple people to come up with the same word.

Want to create a new word? Try blending multiple words, which are easy for others to figure out after determining words on which they’re based. Clark references Wanted Words, books that list words suggested by listeners and includes tidbits and letters. The book’s web site held contests that gave readers a chance to create new words based on a brief description. Here’s the last contest. Just click Previous to see more.

Protologism also means creating a new word… but unlike neologism, the creator wants to make it an accepted word in the language as it’s based on “prototype” and “neologism.”

WordSpy collects new terms that have appeared in multiple resources — they’re not sniglets.

Other ways to create words:

* daffynitions: Ex: “alarms — What an octopus is. (all arms)”

* sniglets: Ex: cheedle — “The orange residue left on fingers after eating Cheetos or some other cheesy snack.”

* goofinitions: Ex: “balderdash — rapid hair loss.”

I can’t find a clear definition of “stunt words” as referenced in Word Spy. All the searches refer to Word Spy’s description except for one that points to Wordlustitude, a blog that’s “a growing dictionary of ephemeral words — also known as nonce or stunt words. All readers are strongly encouraged to use these terms in their blogs, poems, prophesies, and recipes.” So “stunt words” are word fads, words with a short life.

Collins Word Exchange How to Make a Dictionary is a good read [Link from Language Log]. Still stuck? Try the Random Word Generator.

Or take an existing word and give it a new twist. “Shut up” isn’t always an insult. It can also be a surprise or a shocker that translates to “No way!” Grey’s Anatomy got my friends and me on a “seriously” kick — to mean “Yeah” or “telling the truth.”

The Geekend Wiktionary from TechRepublic is an “unvarnished glossary of terms for those trying to navigate the corridors of geekdom. No entry is complete until you’ve screwed with…er, improved it!”

Just had to post that for a little weekend laugh. Ha! Paul can relate to HelpDesk.