I’ve been using the social bookmarking and news site digg.com for awhile, but thus far haven’t had much luck making submissions. Recently I posted a couple of my Apple related posts, but they never made it out of the upcoming stories pile (probably just as well, not sure if the WordPress setup I’ve got here could stand the load).

Anyways, I apparently lucked out the other day when I got not one but two stories on the front page! First was Complete Free iTunes Downloads List, which made the leap to the front page practically while I was watching (it was sitting at like 27 diggs in the upcoming after 14 hours, then next time I checked a few minutes later it was at 45 diggs and on the front page). Its now at 2119 diggs and was the second most popular story for the day.

The second post, iTunes 7.0.1 Released for downloads and in software update, was a “target of opportunity” as I noticed the update pop-up in Software Update while watching my other post. Decided to try just for the heck of it. It got dugg up fast, I think it was promoted to the home page in under an hour! Guess not so surprising considering how many people apparently had problems with version 7.0.

Anyways, just thought it kinda cool to have two stories on the front page at the same time. They’ve both passed off the home page, but are ranked reasonably well on the “top stories of the week” page at the moment.

Google Maps has gone online with its satellite images. The coverage for Japan doesn’t appear as high-res as that in the US (here’s my old house), but here’s what Mukaihara looks like from orbit. Looks like it was a kinda cloudy day, so hard to see parts and definitely can’t pick out my house or any other building. If you zoom out or pan over to the north-west a bit you can see the slightly urban area of Yoshida and the lake for Haji dam.

The images of Hiroshima city aren’t much better in detail, but you can make out all the islands that make up the city and the square a little above and right of center that is the moat around Hiroshima Castle.

I’ve been collecting quite a mass of links for ESL lesson plans, games, activities, etc. since I’ve come to teach here. I’ve been wanting to organize them and also be able to share them with the JTEs (Japanese Teacher of English) and my fellow ALTs (Assistant Language Teacher).

Well, the latest hot thing on the web (or at least one of them), is the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. It lets you organize your bookmarks, share them with other people and look at other peoples’ bookmarks. The idea is that people that bookmark the same things as you probably have other sites bookmarked that you’ll be interested in.

So, I’ve started adding what I’ve found, you can find them here. Most of them are oriented towards elementary and JHS since that’s what I teach. I don’t know much about sites specializing in high school materials. Let me know if you know any other cool or useful ones. Oh, the reason there’s a bunch of news links in there is to help my JTEs (who want to practice reading English news) and because they are handy for adult classes.