Linkedin - Relationships Matter

I joined almost 6 years ago when they were first starting and really haven't used it much because I couldn't get others to use it?!? Seems like now they are a "real player" and I'm going to revisit...from the site:

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

Woha Nelly...this is neat! I know my daughter (college student) is going to love this...

You can use a lot of the 'Free' stuff, but for more advanced services/options, it's going to cost you. Not much if this is a tool you really need and are a professional writer, but it's the free stuff I personally would use occasionally.

From the site:

How does Vocabgrabber work?

VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save.

Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action.

Want to try it out? Click on one of our sample texts to fill the box and start grabbing!

How can I view my vocabulary list?

After you grab the vocabulary from a text, you will see a list of words and phrases in "tag cloud" view. In the default view, words in the vocab list are arranged by relevance (more on that below!). In the tag cloud, words that appear most frequently in the text are displayed in a larger font size. The color of the words is based on whether they match one of our seven subject areas (Arts & Literature, Geography, Math, People, Science, Social Studies, Vocabulary).

You can also choose "list" view, which will give you the vocab list in a table, with columns displaying each word's subject areas, relevance score, and number of occurrences in the text. Or you can select "gallery" view, displaying a thumbnail image of each word's map in the Visual Thesaurus.

How can I sort my vocabulary list?

Above the word list you'll see four different sorting options: Relevance, A-Z, Occurrences, and Familiarity. By default the words are arranged from most relevant to least relevant. The other options allow you to sort your list alphabetically, by number of occurrences in the text, or by how familiar the words are in written English overall. To reverse any of these orderings, just click on the name of the option again to toggle the list order.

How can I filter my list by subject?

Your list will initially have the "Show All Words" box checked. But if you want to focus on vocabulary in one or more particular subjects, just click the appropriate box or boxes. The number in parentheses next to the subject name indicates how many words in the text match the subject.

Subjects include academic areas of interest (Arts & Literature, Science, and Social Studies), names of historical figures and places (People and Geography), and words that are of particular importance for language learners at all levels (Vocabulary).

How can I filter my list by relevance? (And what is relevance, anyway?)

All the words in your vocab list are ranked with a relevance score of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most relevant to the text. We calculate relevance by comparing how frequently words are used in the text versus how they are used in written English overall. That allows us to zero in on which words are most significant for the average reader.

By default, the vocab list displays words with relevance 2 through 5, leaving off the words that score only 1 and are therefore least significant. But you can choose any combination of scores by clicking on the bars under "Show Relevance."

How can I add VocabGrabber to my browser toolbar?

In the top right-hand corner, click on the button next to "Add VocabGrabber to your Toolbar." Then follow the directions for your browser to install the VocabGrabber directly on your toolbar. Once installed, you'll be able to use the VocabGrabber on any online text without having to copy and paste. Just click on the VocabGrabber "bookmarklet" and the VocabGrabber will immediately start grabbing the vocabulary from whatever page you're reading in your browser.

How can I create a Visual Thesaurus word list from my vocabulary?

Individual subscribers to the Visual Thesaurus can generate word lists from VocabGrabber results. Subscribers can click a button that says "Create Word List," which automatically selects whichever vocabulary words you have displayed based on your sorting and filtering options. You can then add a title to your word list and choose to include an example sentence of each word drawn from the text you're analyzing. (If the word appears more than once in the text, you can pick which example sentence you want to use.) You can also customize the list by deselecting any words that you don't want to appear. Then just click on "Save Word List" to add it to your collection of Visual Thesaurus word lists.

RecipeBridge

I love this site. It's soo "Google-esqe-ly Simple" as you can see from the home page above.

RecipeBridge basically "scrapes, scratches and crawls" all the food blogs and recipe sites for whatever it is your looking for. The rusults are super clear to understand and even provides other important stuff like the specific ingredients and amounts.

About the Founders
After years of searching through Google results for recipes our founders decided that cooks around the world deserved a simple place to find any recipe, the result is RecipeBridge.

ReferenceBot

ReferenceBot is a free online professional reference automation and collaboration tool. ReferenceBot acts as a reference escrow that mediates between the prospect, the employer and the reference, and at the same time builds a universal repository for professional referrals. This tool benefits everybody in the job hunting/marketing and hiring/subcontracting lifecycles:

It benefits companies hiring, outsourcing and subcontracting: it provides an online tool to help organize and automate the request for reference process for candidates. In addition, if they request references for a candidate that already exists in ReferenceBot, all the candidate references will be available right away for review, taking out the need to request references again and speeding up the selection process

It benefits job seekers, freelancers and marketing people: allowing them to collect and showcase references that they request by themselves, in addition to the references requested by their prospect employers, clients and purchasers, in a centralized place and mediated by ReferenceBot.

ReferenceBot will also suggest existing profiles to employers and clients looking for talent: if you have an account with ReferenceBot, and a company is looking for someone with your skills, ReferenceBot will suggest the match It benefits the professional or industry peer giving out the reference: they don't have to write references over and over again, they're just bothered once and their review will be stored in ReferenceBot forever. References will also have a rate for each review they make.

ReferenceBot utilizes proprietary methods to avoid impersonation of references and fake pumped-up reviews. ReferenceBot is written in Python/Django, hosted in Google App Engine, it is free to use and free of advertising.

ReferenceBot is the ultimate online professional referral and recommendation collaboration tool, create your account now, it's free.