There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.

Find a shop you like? Check out their favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop’s favorites. Repeat until you realize five hours have gone by and you have 60 browser tabs open to Etsy pages.

I never stop at the shop level on Etsy. If I find an item of interest, I go past the shop to that shop’s favorites, and enter an endless loop. Below are some hearters I’ve been digging lately, and here’s a Yahoo Pipes-generated meta-feed consolidating all their hearting activity which you can subscribe to if they strike your fancy as well.

Tip: If you find yourself past page 10 of someone’s favorites, subscribe to their favorites feed.

corduroy’s items populate most of my favorite sellers’ favorites, so being pulled into her favorites was inevitable. She’s led me down some fruitful paths.

Etsy all-star hearter TeenAngster hipped me to the favorites of groundwork (among many others), who happens to be corduroy’s sister. Their mother, pogoshop, is also an active hearter. They share a great eye.

Just now after following a thread from groundwork’s favorites I was led to siiso (hearted this painting of hers). Her favorites led to half-dozen other eye-openers so she joins this list as well.

Icebear, aka Sofia Arnold, is in India right now but she left behind lots of quality favorites leads. I was taken with this free bird and French hermit crab.

Domestikate favors the witty. She likes “color, humor, good design, wood and skies of blue.” She also finds and sells parrot staplers.

yaelfran is one of Etsy’s heavy hearters, with a massive number of favorites. They’re a bottomless source of unusual illustrations and prints.

I’m a fan of Virginia Kraljevic’s intricate line drawings and her favorites have led me to some interesting places, like Hillarie Tasche’s graffiti train drawings and Betsy Walton’s world.

More found daily.

Lauren got the search functionality for Datamob up and running, making the site about 1,000 times more useful. Adjustments are in progress but you can subscribe to feeds of search results.

Recent additions: NPR API, BBC Backstage, CrunchBase API, CrunchBase Map, TheMiddleClass.org, geophysically scaled economic data, Walk Score, Lee Byron’s San Franscisco Walkability Map, Toby Segaran’s Industry Browser and a number of resources.

I’ve been separating out product- and UX-focused feeds from the tech business feeds in my feedreading. Great product feeds include Emily Chang’s eHub, Chris “factoryjoe” Messina’s Flickr feed of notable screenshots, Marshall Kirkpatrick’s custom meta-feed of app sources which includes the aforementioned feeds, Konigi, Dave Winer’s TechJunk and the venerable Signal vs. Noise.

But I think what I really wanted and just didn’t know it is Pattern Tap, which collects and categorizes screenshots of interesting interface elements and allows you to create sets of your favorites. It’s organized UI inspiration.

As someone who keeps a filing cabinet full of old notebooks and sketchbooks organized by year and topic (if only I could tag them), I never tire of these web-head hand styles or their graffiti counterpart. But sometimes you need some mind-mapping software to get the job done. Lars Plougmann’s digitally rendered mind map above of Joshua Schachter’s 2006 Future of Web Apps talk contains a lot of relevant information. Check it out full size.

And if you don’t think any of this paper stuff is useful, consider Bill Westerman’s paper-based time management software. Or Adaptive Path’s sketchboard technique.

NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people—the kind of thing we’re starting to see a lot more of—and you can use it to uncover little-known connections between Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker contributors who have been parodied as Muppets and philosophers featured on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band who have had asteroids named after them, then overlay their zodiac signs. Or just see which big-name donors have contributed to the campaigns of both Obama and McCain. Fun stuff though I would love to be able to use this on top of other data sources.

See also: TheyRule, ExxonSecrets

I always want to know where these sites get their data, and as I dug deeper I noticed that many of them pull from the same data sources. Open Secrets from the Center for Responsive Politics is an important data source—Follow the Oil Money, OpenCongress and MAPLight all tap into it in different ways. Datamob aims to highlight these connections and keep track of all the developer-friendly public data sources and corresponding interfaces. We’ve got feeds of everything (datasets, interfaces, resources, tags, comments, the whole ball of data) to help with that.

The site was built with Rails in coffee shops around New York City using Heroku, an amazing web-based, collaborative Rails development environment. Get the full WTF on the about page. We’re just getting started and there’s a lot more to come.

We don’t usually get to see this handmade stage of the web, but some folks have been thoughtful/narcissistic enough to upload photos of their UI sketches, and I find them fascinating.

Many UI designers sketch with Sharpies but Sox prefers Staedtler pens, which are from Germany and built for engineers. He has a vast portfolio of UI sketches on Flickr.

Finally, some high-intensity paper-prototyping action via YouTube:

A year ago I rounded up a fairly big list of bookish social networks. I’ve since tried a number of them (as the list has grown to something like 40 bookish competitors) and was pretty hyped up about Google Book Search until their embeddable book clippings started breaking and I realized their full-text search only covers a small percentage of the books I’m interested in searching.

This week, at long last, LibraryThing won me over with:

• LibraryThing Local: This is what led me to click ‘register’ and apparently I’m not alone. LibraryThing Local aggregates and maps user-submitted book-related places and events and allows you to keep track of your favorite book spots. So LibraryThing not only makes it easy to bump into book enthusiasts online but also makes it easy to bump into them at your favorite bookstores. I’ve been waiting for this since 2003, when I attempted a one-man, manual New York version in the form of Bookcircuit. Books + community go together. But clearly the user-submitted path is the only way to make this scale.
• Selection: Most book-focused social networks get their book data exclusively from Amazon’s ASIN database, which is basically a clone of the International Standard Book Number system. The ISBN system was introduced just over 40 years ago and there are plenty of books out there that aren’t in it. If you happen to be into old, rare or weird books, chances are you own some. LibraryThing goes beyond Amazon to tap into 255 library databases from around the world. Go ahead and try to find a book that isn’t in one of these databases.
• Member-uploaded covers: Book covers, I like them. I buy old editions of books I’ve read for the covers, and seek out cover designers. When you add books to your library on LibraryThing, you get to choose the cover. Members have uploaded a lot of interesting ones that you might not have seen. If you can’t bear to look at the modern editions of old books, LibraryThing is your bookish social network.
• Book collection comparisons: As you start adding books to your library, you’ll see a box on your profile called “Members with your books.” Prepare to be amazed at the number of LibraryThing members who share your unique taste. They’ll lead you to new books. Compare this experience to that of GoodReads, which has been growing fast and is by some measures the dominant bookish social network at the moment. GoodReads is focused on book recommendations from friends, and while you’re more likely to listen to people you know, there are undoubtedly people out there who you don’t yet know who could teach you something. Try stepping outside your social graph sometime : )
• Community: All the true book freaks are on LibraryThing: the booksellers and librarians, collectors and hoarders (and writers—a lot of authors are members and you’re alerted when you add their books). If this appeals to you, LibraryThing is the right place for you. But besides the level of bookishness on display on LibraryThing, there is a real community feel to the site that is largely a result of the tone set by founder Tim Spalding and his team. New features are continually rolled out, blogged openly and chewed over in depth. And while I tend to be partial to the 37signals school of simplicity, this is an area where you want rich functionality and customization. LibraryThing’s got it.

And sure, it’s not as pretty as some of the other bookish social networks but guess what? You’re invited to help out with that, too.

At last night’s Advertising Club of NY Meetup at Google’s Chelsea offices, Google execs talked about how they’ve been busy reengineering the offline ad-buying process and adding web-like metrics and measurement to radio, TV and print advertising. There was talk of environmental radio ad triggers, so that if pollen levels reached a certain point in a region you could have allergy medication radio ads deployed (synergy!). The vision was for a Google Analytics dashboard utopia combining online and offline activity reporting for Maximum Ad Impact Awareness. Center Networks has video of the whole evening.

The big plan for print ads: barcodes. Mobile phone-friendly barcodes that you scan with your phone’s camera to be taken to a web page in your phone’s browser—a concept eerily similar to that of the late-bubble CueCat scanners that failed spectacularly eight years ago.

But apparently barcodes have come a long way since then. There are semacodes, which I first learned about via Lauren’s blogging of Eliott Malkin’s eRuv project a few years ago (information about eruvin and the history of Lower Manhattan is a lot more likely to get me to point my phone at a barcode than an ad, but maybe that’s just me). There are QR codes, Data Matrix codes, ShotCodes and the quest to hardlink the physical world continues unabated.

Will it be catching on around here soon? No. QR codes are big in Japan, but so are mobile phone novels. You need special software to make these things work and the big American mobile carriers are not exactly on board. Google’s Great Hope: the Android mobile platform project.