Yahoo research has an interesting flash animation exploring tags used in flickr over time. The tags give a good sense of both the growth/adoption of flickr and what was happening in the world at the time.
Chicken And Egg Question Answered
WikiMapia
This is an awesome combination of Google Maps and annotation capabilities of a wiki combined into wikimapia. As well as being great fun to browse, it is even more fun to annotate locations that you recognize from the air.
What a simple, but incredibly useful tool (and idea)!
Google Notebook
I am happy to see the release today of Google Notebook. While the chief grumble appears to be that it doesn’t allow for tagging, I am okay with that (it will no doubt be added soon enough).
What Google Notebook does provide is a means to nab portions of web pages and add them to an online ‘notebook’. Notebooks can have folding sections in them and the text that is nabbed can be edited using a basic function online editor. The editor allow you to modify fonts, color and hyperlinks and a few other niceties. Sections of a notebook can be moved from one notebook to another by simply dragging and dropping. Snippets can also be rearranged within a notebook via drag and drop as well.
Google Notebook reminds me a lot of another application that I use on my Mac called StickyBrain. I use StickyBrain to grab text and graphics from various applications that I can then file away, organize and search for future reference. I find it very handy for when I want to just grab a snippet of something from a web page rather than bookmarking the entire page. Because StickyBrain is a Mac app, I also found myself wishing that I could do the same on the Windows based laptop I use for work. Until now, this really wasn’t possible. I could get part of the way there by using LookLater to have visibility to bookmarks between work and home systems (keep in mind, this was before del.icio.us provided private bookmarks) .
Google Notebook now lets me just nab the bits of pages that I want and share them StickyBrain-like between home and work. Frankly, I was relieved to find that the provided Firefox plugin works identically under both Windows and Mac OS X.
Now if only chronosnet would come out with a way to synch my Google Notebooks with StickyBrain this could be a very powerful solution (they already have an excellent Palm synch conduit and a .Mac synch so this is not new territory for them).
Currently, Google Notebook doesn’t appear to integrate much with the other Google offerings except for search. To me, the big opportunities her are integration with gmail and Google Maps. I would guess that other things like tags and the ability to subscribe to shared notebooks online will come in due time.
Overall, I like what I see with Google Notebook and am curious to see how it will evolve over time.
technorati tags: google, googlenotebook, notebook, bookmarks, webapps
Share Your OPML
I am not sure why people are getting excited over share your OPML; this seems like yet another vanity/popularity service that will soon attract spammers and other bottom dwellers much like Google Page Rank did. It is definitely attracting the attention of those who see it as a marketing tool (sorry, I mentioned bottom dwellers already).
I can get excited about someone that truly implements a relevance system for my OPML or RSS reading habits. I define relevance as presenting me with things that I want to read based on what I read, not on someone else’s notion of popularity. I really, really don’t care what is popular, I do care about what is important to me — it’s that simple. And I can’t imagine that I am alone in that feeling. Sadly, only the dearly departed Searchfox has come the closest to implementing this.
technorati tags: opml, rss, relevance, popularity, sharing
Going Green, Literally
I just became aware of the process called promession through the RSS feed of the excellent worldwidewords.
This is an ecological alternative to cremation or burial. The corpse is frozen in liquid nitrogen and then shattered into powder by ultrasonic vibration before being buried in a biodegradeable box in a shallow grave. Green campaigners believe the technique could ease the crowding in graveyards and the increasingly harmful emissions from cremations.
The inventor, the Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak, claims that the process is good for the environment because the powder (which is essentially compost) breaks down in the soil more thoroughly and quickly than by conventional burial. She suggests that relatives plant a tree or bush above the grave as a long-term memorial.
A quick google search indicates that this idea has been around a while, but, like I said, it is the first I have heard of it.
I can imagine that this might have a certain appeal to geeky types (the liquid nitrogen and ultrasonics aspects) and for those who are environmentally conscientious (the composting and tree planting aspects). It might also have some appeal in places like Japan where I have heard that there is little land for conventional burials.
technorati tags: technology, death, promession
Ajax and Accessability
sitepoint has an excellent posting on Ajax and Screenreaders: When Can It Work? With more and more sites resorting to Ajax-y interfaces (sometimes for questionable, buzzword compliance reasons), I have often wondered what the effect on the usability of these site is for those users who require screen readers to surf the web. In summary the author states:
Let’s face it, a great many AJAX applications (dare I say, “most”?) use this approach for its own sake, and don’t really benefit from it all — they could just as well use traditional POST and response.
I would even go a step further to call for a fundamental re-assessment of our priorities here. What we’re talking about is making dynamic client interfaces work effectively in screen readers, but maybe that was never the point. Isn’t the real point to make the applications themselves work effectively in screen readers?
Some may read this article and think, ‘meh, why should I care?’. I think that you should because a growing part of Internet users are (or are becoming) ‘senior citizens’ who may need a screen reader at some point. Why lock out a large part of your potential audience/market by succumbing to the need to chase the latest buzz? Besides, isn’t this the same sort of lesson in exclusivity that the ignorant ‘IE only’ sites are continuing to learn to this day?
technorati tags: accessability, ajax, usability, javascript, webdev
Shake It Up, iPod
Here is a random thought that I had driving into work the other day: what if Apple were to combine the sudden motion sensor technology that they have in the MacBook with the iPod? Then, on the iPod, if you wanted to ‘shuffle’ songs you could simply shake your iPod in a certain way, an viola!, tunes are shuffled. This could even be used to advance or replay a song.
Obviously this would need to have some sort of a button or some other ‘release’ that would allow this to work. Otherwise, the simple act of walking around or jogging would be forever activating this feature.
technorati tags: apple, ipod, suddenmotion, ideas, gadgets
Yahoo Tech: Plenty of Bloat But Misses The Boat
Yahoo just doesn’t get it. Yahoo Tech is yet another Yahoo offering composed of flash advertisement incrusted pages that will never be as useful as google, google news tech section or tech.memeorandum at providing you with news, products and more without the annoying, in your face (and completely unnecessary) advertising. Might be tolerable under heavy Greasemonkey-ing, but why not use the more useful, less annoying alternatives?
Nuff said.
technorati tags: yahoo, tech, news, advertising, suckage
Mac Virus or Clueless Users (and Reporters)?
I saw this posting on CNN about Viruses Catch up to the Mac and had to respond to the faulty, sensationalist claims.
First off, there is a difference between a virus and a trojan horse. It sounds like what this guy (seemingly, knowingly, intentionally) ran was more a trojan. I have my doubts that just by clicking on some links that this ‘virus’ was able to execute. I also have my doubts that he was looking for ‘pictures of an unreleased update to his computer’s operating system’ (pr0n, perhaps?).
And have no doubt, it is an epidemic, having effected the guy in the story and “at least one other person“. This is great too: “It just shows people that no matter what kind of computer you use you are still open to some level of attack” — particularly if you do foolish things, like run scripts and programs of which you have no idea of the origin.
Let’s also be happy for self-congratulatory ‘researchers’ (like the one quoted in the article) who make generally true statements that could be applied to any software with no specifics required: “… malicious web sites can exploit the holes without a user’s knowledge, potentially allowing a criminal to execute code remotely and gain access to passwords and other sensitive information”. Has there been a single documented case where this has happened on a Mac OS X system? It is important to note how he is careful not say that this has happen with a Mac.
Yes, theoretically it is possible — how about some facts? Ah, yes, there is this a bit further in the article: “Apple plans to patch the holes … and there have been no reports of them being exploited … [an Apple spokesperson] disagreed that the vulnerabilities make it possible for a criminal to run code on a target machine.” You wont find the previous excoriating quotes in or near the headline.
Near the end of the article there is a four bullet list of security issues that have been identified on the Mac. Great. In any sufficiently complicated software (like an operating system), I would expect some bugs. Perhaps even some that truly are security vulnerabilities. Notably, however, there is no accounting of how the number of Mac vulnerabilities compares to Windows (just to get a relative sense of the problem they are
But the grand prize for misleading statements goes to the claim that “With new Macs running the same processor that powers Windows-based machines, far more people will know how to exploit weaknesses in Apple machines than in the past…” Huh? The vulnerabilities in Windows can’t be blamed on Intel-based processors, it can be blamed on a poorly designed, bloated excuse for an operating system (Windows) that has had several unsuccessful attempts to layer on security well after the fact. I would guess that a very, very large number of security vulnerabilities in Windows would be stopped cold by OS X when run as a non-root user.
technorati tags: apple, mac, security, virus, poorjournalism