Jun 17
Jun 10
JobVent is a place you can go to post anonymous rants about past employers (there appear to be few positive comments from what I have seen).
In some commentaries, the poster gets a little carried away and complains in such a great deal of specificity that it would be relatively easy for the company to identify the poster and possibly pursue legal action against them. The whole thing just looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. In the meantime, I sure that posters feel at least a little relieved at the opportunity to blow off some steam.
Technorati Tags:
webtools, rants, dubious
Jun 03
Sporkk is a fantastic ‘Web 2.0′ spoof site that brings together all the tired elements of these sites: reflected logos, smiling-faces stock photos, even a list of quotes from industry ‘pundits’. As an added bonus, click on the ‘glossy submit button’ and it proudly proclaims that it is doing some AJAXy stuff behind the scenes. Brilliant.
And if you become inspired by sporkk, you can use sites like my cool button or Web 2.0 Logo Generator, to cobble together your own ‘me too’ design.
Technorati Tags:
sporkk, humor, webtools, web20
May 25
May 20
Project Joey is a concept that is being explored in the Mozilla labs. It acknowledges that there is just too much stuff in most web pages for a mobile device browser to deal with. So Joey allows you to select and essentially cut and paste data of interest to your mobile device. I think this is fantastic and represents sort of the missing link for tools like Google Notebook and Soho Notes. The value of the tool dramatically increases if the information that I have cribbed away is available both on the web and via my mobile.
Project Joey brings the Web content you need most to your mobile phone by allowing you to easily send it to your device. You can quickly mark content that is important to you and have that content always available while using your mobile phone.
The premise is this: you can use Firefox to send text clippings, pictures, videos, RSS content, and Live Bookmarks to your phone through the Joey Server. The Joey Server transcodes and keeps all of the content up-to-date. You can then use your phone’s browser or the Joey application on your phone to view and manage what you have uploaded.
You can even take an early cut of Joey out for a spin.
Technorati Tags:
webtools, mozilla, firefox, mobile, projectjoey
May 15
Another fine waste of time. Flickrvision shows recently posted photos on Google Maps. Strangely compelling to watch.
Technorati Tags:
webtools, flickr, googlemaps, mashup, photography
May 13
This article on the WSJ Online about having a good google search value for your name gave me a chuckle. Since I de-cloaked about two years ago, I am (not surprisingly) the number one search result for my name. By de-cloak, I mean that previously I was very conscious about not leaving many personally identifiable signs on the internet over the previous 10+ years or so that I had been using it. Note that that includes, usenet, gopher, telnet, command line ftp and all of that pre-browser stuff. After many complaints from people trying to (legitimately) find me (or find out about me) I created the mobrec.com domain and linked in most all of my online stuff.
Back to the WSJ article — So unless there are a huge number of new Campoamor’s online (or those wishing to pretend that they are), I think that I am safe in having ‘a name that Googles well’, as will my daughter.
Technorati Tags:
google, search, names, mobrec.com
May 13
There is a pretty slick feature in Google Spreadsheets that allows you to lookup and embed data into your spreadsheets using the GoogleLookup function call [from google Docs blog]:
One is GoogleLookup, which attempts to answer your questions by using information from the web. You can use it for all kinds of party tricks, like looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")] or when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]. Try it to see what other things you can look up. I’ll warn you in advance, it’s a bit addicting. If you mouse over the cell, you’ll see links to the source pages where we found the data, so you can always check out the primary sources. And don’t forget you can copy/paste (ctrl-c / ctrl-v) the formula to other cells to easily have a bunch of GoogleLookups in a sheet. Don’t expect to change the world with this function, but have fun with it.
While GoogleLookup covers a little bit of everything, its sibling GoogleFinance focuses just on financial data from Google Finance. Using a similar syntax, you can look up the price of Google stock [=GoogleFinance("GOOG")] or the 52-week high of Apple [=GoogleFinance("AAPL", "HIGH52")]. And since stock prices tend to change more often than, say, the capital of California does, we update them in your spreadsheet automatically. So if you leave your portfolio spreadsheet open, you should see numbers get updated as you would on Google Finance itself. Of course, we also have the same 20-minute delay on financial data.
This is certainly above and beyond any feature or integration that you get with the expensive, commercial spreadsheet application available from your nearest monopoly.
Technorati Tags:
webtools, google, googledocs, googlelookup
Apr 29
As a long time user of tinyurl — a web-based tool that lets you smash down those long, ugly, line-wrapping URLs that some sites generate into something much smaller and more manageable, I was curious when I saw a new offering called dwarfURL.
It looks like dwarfURL is the same idea, but adds the ability to track the number of times that the dwarfed link has been clicked on. If you are into stats on your shared links, this might be of interest.
Technorati Tags:
webtools, tinyurl, dwarfurl
Mar 04
Now this is an interesting development. Within the next six months Adobe will have an online version of its cash cow Photoshop. There are already a number of smaller players providing basic photo editing online like fauxto, picnik, preloadr and pixenate. It will be interesting to see how the online editing ecosystem changes when Adobe launches their offering.
Technorati Tags:
photography, webtools, photoshop, tools
Feb 24
I just recently stumbled across slidshare, a site for sharing presentations. Supports both powerpoint and open office formats. Also allows you to rate (and of course tag) presentations as well.
It would be nice for this to catch on and become a single place to go for slide decks from conferences and workshops.
Technorati Tags:
webtools, slideshare, presentations
Feb 24
A List Apart has an interesting article on using HTML and CSS to format a book. At least the creators of CSS2 had the foresight to incorporate the concept of ‘paged media’ into the spec and didn’t just limit it to web presentation.
Technorati Tags:
books, technology, design, css, html
Jan 31
I just discovered a nifty little trick for uploading pictures to Zooomr if you are using Aperture (or iPhoto). You can drag and drop photos directly from Aperture onto jUploader and click the upload button. jUploader will then upload the full size image from Aperture. Maybe this is obvious to others, but I was pleased to find that I didn’t have to export to jpeg from Aperture first to use jUploader.
One side effect of this for me, is that I will be uploading a lot more of my stuff to Zooomr as it has just become so much easier.
Technorati Tags:
webtools, photography, zooomr, aperture, iphoto
Jan 08
Apparently one of the disadvantages of having a place like eBay where you can sell most anything with so questions asked is that it makes for a fine fencing mechanism for stolen merchandise. Just be a little smarter about including serial numbers, etc in your listings (not that I am in any way encouraging criminal activity or this particular use of eBay).
Technorati Tags:
webtools, security, stupid, ebay
Dec 08
The fine minds at SIMILE at MIT have come up with a ‘lightweight structured data publishing framework’ called Exhibit that is in the same vein as their awesome timeline widget.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.
Check out the examples, including US Presidents and Breakfast Cereal Character Guide.
They also provide a complementary tool called Babel to convert from various formats to the Exhibit JSON format.
And, as they say: “Remember: there is no database, no web application behind these examples.”
technorati tags: simile, exhibit, javascript, json, webdev
Dec 08
MIT has an interesting interactive visualization that shows the distribution of zip codes in the US. It would be cool to mash this with Google Maps so that you could surmise how an area grew by watching the final digit of the zip code increment.
technorati tags: zipcode, visualization, webtools, fun
Dec 07
If you are a Mac user that takes advantage of both iPhoto and gMail, you might want to check out the iPhoto2Gmail plugin that is now available. Haven’t tried it out myself, might give it a spin this weekend.
technorati tags: iphoto, gmail, mac, apple, photography
Nov 30
That is, the Encyclopedia Britannica. They have a blog now — with some pretty interesting stuff that changes fairly frequently.
“Ideas that Matter” — indeed. Go have a look.
technorati tags: britannica, blog, webtools
Nov 23
The flickr blog announced this week a couple of useful new features. The first one addresses a bit gap that I have had with getting people to use flickr — how to post private pictures, but invite a select group to come to flickr to view them without having to sign up for a flickr account. This is solved by the addition of the ‘Guest Pass’ which allows you for any photoset to invite up to 50 people to view that set. You can also at a later time expire the guest pass.
I also note in the link provided for this feature a neat little trick: you can create a flickr URL of the form http://www.flickr.com/photos/me/sets/ where ‘me’ would normally be a specific flickr username. The ‘me’ URL will take you to your own flickr sets if you happen to be logged into flickr at the time.
The other two are not as big a deal, in my opinion: they have revamped m.flickr.com, which is the scaled down version of flickr meant to be accessed from a mobile phone. I have never used the mobile version to upload photos but find it a good diversion when stuck in an airport or some such place. Mobile allows you to catch up on comments and contacts photos among other functions.
The camera finder seems like flickr just closing the loop on external companies that were using the flickr API to mine this sort of data (as previously posted). Not to miss a trick, er, opportunity, flickr also links the camera info into the yahoo shopping site to make it easy for you to add a few dollars to the Yahoo coffers if you decide to buy.
technorati tags: yahoo, flickr, webtools, photography, cameras
Nov 19
Quick note to mention that Inside Aperture now has podcasts available. Here is the link directly to the podcasts on the iTunes Store (don’t worry, they are free). I’ve got the first one downloading now…
technorati tags: aperture, podcast, photograhy, tutorial
