29 May 2007
Google Reader Productivity
One of the overlooked productivity features in Google Reader are those little trash can icons in your personal Reading trends (home -> trends -> Reading trends). Just hit unsubscribe for the feeds which consumed most of your time and make room for an extra hour each day.
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tags: 24 May 2007
OCRsourcing
Not as cute as Asirra but an excellent example of how to get microtasks distributed done: reCAPTCHA (stop spam. read books)
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
Brilliant idea: reCAPTCHA mashes up the shortcomings of OCR software when digitizing books and the shortcomings of the web when fighting bots and spam. It extracts value from CAPTCHA systems by sending 2 distorted words: one of them not read correctly by the OCR tool, the other one already known. If the user has the known one right it is assumed the other one is right too.
(via hotlinks)
19 May 2007
Wiki Clock
This is the Wiki Clock — a clock that runs on Wiki technology!
Please update this page with the correct current time (UTC).
(via hotlinks)
28 April 2007
Googlerss
Google announces Authors@Google (informal talks with authors centering on their recently published books):
We’re delighted to share our digital library of events with you, and will continue adding to it. We hope you’ll bookmark this page and check back often.
I’m no fan of the checklist approach to measure usability (RSS, API, Microformats, good, no RSS, no API, no Microformats, lame) – but they obviously put some effort into this, and they obviously will update this series regularly, and they obviously do want interested folks to stay in the loop, so why not throw in a feed for the updates and eliminate the need to check back often?
Check out RSS in plain English for why this would be useful.
25 April 2007
Next Action Balls 16
current snapshot of my next action balls basket
Holy crab, the last entry in the Next Action Balls series was written 8 month ago.
Basically back to paper. Paper rules.
26 March 2007
Unobviously Obvious
Google has a very weak incentive to “support” content of quality. Put another way, Google’s incentive to “support” content creators diminishes in quality.
Think about this intuitively: the more crap there is, the more stuff you have to wade through – the happier Google is (at least in the short run).
Let me put this even more succinctly. Google doesn’t care about absolute levels of quality – it only cares about relative levels of quality. And the more media it indexes, the stronger this dilution of incentives gets.
22 March 2007
Slingshot
Joyent (the longest lasting beta test I’ve ever participated in) just announced Slingshot, a lightweight framework which allows Ruby on Rails applications to run offline on your PC/Mac and to easily sync the data between the online/offline versions. A desktop release of the Connector is scheduled for the end of next month. I can’t wait.
see First Impressions: Joyent and Bookmarks
22 March 2007
urlTea
urlTea is another URL-shortening tool with a nice twist: it let’s you annotate the shortened URL [http://urltea.com/9x?urltea-tiny-urls-with-semantics], and it also has a simple API.
21 March 2007
Linkmaker
Make Link – a useful Firefox extension which speeds up the process of creating links. It’s configurable, so you can create your very own link types (e.g. for Textile)
17 March 2007
Pet-cha
Cute project from Microsoft Research (who knew?): Asirra
Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) refines captchas by asking users to identify photographs of cats and dogs and is offered as a free web service.
They’ve partnered up with petfinder, who provided Asirra
with over two million images of cats and dogs, manually classified by people at thousands of animal shelters across the United States. In exchange, we provide a small “Adopt Me!” link beneath each photo, supporting Petfinder’s primary mission of finding homes for homeless animals.
14 March 2007
Tag Descriptions
del.icio.us just added Tag Descriptions which let you annotate your tags to provide some sort of explicit reflections on your tagging heuristics.
I really admire Joshua Schachter for his ability to innovate (sometimes seeing the obvious first vs. adding features), for his resistance against popularity contests (i.e. digg, Technorati WTF) and for leaving out the crap.
12 March 2007
Dabble DB Commons
Now this is seriously cool: critically acclaimed Dabble DB announced a free version – the Dabble DB Commons
You get the same sweet features as their paid service (check out the 7 minute demo), the only difference is that all data are publicly accessible and licensed under a Creative Commons license.
8 February 2007
Rewired
Gee, only two days after the release of Useless Account – somehow the conceptual nirvana of Web 2.0 (currently more than 6000 people are euphorically doing nothing) – Yahoo! released this weeks second major milestone of the web: pipes
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
(via too many)
5 February 2007
IMified
Usually I try to avoid IM, too noisy, no polite way to schedule responses, ... but IMified is a slick tool which might boost the productivity quotient quite a bit.
Once you’ve added the imified-buddy to your contacts in a messenger of your choice (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber) you can trigger various functionalities (notes, todo items, reminders) by sending messages. IMified even lets you access external services like Blogger, WordPress, Remember the Milk or Basecamp:
3 February 2007
Sparktags
Sparklines meet del.icio.us: sparktags
3 February 2007
S3Fox
S3Fox – a Firefox extension for accessing Amazon S3.
20 January 2007
Parallel Economies
The always brilliant Abstract Dynamics on the DJ Drama drama
Fazit:
In other words at least within the world of hip hop the mixtape industry has just about every component they need to replace the traditional music industry completely. If an artist can make as much or more money on the mixtape circuit why bother signing with a major label at all? Given how much more vital and exciting mixtape music is compared to the overproduced major label product it’d probably be a good thing … The recording industry has lost everything on the cultural and artist side of things, all they have left is the money and lawyers to bully the real competition; at the expense of just about everyone else out there no less.
18 January 2007
Verbotomy
Verbotomy – the create-a-word game.
Nice, but the terms and conditions are kinda aggregoistic:
5. All data and information you provide to us on or through this website becomes the sole property of The James Gang Advertising Inc.
18 January 2007
Footnote
At Footnote.com you will find millions of images of original source documents, many of which have never been available online before.
9 December 2006
Bookmarks
Joyent – a collaborative communication suite (email, calendar, people, files) for small teams – see my previous posting – recently added bookmarks.
My first take was wtf, aren’t there more than enough pretty decent services available by now?, but on second thought they make perfect sense, not so much for bookmarking, but as an adapter to functionalities Joyent doesn’t offer (yet), but others do well.
Need a to-do list for a project? Head over to Ta-da List, create a list, share the URL, bookmark it in Joyent, add the project-tag and you are done. Every member in your team will have access to it.
Or plug in memos and notes (Writeboard), wikis (Stikipad), chat (Campfire) or project management (Basecamp or GoPlan) and so on.
