Here's an awesome Flickr mashup. In fact, one of the best we've seen. It's called Bubblr, and it lets you create a comic strip using Flickr photos. It's built using Flash from the looks of it, but it's a very nice implementation that uses a minimal amount of controls.
Dave's Imaginary Sound Space: Web 2.0 Tools and Resources for Managing Social Bookmarks
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:34 pm EST, Mar 28, 2006
Managing and sharing our online bookmarks can sometimes be a laborious process especially considering the growing number of services we have to choose from. Social bookmarking provides a rich source of information for discovering interesting resources and trends. For example Hublog mp3blog TopList, Hype Machine mp3blogs Toplist and MoMB - Popular Betas (March 2006), all use the most popular bookmarking site del.licio.us. to factor list rankings.
Mentions some new tools being provided, such as emailing and bookmarking multiple sites from one link, and organizing resources into entire lists that can be shared and voted upon.
Big in Japan is an integrated toolkit for prosumer bloggers. Say your own social media projects are taking off, but you're overwhelmed with the mechanics of running, tracking and promoting your sites: Big in Japan can make you Big in Japan. And Jersey City. And Genoa. And Jakarta. You get the drift. Build your own global microbrand using these tools.
This is a collection of ten Web 2.0 apps, some are still in a state of "launch pending". Various tools include widget, Ajax, RSS, Atom, and SMS functionality, in most cases mashed together. Here's the lowdown so far: PodServe: Free podcast creation and hosting with some cool features. FrankenFeed: Combine multiple RSS feeds into one monster feed. ElfURL: Shrink large URLs, tag them and get stats. InstantFeed: Delivers RSS feeds to instant messengers. QwikPing: Blog update notification. Add your blog(s) and instantly ping multiple services. SocialMail: Forward email messages via RSS feeds (launch pending). FeedVault: Save and/or share your OPML files, create group discussion feeds (launch pending). MailFeed: RSS by mail (launch pending). FoneFeed: RSS by SMS (launch pending). StatsTool: Roll all your stats from various key services into one central location (launch pending).
11Alive.com: Atlanta Entertainment - Isaac Hayes Quits 'South Park'
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:27 pm EST, Mar 13, 2006
NEW YORK (AP) -- Isaac Hayes has quit "South Park," where he voices Chef, saying he can no longer stomach its take on religion.
Hayes, who has played the ladies' man/school cook in the animated Comedy Central satire since 1997, said in a statement Monday that he feels a line has been crossed.
Too bad.... The creators make an interesting point at the of the article about why he's quitting, though.
Most product quality problems exist between terminal and chair
Topic: Technology
1:12 pm EST, Mar 12, 2006
Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can't figure out how to operate the devices, a scientist said on Monday.
Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense -- Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up
Topic: Science
10:27 am EST, Mar 12, 2006
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy.
A decent rebuttal to creationists' attack on evolution. It's a nice article, although it saddens me that we have to explicitly spell out the fact that The Theory of Evolution is only... (hold your breath for this one)... a theory. If i was a creationist, I'd feel a lot more threatened by evolution if scientists called it The Axiom of Evolution! Considering the source of this article, the "science" tag trumps "current events" on this one....
Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Laotian Rodent Proves Living Fossil
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:55 am EST, Mar 12, 2006
When wandering through a hunter's market in Laos, Robert Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society happened upon a previously unknown rodent. Called kha-nyou by locals--or rock rat--the long-whiskered and furry-tailed rodent was reputed to favor certain limestone terrain. Western scientists named it Laonastes aenigmamus or stone-dwelling enigmatic mouse--partially because a live specimen has never been collected--and thought the rock rat represented a new family of mammals. But new research reported in today's Science proves that Laonastes actually represents a fossil come to life.
Pretty neat discovery, considering how scientists have thought the stone-dwelling mouse to be extinct for 11 million years! The article goes on to mention how such a discovery helps scientists determine the accuracy of knowledge that is derived by fossil records alone. Of course, it's not unreasonable to think that certain physical traits of the species might have changed over the course of 11 million years. Also, aren't we able to find the (11 million year old) fossil remains of any other creature that's not extinct -- such as a cat, bird, or dog -- for the purpose of refining our predictions based on fossil records?
Have you seen this guy's 3D sidewalk art? Well, it's 2D... but done in such a way that if viewed from a certain angle, the image will trick your eye into thinking that the object depicted is "on" the sidewalk.
Make sure you scroll down far enough to see what his artwork looks like if photographed from the "wrong" angle!
The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.
This article provides an excellent overview on how the web has changed from being a collection of static information, to being a "web" of functionality in which data can be easily seperated from interface. To take an example from the article, Amazon's database is open to the public -- anyone can develop an interface that better suits his/her need for viewing and searching Amazon's content (such as porting the data to a cell phone). This new world wide web is being dubbed the "web 2.0". The article links to two more interesting articles; one on writing semantic markup, and the other on web 2.0 for designers.
