herebenotions

Web2.0 is...

From vidipedia

Stumbling

Back in November I stumbled upon stumbleupon.  This is another great web2.0 company that crosses search with social networking. 

I love the site, it's made me fall in love with the web in a new way.  I love the randomness, the unexpected stuff it throws up that I'd never see otherwise.

So how does it work?

Download a toolbar that sits in your browser, and any time you fancy you hit the stumble button and you'll be taken to a new webpage. The pages you are shown depend on the interests you've previously stated (over 500 options), the friends you've made and stumbleupon learns from the likes and dislikes you state with one click as you browse.  All pages have been recommended by other stumblers, so it neatly sidesteps all the companies that pay search engines to get on the first few pages, and you tend to get interesting, high-quality sites. 

The blogging feature is easy to use; you can add comments to any webpage that are copied to your blog, and even if you don't want to comment on a page you can review everyone else's comments. You can recall the full list of sites you've given the thumbs up or down to. It's also a lot quicker than 'proper' grown-up blogging, so I've tended to switch to that for capturing a lot of the random, little things that catch my eye. 

You can browse stumblers by their interests, or see who liked the page you're on, and send stumbles to your friends (this is easily the best social networking feature). 

Some of my stumbles are blogged on my stumbleupon homepage.  There's the odd gem, but a lot of totally random stuff like oneword, footprints in the sand and weirdly pretty odd too.

Musicovery

Musicovery is a very nifty little music search engine that lets you search for music to suit your mood, and by genre. 

And it lets you listen to whole tracks, free, and skip instantly if you don't like something. 

Not a massive selection of tracks, and with no way to upload your own playlists, it's a nice but limited idea.

The naviagation is interesting, but lacks full scrollability, it would be better if you could browse down the music 'branches'.

Basic business model in that there are simple links to itunes and amazon music for the track that is playing.

Musicovery isn't 'intelligent', and does serve up a pretty random selection of tracks.  I rather like that, but if you fancy something more personalised then Last.fm claims to be leading the 'social music revolution'. 

You type in a track you like and it serves you up something similar.  You can rate whether you like it or not, and it'll learn your preferences.  It crosses search with social networking, in that you can create a profile, and see what your friends are listening too.

Traffic jam?

It's getting pretty crowed out there.

In 2005, about 10 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1018 bytes) of new information was produced and stored worldwide, roughly equal to 74,000 times the 17 million books in the United States Library of Congress.

Compare this to the estimate that in 1999 the sum total of recorded human knowledge, music, images and words amounted to only 12 exabytes.*

These figures are pretty mind-blowing. 

With the take-up of broadband people are really starting to upload content to the web, rather than just consume it.  The problem is computers and networks weren't designed for people to upload large files (compare the upload and download specs on your computer).  When the protocols were decided, no-one imagined what possibilities digital technology would release.  How the 'network constraints' will cope with the flood of consumer generated content is something of a headache for the boffins and companies like YouTube.

(*Source: UC Berkeley, School of Information Management and Systems)

Finding a good match

Been meaning to write about this since October...retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.

Retrievr makes use of a Flickr API, which allows outside developers to incorporate Flickr functions and data into their own applications.

Read more in this Wall Street Journal article. 

Pictures of walls

Pictures of walls.  Amusing graffiti photographed on walls and street furniture.

 

Barack Obama to stand in 2008...

Been incredibly busy, but this jolted me out of the worksphere...American politics is fascinating, and the race for the Democratic nomination in 2008 looks like it will be riveting.

Adding up to nonsense

A tale of a Verizon mobile customer and various conversations with customer service reps who can't tell the difference between dollars and cents.  Painfully funny. 

Customer: Do you recognize that there's a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?

{pause}

Rep: No.

Full transcript can be found here.

'The Peanut Butter Manifesto'

If you haven't heard about this story already, try and guess which brand is being talked about from reading the first paragraph. 

Interesting that it really could apply to a whole range of brands.

Nice summation of the problem by the senior VP of the company.

Food for thought

Google gets a wide range of people in to their offices to give talks - and they post videos of these talks online where anyone can watch (which is nice of them).  I just finished watching the one on human computation which relates to The ESP Game, peekaboom and verbosity (none of which you should play as they're hideously addictve).  It's a funny and thought provoking talk. 

The range of topics covered in the Google talks is really wide, they aren't all techy, and many are fascinating. Links to the Google tech talk videos here if you want to check them out.