I’ve read several “Best of 2007” or “New for 2008” articles lately dealing with web applications and what authors consider to be their favorites. These include Will Richardson’s roundup on Weblogg-ed, TechCrunch’s “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without,” and Lifehacker’s “Top 10 Underhyped Webapps.” There is some overlap in these lists, and several of … Read More “Cool Tools Roundup” »
Category: Internet
I’m not quite sure how I missed this one. Apparently Microsoft Labs came out with this really cool product in 2006, and I’m just now learning about it. Even though I’m behind the curve, I think it’s worth mentioning here. Take a photo sharing site such as Flickr. You have thousands of users uploading thousands … Read More “Microsoft Photosynth” »
Scenario 1 – A repressive government controls all Internet access. Its citizens cannot get to information on religion, democracy, or any site that might be critical of that government. Solution – A distributed system of web proxies enables the people of the repressed country to effectively bypass the filters, allowing them access to information that … Read More “The Blocker’s Dilemma” »
There is a television commercial currently on the air for some GPS company – I can’t remember if it was TomTom or Garmin. The ad shows a ceremony at the opening of a new bridge, with a red ribbon across it. Just as the ribbon is cut, a car drives across it per instructions from … Read More “Google Earth Confusion” »
When I first got to my office early this morning I opened up RandomConnections to check comments and clean out the boatload of spam comments that tends to accumulate overnight. The first thing I noticed was that all of my photos were missing. If I clicked through to get to the actual photo page, the … Read More “So Much for Flickr” »
I found this via my brother Stephen’s Tumblr account – an application that analyzes the readability level of various blogs and websites. My Master’s degree is in Reading Instruction, so I’ve spent a good bit of time studying readability levels and lexile scores for text. I’m actually quite please with this outcome for RandomConnections… I … Read More “Readability Level” »
When I did my presentation “Geotag This! Adding Location to Learning” at EdTech I wanted to give examples of geotagging different types of media, not just photographs. With the new YouTube layer now available in Google Earth, it was easy to demonstrate how to geotag video, and with GeoRSS feeds now available, I was able … Read More “GeoPodcasting – Adding Location to Audio” »
Local Greenville blogger Eric Rogers stumbled across one of my posts about tilt-shift photography and thought he’d give it a try. Eric is a filmmaker, so he took things a step further and tried to tilt-shift a video clip. The results are quite good. Here’s a link to his finished product in Quicktime .MOV format… … Read More “Tilt-Shift Video” »
I’ve heard several suggestions for increasing the number of views of photos in one’s Flickr stream. These include posting limited numbers of pictures each time, posting early in the day so that buzz is generated early about good photos, and making sure that you post pictures of interest to begin with. I’ve found another sure-fire … Read More “Increasing Flickr Views” »
Google brought us the earth, then the sky. So it was natural that they turn their sights to the moon. Unlike Earth and Sky, Moon is not a separate application, but is accessed online similar to their Maps program. Users can zoom in and out (to a certain extent) and can pan across the terrain … Read More “Earth, Sky, and now Moon” »