For those of you forced to communicate at a distance with your friends or colleagues, Yugma offers a free alternative to some of the spendier web conference options out there. Yugma lets you share your desktop with up to 10 people at a time (for free - you can pay to add more), and connect in with teleconferencing. I’ve read some complaints about Yugma not really being free if you still have to pay the long distance fees for the audio conferencing portion, but if you and your pals are all on Skype, you should be able to work around that fee as well. In addition to the teleconference part, there is also an IM feature, and depending on what type of information you’re sharing and your typing skills could be just as useful as the teleconferencing option (my in-laws have done this for inter-continental family check-ins; it worked swell). Another potentially nifty feature is the ability to change presenters so multiple people could be involved in sharing a discussion instead of just one centralized presenter. While this may not be the tool for a full-on webinar, this could be just the thing for sharing ideas or applications with a couple of colleagues who don’t happen to be sitting in the cube next to you.
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WARNING: You should never use the internet to diagnose or treat yourself. Consult your doctor NOT the internet.
I admit it, I’m a total hypochondriac. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, you can only imagine what it’s been like to be my husband for the past 10 years. The poor guy has to listen to my weekly updates on all sorts of potential ailments, “I have a headache, I’m worried it might be brain cancer…my toes are tingly, it’s probably a sign of the onset of MS.” I have no idea how I got to be this way, nor do my parents. It’s highly annoying– even to me!
The only thing that sometimes soothes my worries is the internet. Once I decide I’ve got a life threatening illness I consult numerous websites to determine the symptoms and signs. Usually this calms me down until my headache subsides or my toes stop tingling. Now, I will no longer have to visit multiple sites, because MEDgle is a great source of medical information (not to mention, kinda fun!). I really like the graphic interface – touch the arm, and get a host of potential problems! Select the problem that most closely matches your symptoms and the symptom gets added to the search engine.
Although I know I’ll be using MEDgle quite a bit, I also know that many people are becoming too reliant on the internet as a source for medical information rather than consulting their doctors. So, again, MEDgle is for information purposes only, and should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment.
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Restaurant review sites have been around for a long time, so when I heard about Yelp I thought, hmm, do we really need another review site? Well, yes, as it turns out. Although Yelp is a good source of restaurant reviews, it also includes reviews of hair salons, and even post offices and libraries.
Whether you’re travelling, moving to a new city, or just exploring the place you already live you’ll find some new places to frequent (and avoid!) on Yelp. If you own a business or care about the place you work, Yelp reviews can be a good way to find out what others think about you.
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Ok, just how long do you think it would take to determine the number of internet users there are…in the world? I’m a sucker for this kind of fun. Join me in mapping your name at the MapMyName project. The idea started from a guy who has a short video explaining the project–he even includes mathematical formulas that I can’t read. It’s great fun to see where in the world people are and even more interesting to see who connects to whom. For example, if you join as “my friend” it will track that we are connected. Then if you spread the word to your friends, they can indicate their connection to you. Maybe we’ll really learn how many degrees of separation there are from each of us? Or, funnier yet, from Kevin Bacon?
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In January Fortune magazine came out with their list of the 100 best companies to work for. But, what I just discovered is this great visual representation of the companies and how they rank compared to other companies when hiring women and minorities. For example, you can see below it looks like Umpqua Bank is doing a good job of hiring women, but not so good at hiring minorities.
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While Newsvine in and of itself is a cool tool, it’s the illustration, not the take home message of this post. If you haven’t already encountered Newsvine, it’s basically a news aggregator that pulls together news from the NY Times, ESPN, and other top newsy sources. The interesting thing about Newsvine right now is that they have just launched a re-design of their site. Using a variety of Web 2.0 tools they have morphed themselves into one of the most interactive, customizable sites I’ve come across that still has a connection to something most of us do every day - read the news.
Readers can move modules around, edit or remove modules, start group discussions, IM their “friends” from the site, vote on the popularity of news items, add additional feeds to the site, and tag articles. None of these tools is unique to this particular site (although it’s not everyday you get the option to have your weather displayed in Kelvins); however, the way they are combined is one of the best illustrations of how Web 2.0 can be normalized into a daily routine. The news is an obvious example of a situation in which you would want continuous feeds, the ability to discuss the spin of a particular article with someone else, the ability to prioritize tech news over all other news, and the chance to tag articles in a way that makes sense to you.
For those of you who try to explain Web 2.0 to others - keep Newsvine handy as an example - the design is clear and the applications are straightforward (even for those who don’t realize they’re still muddling along in a 1.0 life).
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When I was 19 my taste in art ranged from $10 prints by Picasso to photos of Edie Brickell. Now I yearn for original art by affordable/new/up-and-coming artists, and even that is often out of my price range. Nonetheless, it never hurts to look. Sadly, I don’t have much “looking” to do, because I live in a somewhat smaller town which means I don’t have access to a lot of art shows and displays (don’t get me wrong, we do have some quality art and artists, but not the same variety as Portland or Seattle). In addition, my husband is a full-time glassblower and often bemoans the fact that he doesn’t have ready access to a city filled with art-lovers and galleries.
So, for all these reasons, I’m excited to let you know of a new website unveiled just this week! Artflock. Using Artflock users can buy and sell art online. I searched the website, and there is some quality art on there (and a lot of not-so-good art), although I haven’t found anything *yet* that I’m going to have to buy. But, since it’s only been up for a week, I’ll give the collection some time to grow. If you register with Artflock you can create a gallery (here’s mine). You can also search by collection, artist, and medium.
The only way Artflock would be better (in addition to a bigger collection with even more quality art) is if they took some browsing ideas from Etsy. Etsy is one of my favorite websites and allows users to shop for craft-arts by color, location, and connections. Although you can search by color in Artflock, Etsy is just a lot more fun!
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When you travel to a new city, do you get recommendations from friends about where to eat, what to see, and what not to miss? Do you also like to know about things you should miss? What if you could pick up comments about places as you pass them by getting messages on your mobile phone? Socialight lets you do just that, using geo-tagging to make virtual Sticky Notes tied to specific locations.
Socialight exploits the possibilites of location-aware social data. Imagine the “real world” tagged with virtual comments and suggestions, accessed only by those with the proper “level” of awareness. Online gaming conventions bleeding over into so-called real life! Shades of the Metaverse? As you move through space you can view all the publicly available geo-tags, or you can limit your view to your friends’ Sticky Notes. You can also create “channels” for certain types of information, such as coffee shops with wi-fi, or visitor information for conference attendees.
Socialight is a Google Maps mash-up incorporating mobile phone GPS technology to access your current location. That’s where it gets a little spooky for me. I’m not too keen on broadcasting my current location, even though communication companies have that data and I don’t know what uses they make of it. But I am intrigued by the immense potential of linking physical location, map data and socially-created data. It’s exciting to see applications that allow users to build on collective intelligence as described by Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs.
Last month, in Baltimore, I had dinner at a nice, vegan-friendly restaurant near the Washington Monument. If I had been a Socialight member, my mobile phone could have alerted me that there was a Sticky Note on the the monument. I could have added a comment and uploaded a picture of the monument and my friend to mark the occasion. Then I could have played restaurant reviewer, creating a Sticky Note about Minato, our dinner venue. Why would I go to the trouble of doing this? If you’ve ever needed to find a vegan restaurant in a new town, you might be altruistic enough to help build a channel for vegans everywhere.
To get a feel for Socialight, watch this NextFest interview with Dan Melinger, the founder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KeFXtRJLG8
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Published by Jane on April 19, 2007
Categories: Web
Yup, for that time when you need a quick, pretty easy and free web page creation tool turn to Weebly.com.
I thought this would be a great way to finally create my professional web page and it is just what it says it is pretty easy and pretty quick. It’s very straightforward to create a page. Just sign up and start choosing your elements. You can include photos, RSS feeds, video content and more. Part of what makes it easy is that it includes design templates to choose from and they include some good designs-nothing too floral or dated looking. To break up text you can include columns and nest text boxes. I also like that it easily formats all of your content into boxes. The usual text editing options are also available.
If you’re looking for the same control as you get from web editing software this might not be for you. I think it would come in handy for individuals and groups with a range of skills who can’t or don’t want to heavy web page creation.
So here’s a snap of my page. My only frustration is that I accidentally deleted one of my boxes and couldn’t undo. Not too bad since I’m further along than I was 20 minutes ago!
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You may have noticed the little orange square with white dots at the bottom of our blog entries. Have you wondered what that little icon is? Well, it’s a way to bookmark the comments you make on blog posts–and find out if anyone responded. It’s called co.mments and really quite simple to set up:
1) Visit co.mments and setup an account.
2) Using your internet browser drag and drop their icon into your toolbar (instructions are here).
3) Decide if you want to be notified via email or through an RSS feed when you are tracking your blog comments/conversations.
4) Make a comment on a blog (bloggers love comments *hint hint*) and then click the little “track co.mments” icon you just added to your browser. Now, you will be updated via email or RSS feed when a reply is made to your comment.
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For all of those doodlers out there who sit in meetings with a laptop and have to bring a pad of paper along just to doodle with - your days of tree wastage are over. Now you can doodle on the web and skip the paper step altogether! Okay, so the new Firefox add-on Firedoodle is more than just a time filler for dull meetings, Firedoodle allows you to draw on webpages, save your drawings, notes, or highlights and then share the annotated webpages with others. With Firedoodle, you can also put page markers on lengthy webpages, or just use the page markers to make notes for yourself about what the webpage is about.
Firedoodle includes a good tutorial on how to get started, and I’m sure there will be lots of evolving uses for this add-on. My main complaint with Firedoodle was that my first thought of how to use it - for making notes on online PDFs - didn’t work. I also ran into several other websites that didn’t allow me to “doodle” on them. I’m not sure what sort of permissions issue this might be, but hopefully it is a bug that the Firedoodle people can work out in the future. Meanwhile - go tag a site!
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I am not a visual learner. Poster sessions are frequently lost on me and I always have to read the accompanying text to make sense of graphs and charts. Since I’m often helping others organize their thoughts about a topic, however, new visualization and mapping programs still catch my attention; I like to have a “toolkit” of options available in hopes that one will be just the right thing. bubbl.us, a free, easy-to-use, online mind mapping tool, has earned a place in my kit.
A new bubbl.us map is created with a single mouse-click, and bubbles can be added using either the mouse or the tab and enter keys. Changing colors, moving bubbles, and creating new connections are all tasks easily accomplished by clicking on the bubble you want to edit.
bubbl.us gives several options for sharing the maps you create. You can link directly to a read-only version of your map. A snippet of code is provided for those who would like to embed the map right into a website (or blog post). If you want to map with a group, simply invite your collaborators to join bubbl.us, then give them full access to your map.
Creators Kirill Edelman and Levon Amelyan indicate that real-time collaboration is a goal for the future. I would also like the ability to label the connections between the bubbles, but that may just be a my preference for text creeping in. For now, bubbl.us is a simple, intuitive way to create and share good-looking mind maps.
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