I’ve been a Facebook member for two years (ever since my university was added — back when you had to study or work at a university to be a member). Over these past two years there hasn’t been much activity on my Facebook account, just a post on my wall every-now-and-then. But in May my Facebook account exploded with activity! Suddenly many of my colleagues and friends, previous non-members, were adding their profiles to Facebook and longtime users were adding new applications to their profiles everyday. This led me to ask myself, “What is going on with Facebook?!”
Because I’m a librarian I had to do some research (duh!). I discovered that on May 24, 2007 Facebook launched their Facebook Platform, which opened up the development of Facebook applications to the world; on that day 85 applications were added. Note: I should explain for anyone that doesn’t use Facebook that an application is similar to a widget…actually to get a better understanding of how the platform works and what an application is I recommend viewing Michael Porter’s video about the development platform, why it’s exciting, and how it can be used in libraries (yes, he’s a fellow librarian).
Some people are developing applications just for fun, but many are hoping to make money. For example, one application, Favorite Peeps, has already been purchased by Slide.com for $60,000! Damn!! I really need to get some coding knowledge and invent a cool Facebook application. I could use $60,000. But I digress.
Who knew opening up Facebook to worldwide development would have such an impact? Probably Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, the authors of “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.” I’m only 40 pages into the book, but already convinced we’re on the cusp of a huge cultural change because of the possibilities of group collaboration and creation. I’ve been wanting to read the book for awhile, but this upsurge in Facebook popularity piqued my interest and I started reading Wikinomics just this week. I highly recommend it.
If you’re not a member of Facebook yet, you’re missing out on all the action–so when you sign-up make sure to join the group I just created, infodoodads fans. If you’re already on Facebook, well, you know what to do.
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Next week, we’ll unplug for a few days and hang out at the lake. 
Because we usually get our rays from the computer screen rather than the sun, I know we’ll need sunscreen. That’s where the Skin Deep database comes in. Skin Deep is the place to find out what the FDA and many cosmetics companies don’t reveal: the safety of ingredients used in personal care products.
The creators of Skin Deep, the Environmental Working Group, studied 783 sunscreen products and found that 84% delivered inadequate protection from the sun, or contained ingredients with significant safety concerns. 17 products were rated as effective and of low health hazard. Discover how your sunscreen stacks up by searching brands, or find the best sunscreen for children using another search. The advanced search filters results so that you can find products without parabens, phalates, known allergens, or mercury (!). Skin Deep gives consumers powerful information.
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Published by Michael on June 26, 2007
Categories: Web
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Geotagged movies via XML? Now wouldn’t that be something. This week I wanted to go outside the box and feature some sites that poke fun at the popularity and hype of web 2.0. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m getting to the point where the buzzword makes me cringe every time I hear it.
The logo you see above? Yep, fake. It was created using a parody web 2.0 logo generator by Hasan Master, a 16 year old student in the UK. This is one of my favorites. It has that same “look” as most web 2.0 tool logos which at first looked cool, but began to really just all look the same.
Delodino, the title of this post, as well as the description, were provided by a web 2.0 company name and product generator created by Andrew Wooldridge. You keep refreshing your screen to get a randomly generated name and product using web 2.0-like terms. After doing this several times I ran across a few that made me go “wow, if only…”
Anyone out there working on a conference presentation proposal? Looking to spatter it with web 2.0 paint? Try these two websites. The first is a web 2.0 bullshit generator created by a guy who goes by the pseudonym “wonderchicken.” Again, some of these randomly combined terms might make some pretty nifty technologies. Another site that does something similar is What Was The Question | Buzz. It provides all of these nonsense things in a tag cloud (oooooh, ahhhh!).
The purpose of this post is to reinforce the social and fun side of web 2.0. Whether it is web 2.0 itself accomplishing this, or a parody of the concept, I think it’s an important thing to be aware of.
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I know, I know, I’ll quit after this week with the evolution thing (it’s like I’m an addict). Do you ever want to grab sections of text from a webpage or have a little more context for the page you were checking out, but have no interest in monitoring the entire site as a bookmark for the long haul? Of course you do. Or at least that’s what the folks at Clipmarks figure. And they might be right. They have combined social bookmarking (a la del.icio.us or furl) with a clipping feature that allows you to grab parts of a page and then just bookmark that part. Basically, all you have to do is register, download the clipping tool to your browser (Firefox of course), and then start clicking the little paper clip to start gathering and tagging your clips. Here’s what my page looks like currently (the red arrow points to the clipper tool).
Clipmarks has a ton of side features already like the ability to start a cliproll (purple arrow), feed your clips into your del.icio.us or furl (or whatever) account, an option to send your clips to a blog, or simply email or print them out. Since there is a rating system for shared clips, you can quickly see what the communal psyche is checking out. All in all a pretty nifty tool, especially for those longing for a little more visual pleasingness in a social bookmarking site.
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Are you shopping for a used bike, car, or couch? Are you willing to drive more than 90 miles to get it? Do you find yourself looking at your local craiglist, then another craiglist community, and another, and another, and so on? If so, then you are are going to love crazedlist. Simply type in your search terms, select a category, and choose the communities you want to search. And, like craigslist, you can even subscribe to an RSS feed (but this time, it’s for all the communities you are searching!).
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Published by Kate on June 22, 2007
Categories: Blogs
If you’ve ever thought about starting a blog but were worried it would be too much work you should check out tumblr. Tumblr lets you create a “tumblelog“, a blog of short posts, photos, video, and links.
Couldn’t you just make a tumblelog with any blogging software? Of course, but if all you want to do is pass on little bits of information to tantalize your readers, there’s no reason to use anything more complicated. With tumblr you can have your new blog up and running in a minute or two, and posts are just as easy. Upload a photo, quote something interesting, embed a video, share a link, or write a quick thought. Since a tumblelog isn’t intended for long posts you don’t even have to feel like you should have written more. You don’t even have to worry about moderating comments–there aren’t any!
(I created www.fifthsentence.tumblr.com to test out the tool and I’m already hooked!)
A tumblelog could be a great way to share anything from books in your collection (post a quote and a source–or a call number?–and let your readers take it from there), the funny things your two-year-old says everyday, or whatever else catches your attention. Don’t wait until you can write up a pithy analysis, just post it with tumblr.
(btw, tumblr is brought to you by the same folks who created senduit, the tool Jane reviewed recently.)
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Published by Jane on June 21, 2007
Categories: How-to
Want an idea about how to unclog your drains? Or how to get moving boxes from stores? Or how to make fishing lures from old teaspoons??? These and many more questions can be answered at Daytipper (formerly called VitaminT). You can post your tips and even be paid to add tips. Create a free account and you can save your favorite tips. If you don’t want to create an account, you can Digg, Del.icio.us, add to Favorites or forward tips.
I had fun just browsing through tips arranged by category and looking at the Best Tips of all, for last year and last month. Not all tips are accepted, in fact I think more tips would add depth to the site. Daytipper also lets you vote on whether you find a tip helpful or not and shows top tippers.
I like that I could find a tip on pretty much everything. I was especially drawn to the technology tips-always can learn more! The next best are random tips like using a tennis ball to remove scuffs from a hardwood floor. Who knew? I’m off to go try it!
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Anyone out there geek out on music? I know I do. Of course I have my favorites, but I’m always looking to find new bands to throw onto my iPod. MyStrands is a newish service that is soon to get much much better due to a recent influx of $25 million in funding, mostly from a young Spanish media mogul, Antonio Ansenio. Plus, it’s headquartered in my very own Corvallis, Oregon (Go Beavs!).
From what I can tell, MyStrands offers four primary components to its service, with the ongoing theme of discovery: MyStrands player, MyStrands music, MyStrands people, and partyStrands.
MyStrands player is a downloadable player (supports nearly all platforms) that runs concurrently with your media player (WM Player, iTunes, etc.) and will give suggestions of music, based on your choices, based on what is currently playing, and your entire music library. There are buttons with the selections to let you listen to the suggestions, or purchase (with your choice of vendor).
The music portion of the website allows you to post playlists, comment on tracks and albums, make journal entries, post photos, etc. The people portion connects you with other users of the service, tracks and albums have folks who are “fans” and you can then connect with those folks to see what music they do.
The final bit, and since I’m not a big party-goer have not had a chance to try out, is partyStrands. This service tracks a lot of the larger parties across the world and will let you know when there are those in your area that may interest you. There is even technology available to link your cell phone to your account and SMS text DJs for song requests/comments while at parties. Kind of interesting, but I’m not sure how it really works.
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Xiclets is a place where anyone can make a web page in 
as much time as it takes to type the content. It’s a really simple web page, but you can choose the color… and the bright colors remind me of chiclets gum (well, except for that gray… that’s more like the gum under your desk…)
The interesting thing about the site is how lightweight it is - you don’t have to register to create your own page. The not-so-interesting thing about this review is that I have no idea how I would use xiclets. But it was fun to play with it for a few minutes.
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For those of you who grew up in Kansas (sorry hubby), the deal with evolution is that it often needs long periods of time to take place. Luckily for those of us with an interest in the biological sciences, the scientific journal Nature is evolving fast enough for lowly web observers like myself to actually see change happen. Nature has gone Web 2.0 with their new Nature Precedings. Nature Precedings marks the evolution from the peer-review, high cost subscription, travel to far-away conferences to discuss the latest findings with your peers model to a site that accepts work that is not peer-reviewed (but of high scientific quality), where papers can be submitted and accepted on the same day, where readers can view the papers and poster presentations for free and where discussion forums allow conversations about bioscience topics to take place any time, anywhere. Heck, they’re even using tagging and a voting system to indicate popularity of the papers submitted. While physicists and mathematicians already had a free pre-print service in arXiv.org, arXiv does not have the level of interactivity that Nature Precedings does.
It will be really interesting to see how biology-oriented scientists react to a non-peer reviewed, but high quality system of communicating their work. I hope it catches on and that people submit some really cool stuff and discuss the nitty-gritty of their fields. Of course, I’m sure the cost burden of this site still falls on those who subscribe to the regular version of Nature, but if a little change can happen at one publisher - maybe others will follow?
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Remember the Milk is a productivity tool with so many features I’m not even going to try to review them all–I’ll just highlight a few that caught my attention and hopefully that will be enough to tempt you to check the rest out yourself.
Creating lists and adding tasks to your Remember the Milk (RTM) account is a snap. You can enter dates and times in many formats; “today”, “next Weds”, or “06/22/07″ are all due dates that RTM can understand. You can tag, share, prioritize, or postpone tasks with a few mouse clicks. You can even send tasks as an email. Once you have created a task, you can set RTM to send you reminders wherever is most convenient for you, whether it’s your email, your IM account, or as a text message to your phone. You can have reminders sent as many ways as you like, and you can choose when you’d like to receive them. You can even place your tasks on a map for efficient errand-running.
Remember the Milk is often mentioned in the same breath with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method, but you don’t have to know anything about GTD to use RTM (enough abbreviations for you?) It’s a productivity tool that you can use however it works best for you.
There are two things keeping me from using Remember the Milk more, and neither one is a problem with the tool itself. One, we use Microsoft Outlook extensively at MPOW so I haven’t been motivated to keep a separate calendar for my (not particularly exciting) personal life. It looks like there is a way to sync the two programs though, and I may look into that if I ever change the second reason I don’t use RTM as much as I might; I don’t currently use any kind of mobile computing device. If I did (and in the not-too-distant future I’m sure I will), I think I’d be more inclined to keep everything from my grocery list to my meeting schedule within easy reach with Remember the Milk.
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What are the 4,000 most popular search terms on the web? I have no idea, but apparently the people who work for Mahalo do, and they’ve handpicked search results for each one. Their goal is to have results for 10,000 search terms by the end of the year; at that point the site will move from the “alpha” stage into the “beta” stage of development. The folks at Mahalo say they’re in the 5th month of a 5 year project. So as I figure it, if they continue at their current pace they should have results for at least 50,000 search terms by the end of the 5th year.
If you visit the Mahalo website and conduct a few searches you’ll find very quickly that your top search terms do not necessarily match up with the top 4,000 search terms in the English language (I tried 5 searches and only one returned a Mahalo result). However, the Mahalo results were handpicked and therefore more relevant than what I’d normally find using Google.
At this stage in Mahalo’s development the search results might be useful for anyone planning a vacation (to a major destination) or gathering information on a celebrity, pop culture, or automobiles.
Mahalo is now hiring. You can make $10-$15 for your search results (not much if you ask me, since even their press release says, “It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result.” But hey, if you’re already doing some research for yourself, why not just save your results and submit them?)
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