Tag Archive for 'web2.0'

43 Things to Procrastinate With

Published on November 17, 2006 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , . Post made from or about Home .

It’s exam time again, and guess what that means? Yes! You got it! Time to post to my blog! What? I should be studying? What are you, my mother? Oh… well, you’re allowed to tell me off then… the rest of you, keep quiet.

Study So, what’s this post about? Well, partly about a new site that I’ve discovered, called 43things, and how great it is to procrastinate on. On one level, 43things is a “todo” list for your life. Think about all the things you’ve always wanted to do, put them on 43things, then check them off, get reminders, talk to other people who are trying to do the same thing, … it’s great! Of course, the problem with a site like this is it gives you too many ideas of things TO do.

Have a look at my 43things list (which currently only has 8 things), for example - sure, I’ve got some great long term plans like live in a foreign country and finish my degree (hopefully not TOO long-term with the second one). Then, I also have some good short-term goals like go back to the gym and finish my exams (only 1 more to go).

Then, we have the one which sparked both the picture in this post, the post itself, and (with any luck) plenty of time spent doing non-study related things (mostly after my final exam, of course). Anyway, the picture in this post will hopefully be the first of many to come, since I’ve taken on the challenge of taking a photo every day. I can’t guarantee I’ll post a new photo on this site each day, so I might post them up in batches, but I’m definitely going to try to take at least one decent photo each day for the immediate future.

Feel free to check back to my A Photo A Day album if you want to see how well I keep up with my goal.

Oh, and feel free to check out 43 things for yourself, if you’d like there’s:

Flickr and Zooomr and Sobriquet, Oh My!

Published on July 10, 2006 0 Comments Tags: , , , , . Post made from or about Home .

Well, if you can’t already tell - I’ve been having fun! Not only have I totally re-designed my site (if you only ever read these posts as emails, get your butt over to http://sobriquet.net), I’ve been having lots of fun with Flickr (especially playing around with geotagging my photos - which basically means embedding GPS co-ordinates in them, so you can see where I’ve taken the photos).

DSC01669

On the geotagging note, I’ve also decided to try out a new photo sharing site, called Zooomr (with 3 O’s). While they’re not quite as advanced as Flickr in terms of features and usability (yet!), they’re definitely taking online photo sharing to a new level. On the surface, Zooomr looks a lot like Flickr. It does, however, have some interesting additions - such as the ability to geotag photos directly on the site, and the ability to add audio comments to photos. I’m still trying to figure out how to USE some of the features (it’s not well documented, and some of the features don’t seem to be particularly intuitive), but on the whole, it looks like an interesting product! I was going to try and include a geotagged Zooomr photo as a demo, but for some reason, I can’t seem to get it working just yet - when I uploaded my photos, Zooomr seemed to strip out all the data (EXIF/IPTC) I’d already included with the pictures! Oops! In the mean time, enjoy this photo I took in Europe in 2003.

Oh, and with the site re-design, you might noticed some new photos in the top banner - the funky coloured ones (my favourites!) were taken in a “luminarium” which graced our shores during the Commonwealth Games.

My new favourite sites

Published on December 12, 2005 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I’ve been discovering a number of very cool sites recently, and, let’s just say, the web is a constantly changing environment. New sites pop up all the time, and plenty fall flat on their face just as frequently. One major trend on the web recently has been the so-called “Web 2.0“. Brief run down - community based sites, organising information through tagging, content syndication and sharing - all stuff that, historically speaking, hasn’t been too common, but seems to be popping up everywhere these days.

Anyway, I’m writing this because I wanted to share with you some of the sites that I’ve been using recently. Check them out, and have a play!

del.icio.us

Yes, it’s a strange address for a website - where’s the www? where’s the .com? Well, for now, you’ll just have to trust that http://del.icio.us is actually a valid web address. Or, if you really want to know more, see an analysis of del.icio.us’s domain name.

This has to be one of the websites I can’t live without (excluding Fastmail, my main email provider, and Google). del.icio.us is a “social” bookmarking site. While traditionally, you stored your bookmarks on your home computer, and sorted them into folders, del.icio.us takes a different approach.

With del.icio.us, you instead of putting your bookmarks in folders, you “tag” them. By linking words to each of the websites you bookmark, you can place them in as many categories as you want, and find them easily later. There’s also plenty of tools to help you use and access your del.icio.us bookmarks once you’ve starting using it. If you can think of a way to use tagged bookmarks, chances are someone’s already written a tool to help you do it with del.icio.us!

Flickr

Flicker is a photo sharing service which uses a similar tagging system to del.icio.us. You can upload all your photos to flickr, and share them with family, friends, and other people you’ve never met! There heaps of social groups, and fun groups which people can submit photos which follow a theme. The Flickr community are often amateur or professional photographers, so there’s plenty of good photos to look at, but there’s nothing stopping anyone using the service!

Searching photos on Flickr is easy, because of the tagging system - you can search for things like beach, party, Melbourne, or almost any word!

One other great thing about Flickr is the fact that you have unlimited storage space for your photos. There’s limits to how many photos you can upload in a month, but once they’re there, there’s no limit to how many you can post!

Kaboodle

Ever find yourself shopping for something online, and wishing there was an easy way to collate all your options in one place so you could compare them? Want to create a “wishlist” to share with your friends, but feel limited by sites like Amazon which don’t let you add things from other websites? Kaboodle does all this and more.

I was having fun recently going through Amazon’s website and adding things to my wishlist in the hope that people would buy me some of it for Christmas. I then started to think about things I wanted which weren’t available from Amazon, or that would be easier and/or cheaper to purchase in Australia rather than through an online store based in the USA. I then found Kaboodle.

With Kaboodle, once you’ve installed the buttons in your browser, when you’re looking at a page which lists something you want to add to your personal Kaboodle page (wishlist, giftlist, or whatever), you click the button, and Kaboodle does all the work for you - 90% of the time it will pick out the photo of the object, the description and price without you having to do any more work. If Kaboodle gets it wrong, or you wanted to add your own information, that’s easy too!

Google Reader

Now, I mentioned earlier that most of these sites supported content syndication. If you looked at those words earlier, and thought “what the hell is that?”, then, Google Reader might be a great way to find out. Of course, if you read those words, thought “what the hell is that, I’m not going to understand this post”, then you’re probably not reading this anyway. Bugger.

Anyway, if you find any site that has an “RSS” or “Atom” feed and you can subscribe to it’s content directly in Google Reader. That means you can read all your news, discover new del.icio.us links, view Flickr photos, etc. all in the one place! (Oh, did I mention you can subscribe to this site as well?)

Last.FM

A site I’ve only discovered today, but which looks very promising is last.fm. Last.fm is an online radio station which suggests music, and creates custom radio stations for you based on the songs you like to listen to. Personally, I love hearing new music, but I’m not about to go out and buy CDs for Artists I don’t know well - I figure something like Last.FM can help here!

By installing some software on my computer, Last.FM can be notified when I’m playing music on my PC, and can then build up an idea of what I like listening to based on what other users enjoyed. Again, it’s a community-based website, using other people’s recommendations and tags to help make recommendations to you.

You can see what I’ve been listening to if you want!