I’d be able to put aside my previous worries about the machines taking over if everyone built robots that were less Matrix and more Wild Wild West, a steam powered centipede, for example.
Link via the nxtbot.com Blog, sorry for the blatant filler some substance may turn up over the weekend.
Google have released Google Calendar which seems about what you’d expect from Google. The bonus, and probably the reason I’ll use it, will be the integration into GMail. I’m disappointed they haven’t added a min-calendar to the sidebar in GMail yet. Now if there was some sort of useful on-line To Do list thing that I could integrate into GMail too then I’d be sorted — or I could just keep sending mail to myself.
Speaking of To Do lists, another neat little blog is collecting them.
Thinking about it it’d be nice if GMail allowed people to plug-in new sidebar content where the Chat / Labels / Invite boxes are. Or at least let make it a bit more customisable, I’d rather have a calendar than a chat box. There’s probably a way to do it in Firefox using something like GreaseMonkey, there’s already a few GMail hacks out there. And there’s this Google Dark hack, which is great (if pointless).
Finally, if you need more distraction, here’s what happens when you let grown-ups get carried away with their marble madness sets. Enjoy.
Nod to the UnorthodoxY Moron for some of the links in this blatant filler post.
Links to a few things I’ve been exploring, first a couple from this list of all things “Web 2.0”.
bebop — a neat little tool that talks to iTunes and tells you about any upcoming gigs featuring artists in your library. It’s a nice idea and very well executed but limited in it’s source of information, it didn’t show several Edinburgh dates (I’m guessing because they’re not listed via Ticketmaster) and it only works with iTunes. It’s early days however and I’m willing to give it a go and see what else gets added.
CouchSurfing — an idea that has a lot of potential and the sort of thing that really leverages some of the reach of the internet. From the site:
CouchSurfing.com helps you make connections worldwide. You can use the network to meet people and then go and surf other members’ couches! When you surf a couch, you are a guest at someone’s house. They will provide you with some sort of accommodation, a penthouse apartment or maybe a back yard to pitch your tent in. Stays can be as short as a cup of coffee, a night or two, or even a few months or more. When you offer your couch, you have complete control of who visits. The possibilities are endless and completely up to you.
I’ve been trying to schedule some stuff using HipCal, I’ve never really like the ‘feel’ of any online calendar but this one is quite easy to use and seems to deliver what it promises.
On the not-as-useful side of things there’s this flood map which shows you what’ll be underwater depending on the rise in sea level. (via diamond geezer.)
But mostly this week I’ve been playing with SameGame, a classic and still as addictive as I remember. I lost vast amounts of time a few years ago to Marbles, a variant of the same idea. (via jay is games.)
The winners of the 2006 bloggies are up. The winner of weblog of the year was PostSecret, which I’d never heard of. After reading it for a bit I can see it is, quite frankly, brilliant and a deserving winner.
I’ve spent a good while adding some of the winners and nominees to Bloglines. Generally I subscribe to anything that looks vaguely interesting knowing that I can always junk it later, but I was surprised that a couple of sites didn’t have feeds of any sort. There could be many reasons, and I’m not going to try to second guess why they don’t but I do think it’s a shame. I love feeds, I tend to forget about things I’ve found as they get pushed further down the list, having them all in a feed reader means that I see things only when they’re updated which makes it much easier to manage everything.
Fortunately there are some tools to help with just this problem, I’m currently experimenting with FeedYes which promises to generate a useful feed out of any website. It’s seems to work although each post needs linked with meaningful text if you want something readable in the feed (other than fourteen entries that say ‘Link this article’.) Even for sites that don’t have useful text in the links it provides a placeholder in your feed reader and acts as a basic update notifier. Worth a look if you want to keep tabs on a feedless site.
… it’ll be these snakebots you’ll find slithering out the plumbing seeking to silence the brave resistance fighters.
I was reading a post on Wil Wheaton’s blog (always a good read) about AIM bots which reminds me once again that I just don’t get it when it comes to IM bots.
The idea is you have a little program at the other end of an instant message service that responds to queries of some form and, maybe, also contacts you with some useful bit of information. I’m sorry, but that’s not what I want instant messaging to do. I don’t need the feeling I’m talking to some pseudo-person to find out something, I have more powerful tools for that. I certainly don’t want to be interrupted with some new update or other I’ll check my feed reader for that, thank you very much.
Isn’t this just a ‘cute’ use of the technology, repacking information in yet another way? Is there any real use for it aside from the cool factor? If you’re always on IM (and I admit that I’m not) perhaps it’s just merging all the information into one place. Or perhaps it’s a hangover from the days when that sort of text messaging was the best way. It seems a bit of a shame to downshift everything to a format suitable for IMing when you’ve more than likely got a fully featured web browser sitting just beside it. I guess that people on mobile devices might benefit but nowadays they’re just as likely to have a browser and other software anyway.
I don’t think we should clutter different communication mediums just because we can, and if we are converging things don’t filter down to the simpler methods of communication. Why not converge them up into the richer methods, IM conversations in your feed reader and e-mail app (pretty much where GMail is heading).
The trick is to get more new information out in the ways that are already there, and not so much delivering the same information in new ways. If people really want IM bots they’ll find something the translates search results / RSS feeds into IM responses, it shouldn’t be the job of the content provider to do that.
Or maybe I just don’t get it. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I may as well shill for StopTicketTouts.co.uk which is an online petition to, eh, stop ticket touts. It’s a good idea, and worth signing for the time it’ll take you, but most online petitions are pretty worthless and I’m not sure this one’ll be any different.
Further to my recent rambling on RSS feeds for upcoming events I’ve remembered a site that did repackage ticket information scraped from the Ripping Records site. It was called Ripped Tickets but sadly seems to be no more. The magic of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine reveals a page from 2005 that shows what they were up to.
The question there is: what happened? Did they get cease&desisted by one of the sites they were scraping? Are they gearing for a relaunch? Too much traffic not enough revenue? Was the site enough for them to sell the idea to someone else and it’s just taking a while? They seem to have been going recently enough that it’s perhaps just down for a server swap/revamp but who knows.
Hmm, postings dropped off a bit I see, I’ll post a link to a pretty good joke and hope that suffices.
Well I’d expect posting to be even more infrequent over the next few days as I’m sodding off to Prague for a long weekend.
I’ll leave you with this, found via Defamer, Willie Nelson releases ‘Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other‘.
Snippet of it on Howard Sterm is linked from here or the full version without the annoying Stern commentary from iTunes.
Well a cowboy may brag about things that he’s done with his women,
but the ones that brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer.
Fuckin’ Classic.
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