Some time ago I put Quizify on hold to work on a new project. I like Quizify, but I wanted to do something more important, something that can make a difference to the environment. I’ve been working on Waste Nothing, which is a long-term project for me. It’s a simple service where you can look up what to do with anything you no longer want, from orange peel to old books to makeup and more. In fact, you can try it out right here:

The main reason that I haven’t mentioned it before is that much of the data is location-specific and might not apply to everyone reading this. Thanks to Toronto’s Open Data initiative, I have brought in Toronto data as a demonstration and am now looking for other cities and organizations to partner with; to bring in their data and make it available to their residents.

If you find it useful and want the service available where you live, let me know.

Waste Nothing is built on Ruby on Rails, which I had been putting off learning but am now very glad that I have. Waste Nothing may never have gotten this far without it.

Since I’ve been getting questions about it lately, I hereby present my entirely unorganized notes that would have been used to actually do some research and finish the followup:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_entity_recognition

http://developer.zemanta.com/docs/Zemanta_API_companion
http://developer.zemanta.com/docs/suggest_markup/

amplify has some improvements, but you need to slightly change the API call… need to compare it to the older one

calais updated some stuff http://www.opencalais.com/documentation/opencalais-documentation/opencalais-release-notes … do I need to relook?

new features on alchemyapi http://blog.alchemyapi.com/?p=70

other changes
* note evri non-commercial use and that you can’t store longer than 2 weeks
* look into opencalais having ’semantic links’ (read the comments)
new APIs
*Wingify doesn’t really do what I want but may be of interest to others
http://www.wingify.com/contextsense/; API details if you contact them…
*uclassify.com let’s you do some simple classification based on giving it some training data; there are
a number of sites like this but not what I’m looking for

comment on original blog post by Andraz Tori

* no api, but http://lcl2.di.uniroma1.it/termextractor/
http://labs.translated.net/terminology-extraction/

* Apache UIMA incubator project
* http://expert1.expertsystem.us.com/essex

http://www.chailabs.com/platform/ and www.inform.com – two examples with no public APIs

http://blog.viewchange.org/2010/05/entity-extraction-content-api-evaluation/#overview

http://affy.blogspot.com/2009/10/entity-extraction-links.html

http://www.digitalpebble.com/resources.html

http://www.loomp.org/

Anyhow, Dave Meslin is a serious asset to Toronto. To summarize, he was surprised at a city statistic, arranged volunteers to collect their own data, proved the city wrong, and was completely blown off by the city. Eventually (presumably due to media coverage) they caved in and admitted their own figures were wrong.

Let’s hope we all learn something from this.

Within the first page or two I came across the phrase “North Americans,” which told me immediately (and correctly) that it was written by a Canadian. After all, North America is the least-inaccurate way to refer to the US and Canada together, and while people often could refer to the two of them together, virtually all Americans would have written “Americans,” not bothering to even assume that their statement would remain true if expanded slightly.

Anyhow, the entire book is essentially a single rant, almost a stream-of-consciousness, but somewhat better organized. The theme is around the large and growing trend of anti-intellectualism. Unfortunately, it basically sounds like what I would say, other than the much better style of writing. She has a talent for a certain sort of wordplay and wit. But beyond that, it said things I already thought and also proposed no solutions, so I ended the book feeling that my societal worries are correct and that’s that.

Is there a point in writing a book about certain problems and proposing no solutions? I’d never read one before, but then again there’s nothing wrong with stating a problem if the hope is that someone listening will themselves come up with solutions.

I’ve composed dozens of blog posts in my head during the blog’s absence and hopefully I remember some of them enough to post them eventually.

It’s good to be back.

If anybody notices anything broken please let me know.

I got the email that etacts was shutting down and then saw that it was being purchased by Salesforce so figured I might as well just publish this post with the brief notes I already had.

What I’d been trying to say was that after some period of stagnation, I was seeing general improvements as well as some real innovation in address book / contact management.

• Google Contacts, which is built into Gmail finally added merging of duplicates. Not a huge innovation, but quite important to me. Also Google Contacts integration with Google Voice works very nicely
• Gist builds on you address books elsewhere and is quite neat, and now has browser plugins
• Silentale was great in letting you search across your various inboxes, and since I last looked at it appears to have added a lot of new contact management features, so I’ll have to play with it some more again.
• etacts, as mentioned above, had some neat features. Letting you know how long since you had spoken with various people, and prompting you if desired. Also keeping track of whether you got replies to particular emails. Integrated nicely into Gmail.
• Rapportive, similar to etacts and Gist can integrate good information right into Gmail. One thing that was especially neat was their plugin-within-a-plugin model, so for example you can also get details about individuals from TransparencyData and Crunchbase, among others.
• I’m not sure about now, but when I first went to write this post, both etacts and Rapportive were being powered by Rapleaf which now looks to be more of an advertising venture
• Some other products that look good but have limited functionality for free users is Scrubly (address book cleanup and backup) and Flowtown which is intended largely for markets but allows you to match up contacts with their Facebook (and other?) IDs. Unfortunately Flowtown’s website indicates that basically all of this functionality is going away, and I’m not quite sure what they’ll be doing instead.
• Find by Email, a great (and open source) service that aggregates the find-user-by-email feature of many websites, as explained by Pete Warden. I’ve been meaning to write about some of Pete’s work for months, and this is just one little example.
• Digsby, the instant messaging program has been around for a while, but I finally tried it, hoping it would have a certain feature. I didn’t stick with it, but to use it and get my IM logs in I found Chat Log Converter which seems quite useful and supports quite a few formats.

I don’t agree with everything in the book (I’m not sold on PRT or Personal Rapid Transit) but just about everything else is extremely well justified. I was already thinking along the same lines as the authors, and so the most enjoyable part of the book for me was the first chapter. It is a look back at five prior major transport revolutions, about which I knew almost nothing and is very fascinating. If you aren’t interested in reading the whole book I recommend reading the first chapter and then flipping through to find interesting graphs and reading as much of those parts as you wish.

The striking part of the end of the book is the realization of how much needs to change, right now. All that needs to be done can be done with existing technology, but government needs to make some huge moves in terms of cancelling many existing projects, increasing some taxes, and shifting huge sums of money to new projects. While change is happening today, it is not remotely on the scale suggested by the book as being necessary, and it is hard to imagine the public in the United States accepting of the need to increase the pace of change much more.

I wonder if there’s any chance of the concepts getting adopted by any existing hardware manufacturers.

I looked briefly for a link to the official website but didn’t find one.