Official Gmail Blog: Four changes to Gmail contacts

Posted on February 24, 2009 by mfagan

Official Gmail Blog: Four changes to Gmail contacts – I meant to blog this a while back, but Gmail finally adding contact merging was infinitely needed. Glad to see it’s there.

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LendAround

Posted on February 1, 2009 by mfagan

LendAround – I got an email from LendAround, who saw my earlier comments on borrowing websites and gave me an invite to the beta site. Like many of the other applications out there, they are only used for a dedicated good (in this case, DVDs), but the site is quite well done (autocomplete in data entry, good design, facebook integration), and according to them, will expand beyond DVDs eventually. Once they’ve expanded to allowing goods of any sort I’ll give them a real try-out.

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WhiteHouse.gov’s New Robots.txt

Posted on January 20, 2009 by mfagan

WhiteHouse.gov’s New Robots.txt – geeky, but this perfectly symbolizes the differences between the two administrations

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Welcome to the Washington State Department of Transportation

Posted on January 16, 2009 by mfagan

Welcome to the Washington State Department of Transportation – so just about all public institutions are far removed from those they serve. The WSDOT is a rare exception, and they do an excellent job. I read their blog, which is written as a real blog, not just PR. They talk about how they care about the issues. Last week when their was flooding I could immediately see photos of that online. Today I’m looking at a series of slides they just posted assessing the current state of Washington’s transportation, given several recent problems. These guys are with it.

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good design: laundry detergent

Posted on January 11, 2009 by mfagan

in response to those who thing I only (and always) critisize the design of everything, I present an example of something extremely well designed: the lids of liquid laundry detergent jugs. I would link to something, but I can’t seem to find a good link for this…

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the best thing that could have happened to newspapers…

Posted on January 11, 2009 by mfagan

…was the creation of the internet. The web’s been around well over a decade and practically every newspaper seems to still think it was the worst thing that could have happened to them. The important thing about newspapers – as I naively thought – was reporting on the news, not the physical manifestation of that on dead trees. Newspapers would have to be pretty silly to let non-news organizations usurp them completely on news, right?

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geoupdater

Posted on December 10, 2008 by mfagan

geoupdater – does something very similar to what I was working on.

I’ve got my location set in FireEagle, which I update via the site and Dopplr. I also found an app that turns FireEagle into geoRSS which allows me to include the updates in friendfeed and plot my location easily on a map, which I will shortly be adding to my personal homepage.

This tool (via Ogle Earth) will read from FireEagle and post updates to services like Facebook, and via an RSS feed that includes past locations, allows you to pull in updates to friendfeed, etc. Not bad.

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Hossein Derakhshan arrested in Iran

Posted on November 25, 2008 by mfagan

Hossein (link goes to his English blog) is known as the father of the Persian blogosphere. I met him a couple of years ago (old link takes a while to load), not too difficult since he also lived in Toronto. Anyhow he’s been arrested in Iran on obviously fake charges. Considering that Canadian journalist was beaten to death after her arrest in Iran a couple of years ago, this is not exactly good.

Free Hossein Derakhshan // Libérez Hossein Derakhshan is a Facebook group that seems to be acting as an early petitiony-type thing. I wonder if the Canadian government can be persuaded to actually do anything about this at all.

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borrowing websites

Posted on November 17, 2008 by mfagan

Goal: find an online tool which allows me to list things that others (friends and neighbours) can borrow, and let me view things that others have listed

This doesn’t seem like an impossible goal. One problem is that most of the websites for this seem to be for only books, movies, etc., few work for just any miscellaneous items. The only thing that matches is Neighborrow. The site isn’t particularly well-designed, but I could live with that.

How this should really work is that I should be able to state my location as the source for all my items, and be able to search geographically. Instead I have to join “neighborrowhoods,” which can either be public or private. This isn’t as good as arbitrary locations, but it would do, except that there are no public neighborrowhoods for my location and it costs $$ to create one, versus private groups (which are not what I want) and are limited to fifty people. I thought that Facebook applications might be another good place to look, but there seem to be only media-sharing applications plus one that matches my idea but is broken and has no users.

So for now, I’ve listed most of my borrowable stuff on neighborrow, which can sadly only be seen if you join the private group I created which so far includes just me. bleh

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keeping tracks of books read

Posted on November 13, 2008 by mfagan

So for the past few months I have been keeping track of the books I finished reading. Just a text file with ISBNs and dates. I finally got around to deciding how to expose that online, the choices being to publish it myself or use another website. I was looking for a well-done site that allowed import and export, and hopefully a site that was fairly large already so that it wasn’t likely to die, and if it had social aspects it could take advantage of the numbers. Turns out there are tons of sites, but I decided to only look at the two biggest, LibraryThing and Shelfari, both that I had known of, and both at least partially owned by Amazon now. I decided to go with LibraryThing, because it seems like a much more serious and powerful tool, and the attitude of the company (which does not get along with the other) was much more favourable. You can see my profile here. There is a limit of 200 books listed for free, but considering my pathetic rate of reading right now, that won’t be an issue for a long time, at which point I probably won’t be using LibraryThing anyhow. One minor point is that I think LibraryThing thinks I actually own all these books (I own none of them), whereas Shelfari had options for that.

Actually I added the LibraryThing profile link to my home page, but at some point I am going to redo that home page to be more dynamic and actually show information directly on that page via Fireeagle, Google Calendar, and Friendfeed, at least.

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