I’ve got another blog at my.opera.com, which I also maintain from time to time. It is as though one wasn’t difficult enough. The new feature of this system is that it is integrated with Opera Mini 3.0, which allows for very simple picture blogging; all one has to do is log in from mini, take a picture directly from the browser, and it is automatically uploaded to the blog. cool!
View the blog at olegt
Last.fm is a very cool site that makes a graphical profile of your taste in music.
“Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler system, a music engine based on a massive collection of Music Profiles. Each music profile belongs to one person, and describes their taste in music. Last.fm uses these music profiles to make personalized recommendations, match you up with people who like similar music, and generate custom radio stations for each person.”
The plug-in works behind the scenes so that you not aware that you are building a profile, but yet, every time you play a song, it gets logged on your personal page, and eventually a profile gets built. Very cool!
Also, it’s a good way to discover new music. Clicking on a song gives the overall statistics for it and the top fans. If you go to their page, it’s possible to see their profile and check out what bands they listen to.
Check out my Last.fm profile.
It’s official: pidgeons are faster than ADSL!! A group of users in Israel tested their Wi-Fly network, i.e. pidgeon-powered wireless internet, and found it to be faster than the ADSL infrastructure. Go pidgeons!
Pidgeon-Empowered wireless internet
A bunch of MIT students got together and wrote a program that generates computer science papers, complete with graphs, figures and references. Having generated a paper, they submitted it to a conference taking place in July in Florida and got accepted!
Their website features the generator, so that you can make your own random CS papers, and their correspondence with the organizers of the conference.
Great fun!
SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator
They even made BBC News.
Thanks to Ottar for sending me this!
I have just started using the Adblock extension for Firefox and I find it absolutely excellent. It is extremely easy to use and enables the user to filter out web advertisements such as banners, flash animations, buttons, etc. One of the most useful features is wildcard filtering, which makes it possible to block anything from a particular site. In other words, the user may block all images from DoubleClick and the page appears without a single banner. Pages load faster and are much more esthetically pleasing.
What I’m interested in is how content providers that rely on advertising as a source of revenue are going to handle this. Firefox boasts over 25 million users and it is only a matter of time before the use of Adblock is widespread. The total downloads for the extension are currently 1.2 millon, with 102000 downloads this week alone. If so many users are filtering out blocking ads, the content provider may end up losing revenue. Not in the sense that users will click on fewer ads - click-through rates are already very low - but in the sense that advertizers may be push prices down, based on the availability of this technology. If all ads on a given page can be filtered by a few clicks, never to be seen again (once all images from a given server are blocked, they are blocked from all sites), the investments in internet ads are suddenly much less profitable.
In fact, this affects not only content providers but virtually all internet sites that use advertizing. It will be quite interesting to see whether this changes the face of the Internet. For my part, I’m reading ad-free newspaper sites and they look great.
An article that I have co-authored has recently been published in Virtual Law Journal. This was a study of the Norwegian law firm Schødt and their strategic use of Knowledge Management Technology.
The article is available at here or on request.
Also, Virtual Law Journal is an interesting read.
The All Free Dictionaries project maintains free online dictionaries in over 43 languages. They are developing a new concept that will unite all the different dictionaries into one universal dictionary. This basically means that one only one SQL query will be necessary for retrieving all the available translations, which is very practical both in terms of table structure and query time. They intend to make this dictionary available for free (GPL).
It is possible for everyone to contribute, and I have added several English-Norwegian translations myself.
A great project!
(via Slashdot)
An interesting article on how censorship does not work. MSN Spaces is Microsofts blogging service that turns out to contain censorship controls. However, they are far from perfect, and many titles that we, as humans, would deem inappropriate, make it through. Why try to censor blogs in the first place?
On another note, read this article that mentions Microsofts terms of use for this service. They own you….
Imagination Cubed is a very interesting idea. You can collaborate with others by scetching drawings using this tool. It looks really cool, and the different pens and brushes are nicely designed. I have played around with it and the results are pretty good, considering my lack of artistic qualities.
The service is free - anyone can visit their website and start drawing and inviting friends, etc. So this got me thinking, what’s the catch? Enter the Terms of Use agreement. Point 5 basically states that by using the service you agree that all copyrights and intellectual property rights will be assigned to GE. In other words, don’t draw anything on that board that you don’t want to hang on to.
The link to Imagination Cubed from GE’s website says “Share your imagination”. So it’s a give and take operation: GE provides you with the tool, and you give them whatever brilliant ideas you may have.
The same Terms of Use agreement states that GE encourages using Imagination Cubed for your personal, non-commercial use. So this may seem ok. After all, they do tell you not to use the tool to design a revolutionary microprocessor. But say that I want to design a new logo for my personal website - what then?
I am currently reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, so I may be overly paranoid, but the fact remains that collaboration along GE’s terms would be very limited if people were aware of what they are agreeing to.
(To see the Terms of Service, go to Imagination Cubed, launch the tool, click on ‘Invite a Friend’, choose ‘By E-mail’ and click on ‘Terms of Use’ in the popup window. The site is done entirely in Flash, so I can’t link to the Terms of Use directly.)