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Thursday, February 10, 2005

Create Your Own Spam

OK, so you could already create your own conspiracy theory, band, snow-flake, adventure, cubist painting, South Park character, super hero, crossword puzzle, terror warning, Jack-o-Lantern, or goth poem. The only important thing left was a way to create your own spam, so I’m proud to present the Spam-o-Matic to do just that.

Google Helping Wikipedia

Just today I was talking to my colleague about how Wikipedia is great, but really slow (and often too slow to use). But there might be a solution on the horizon, as Dirson found out. He says “Google wants to collaborate with Wikipedia, and they’re planning to help this project by donating bandwidth and servers to handle part of Wikipedia’s increasing load.”

Brian has some updates in the forum.

Free Fotos

BigFoto.com offers a relatively small but OK-quality selection of free pictures for you to use. The gallery is sorted into different categories like Asia, people, or close-ups. To use an image on your web site, all you need to do is give credit by linking back to BigFoto. (Also free, and with search functionality, is the GIMP public domain photo archive.)

William Gibson Quote

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

(Tim O’Reilly used this quote by William Gibson to explain Alpha Geeks. I came across it today over at ITConversations.com, which is quickly becoming my favorite web station. It’s full of Alpha Geeks, too.)

Mark Jen Blogging Again

After a two-week hiatus, now ex-Googler Mark Jen is blogging again. He does not mention any details on the “Google issue.” [Thanks Jason.]

QuotePlay

QuotePlay is a free Flash-based solution to link to specific parts in MP3 files. This can be used for easy quoting of podcasts. Too good to be true? Here’s the catch:

“Currently the entire MP3 has to be downloaded before even a short clip can be played, which is slow and wasteful, but an update will solve this.

Those with PHP-enabled hosting will soon be able to switch to a version which still (optionally) includes the Flash player for choosing a clip, but for playback produces a small MP3 file containing just the selected bit (so clip downloads will be small and play via the user’s own audio player).”

[Via Waxpancake.]

Flickr Social Network Visualization

The Flickr Graph application by Marcos Weskamp shows the relationships among Flicker users. If you don’t know any Flickr users, try entering “Evhead" for a start (he once worked at Google’s Blogger). [Via Waxy.]

Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox

Yahoo released a toolbar for Firefox. [Via Gary Price.]

The Google Login


Is this what a Google “premium” login would look like?

“Google is likely to require its users to begin providing personal information to use some of its products and services, said CEO Eric Schmidt. Requiring people to provide their identity and a password to gain service access is common at many Web sites, but would be new for Google. Having more personal information would enable Google to offer more useful improvements, Schmidt said.”
– Michael Liedtke, Google Discusses Strategy With Analysts (AP), Feb 9, 2005

Watch the Analyst Day Video [WMP].

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