[GEEKY] Can your current reader/aggregator do this?
Check out the latest summary of amazing feats by BlogBridge. I don't want to be too cheeky, but there are some pretty cool things that you get from BlogBridge (for free) that you can't get anywhere else.
BlogBridge is definitely a serious tool which is why I bit my tongue and marked this post 'geeky' but really it's also, as you know, my labor of love, so I can't resist showing it off. Hope you take a moment to try it!
State department has a blog team
Apparently the US State Department has a team of bloggers who get into discussions on boards and blogs around the world, taking an interesting alternative approach to the usual formal, high level diplomacy:
"…The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting…."
This is pretty interesting, and yet another sign of how blogs are infiltrating all aspects of life. Read the whole article: "At State Dept. Blog Team Joins Debate", from the New York Times.
[geeky] Google Groups missing key functionality
I've been living inside a couple of [tag]Google groups[/tag] lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and [tag]Active Scaffold[/tag]: Ruby on Rails plugin)
Much to my surprise and [tag]productivity-loss[/tag], it's not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this 🙂
Interesting pointer from Francois on the marketing potential of Facebook et al
Check out this post from Emergence Marketing:
"Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself - many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group's conversation."
(from : What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace)
Joel remembers Lotus Symphony and talks Strategy
Check out this post from Joel on Software:
IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli.
(from: Strategy Letter VI)
Actually this is a great article about strategy in the [tag]software business.[/tag] But us Lotus alums remember Symphony and had quite a chuckle to see that IBM brought back the [tag]Lotus Symphony[/tag] brand.I am waiting for the second coming of other great product names owned by Lotus: Lotus Manuscript; Lotus Jazz; Where are they now?
Scott Adams is still funny: Suing God
Scott Adams of course is the evil genius behind Dilbert, which as you know I am a big fan of. Scott also has a really funny blog. As proof, this is from the latest post from The Dilbert Blog:
Lawyer: “Where were you on the night of the tornado?” God: “Um, everywhere. Same as always. Go to Hell. Seriously.”
(from: Suing God)
Is a book’s cover art copyrighted?
I'm
not trying to start anything. I just thought this was amusing. Two totally
different business books, published years apart, with practically the same
cover.
Funny?
Patriots win, I am souring on Football and the NFL
Reading this article about The Casualties Of the NFL, in Men's Journal the other week really colors my view of the NFL and football. Here's a bit of it to give you a taste:
"…But the men on the field who generate those billions are real; they bleed; they break; their brains cloud. The nature of their injuries, particularly the mind-dimming concussion, has dominated the off-the-field news of late. Post-mortem exams of Andre Waters (suicide at 44), Terry Long (suicide at 45), Justin Strzelczyk (car crash at 36), Mike Webster (heart attack at 50) -- showed staggering brain damage in men so young and affirmed that football is no longer a contact sport but real-life Mortal Kombat in cleats.
Stunningly no one in the sport has stepped up to address the scope and depth of the injuries -- not the teams, not the owners, and certainly not the one organization charged with looking after the athletes, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA). In a game expected to take in $7 billion this year and that exceeds all others in causing bodily harm, fewer than 3 percent of the men who played in the league succeed in getting disability benefits. Worse, the players union turns away ailing vets despite a pension fund with $1 billion in assets…." (from The Casualties of the NFL, Men's Journal)
[GEEKY] Gshell, the web’s own command line
You remember back in the stone ages we all interacted with computers by typing [tag]command lines[/tag] at a prompt. Then in the bronze age, the [tag]GUI[/tag] was invented and we used mice, menus and windows? (Oh some of us still preserve the old traditions of course using the ancient language of the unix-people?)
Today the Google Search box is becoming the new command line. There's almost no end to the non-search things you can type into google to get answers.
I just discovered this one:
"65 degrees f"
Gets you a conversion of 65 degrees Fahrenheit to 18.3 degrees Celcius.
Others that I already knew about:
5 * 12 => 60
AA 123 => Flight information for American Airlines flight 123
define abacus => dictionary definition of the word abacus
AAPL => stock price and chart for Apple
It goes on and on.
Google is the command line shell for the web. [tag]Gshell[/tag].