...And The Best Substitutes We've Come Up With So Far There's so much content online every day that it's totally overwhelming. That's where good recommendation technologies and media outlets come in handy. As a blog that seeks to share the most interesting web technology and trends with readers, automated help with the discovery process is of great interest to us. Below, we discuss some tools we wish we had and the closest makeshift substitutes we've been able to come up with. Maybe you'll find some of them useful or have even better recommendations to offer us and other readers. Sponsor...
Organic: shapes, methods and patterns modeled after those found in living systems. When applied to architecture, the results can be interesting at least, mesmerizing at best and are always a challenge for designers and builders alike. These 12 examples of organic architecture showcase some of the ways designers transform a lot by learning to bend a little. (image via: Eikongraphia) Architect and visionary Robert Bruno has been building his organic, fantastic, metallic Steel House since 1974. Overlooking a cliff near Lubbock, Texas, the huge structure has grown from a spindly metal tripod of beams to a massive accumulation of...
by Michelle Lentz The closer to mainstream Twitter gets, the more time wasting third-party apps will appear. I call that the Facebook model. By watching my Twitter feed, I’ve come across three fairly pointless applications just today : TweetValue: This site assesses the value of your Twitter ID. I have no idea how they figure this out or how it might ever be useful. According to the site, “The value is calculated with a Ph.D algoritm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile.” Uh, right. Anyway, JasonCalacanis is worth over $14000. Me? Not so much....
Google Talk is one of the most popular instant messaging platforms by far. Whereas years ago we’d get turned on by the prospect of voice calling, G Talk takes the possibilities (and your productivity) to a whole new level. Here are some really cool things you can do with Google Talk to make your online experience better, and to increase your productivity: 1. Chat with your site visitors If you have website or blog, and you’d like to interact with your visitors on a one-on-one basis, you can integrate Google Talk into your site using the Google Chatback Badge. This...
Microsoft unexpectedly released an update to the Zune PC software and device firmware today, bringing both up to version 3.1. Here’s the news from the Zune Insider blog: The team has been doing a little extra work heading into the holiday season; in fact this week is a busy one. You are going to see some pretty cool things coming for Zune that we thinks you'll enjoy. Starting today, Zune gets a little update which will bring a handful of free games, a refresh to Zune Social and incremental improvements to the software. On the games front, we are giving...
Saturday brought yet another grim story about the tech industry, this one as p1 NYT. The rest of the weekend followed suit, bad news upon bad news. And not just in tech or business, but in the communications industry overall – existing news outlets in trouble, online ads (seen as the fuel for everything cool) dropping, even blogs tightening up for the coming crunch and our new president elect being threatened with the loss of his blackberry. Two topics near and dear to my heart – tech and communications – talk about a double whammy! But I’m an optimist still....
Here's the CRAFT 2008 gift guide from CRAFT volume 09 (PDF). If you have your printed copy of CRAFT it's on page 81, a pull out, and in the digital edition it's at the end. I also wanted to post up a great article by Rachel Hobson & Diane Gilleland called "Whose Craft Is It, ANYWAY?"... Elder crafters respond to the slogan "Not your grandma's craft." Visit the craft aisle of your local bookstore, or surf the web, and you're bound to run into this phrase sooner or later: "This isn't your grandma's knitting." Or crochet. Or quilting. Just...
Now here’s an odd discovery I made today: Nanologica has created see-through solar cells that you can place on a building surface. The technology is pretty freaky. What you have is a “polarized” surface that lets in light allows some light to pass through. Some light, however, is captured and reflected back at a different wavelength so it can’t leave the glass until it hits another wavelength. Once it reaches a certain point, it comes out as a different color, which means the glass can actually show the world in an alternate color or, potentially, show it in real...
Turns out Chris Miller over at The Social Networker noticed a list of top 150 social media blogs on eCairn's blog last week, but was disappointed to see that it was not available as an OPML file. So, he created one. Today, we realized that the most popular posts from those blogs may be useful resources for many folk, so we created our own OPML file. Ah, the beauty of the Web. Sponsor It all started when eCairn created a Top 150 social media marketing list from the roughly 1000 social media blogs they monitor, concentrating on blogs focused specifically...
If there's one thing that this past week has taught us here at io9, it's not that a historic election can get everyone excited about the future. It's not that people are hopeful in a way that's changed the very atmosphere of a country overnight (albeit a night that many of us spent watching more CNN than is potentially healthy - they had holograms). No, it's that a lot of you really don't like it when we talk about politics. As in, "Screw you guys, I'm going home" don't like it. The main offender, in most of your eyes, was...
