UserDriven

Wikibooks

"If Jimmy Wales and his colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation have anything to say about it, you could have another way to go--the Wikibooks project. It's their attempt to create a comprehensive, kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free and freely distributable, based on an open-source development model. Created in the same mold as the Wikipedia project--the open-source encyclopedia that lets anyone create or edit an article and that now has nearly 747,000 entries in English alone--Wikibooks is still in its earliest stages." (Wikibooks takes on textbook industry | CNET News.com)

Database of Intentions

"As more and more of our lives moves to being managed through the Net, the companies who can correctly analyse what we are looking for and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the ones who will prosper. And, as a by-product of that, the more users they have, the more they can analyse what's been asked for before to anticipate what will be asked for in the future. Battelle calls it the Database of Intentions, and mastering the analysis of all those billions of queries is where the money lies." (John Battelle : The Search : book reviews : spike magazine)

Phonetags

"An experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to bookmark, tag and rate songs they hear on the radio using their mobile phone." (Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags... (plasticbag.org))

Last.fm

"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." (Last.fm)

Getting @ @

"All over the world, people are logging on the 'net in countries that never heard of "eggs @ $1.50 a dozen," and whose keyboards never had such a key before. Find out how they are coping here." (A Natural History of the @ Sign)

Wikis, Blogs, E-Mail, IM

"Finally, in looking at the evolving style of communication inside of a little place like JotSpot, we use e-mail for urgency. So we use the blog for highlighting, the wiki as the repository, and e-mail to convey urgent messages....

It's interesting to note in one small environment the balance between e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, and wikis. What we're seeing is that each serves a purpose. We're one of those places where I'll instant-message someone sitting no farther away from me than you are now—to send a quick note in a point-to-point way that needs to be handled immediately.

I rarely IM programmers, though: The most important thing in programming is to let them to stay in the flow state. This means that the most productive thing most people can do is actually turn off their IM client. So we're pretty judicious about IM use. I tend to e-mail questions to engineers because I don't want to interrupt them. How can you not use e-mail? We actually use very little e-mail internally, but you've got to use it for stuff externally...

I really believe that JotSpot's mission over time is to transform web-based applications the way that Excel has transformed financial apps. We want to enable end-users to build these ad hoc, one-time-if-necessary web-based apps. And we want to enable a lighter-weight class of programmers to do a lot more than they ever could before."

(JotSpot founder and CEO Joe Kraus, Wikis and Blogs and E-Mail, Oh My! :: Always On)

Google Maps + Census Data

A great interface to the 2000 Census Data

Google Archaeology

"Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient Roman villa." (nature.com)

Open Internet?

"On the internet, having to ask permission first can kill the creation of a useful new tool. The law should treat the internet as open by default -- a public resource rather than a gated community. This doesn't mean that we can't protect our networked computers or data with copyright law, passwords, firewalls or perhaps even terms-of-service agreements. But rather than asking whether a user obtained permission to access computers connected to the internet, the law should ask whether the owner did anything to prevent public access." (Wired News: Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye)

Google Blog Search!

"Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds, which will be checked frequently for new content. This means that Blog Search results for a given blog will update with new content much faster than standard web searches. Also, because of the structured data within site feeds, it is possible to find precise posts and date ranges with much greater accuracy." About Google Blog Search