Yahoo Pipes

Pipes is a web service that allows users to easily build web-based applications from aggregated web feeds, web pages and other sources of content. The drag-and-drop user interface makes it dead simple to quickly create useful applications from various data sources.

Some examples below:

Content Keyword RSS
This pipe will search news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News, compare content to remove duplicates and output a unique RSS feed full of content related to your keywords.

YouTube tags to RSS
Be alerted when videos on Youtube are tagged with specific keywords that you may be interested in watching.

Social Media Firehose
This is a big, fat, wide-reaching net of social media searches to alert you every time your brand or product is mentioned by anybody on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.

Bestselling Books
Keep up with the Amazons bestselling booklist. This Yahoo Pipe creation is updated hourly to include the most popular books on Amazon.

GeoAnotated Reuters News
Uses the geonames.org RSS-to-geoRSS webservice to add location information to Reuters newsfeed. The result is displayed using the Yahoo!Maps AJAX API

Nonprofits will find the service beneficial for augmenting their own data, with Pipes geo-location mashups, buzz monitoring tools and data analysis.
Dapper is a similar service, based in Tel Aviv, that also makes it easy to reuse content from any web site.

Yahoo! Pipes

Google Gears

Gears “is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser.” With Google Gears, you can -

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

I use Gears to run GReader offline, to check Remember the Milk and more recently, I’m able to to use Google Docs when disconnected.

Gears is exploring implementing other uses as well:

• Multiple File Upload: Using the File System API, Chris demonstrated a multiple file upload experience.
• Resumable File Upload: He then showed a YouTube mockup that showed uploading multiple files, seeing their status, and after a connection died showing how the file resumes and doesn’t start from 0% All using a ResumableRequest that sat on top of the Blog API and HttpRequest
• Find nearby stuff! A Google I/O demo searched for beer, resulting in local places around the Moscone Center. This example used the Geolocation API which uses GPS, Wifi IDs, Cell IDs, and IP address to work out where you are

Google Gears

(via caribbeannetnews.com/)

 Guyana’s ministry of health has called on residents to remain alert as a result of 12 confirmed cases of dengue fever in region nine, Lethem, close to the Guyana-Brazil border.

Health minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy said over the past month there have been a number of reported cases of fever in the region nine area.

“Over the last four weeks the Ministry has noted the increase of reported fever cases from Region 9, especially Lethem, and investigation revealed that these cases were not due to malaria. A test for dengue fever confirmed that some 12 cases were as a result of recent infection with the dengue virus and were among persons in and around Lethem,” the minister said.

The minister added that cases occur sporadically in Georgetown and all the coastal regions but more so in the Lethem area of Region 9 and the public has been advised that care must be taken to avoid mosquito bites.

“The Ministry is recommending the use of mosquito nets and, if possible, insecticide treated nets must be used, especially by pregnant women and children under 5 years. Everyone should sleep under a net,” a release from the health ministry outlined.

According to health officials, the use of insect repellents can prevent mosquito bites if used as recommended and residents are being urged to use protective clothing, especially while being outdoors at night, and to avoid dark colours since they attract mosquitoes.

TheCommon.org

The Common is a sort of match-making site for non-profits and socially minded organizations needing help and looking to help others.

Once you sign up, you can either join a “Community” or add your own. By community, they mean non-profits, churches and activist groups. From there you are supposed to invite people you know that share the same goals as your community. I signed up as an administrator and added a non-profit I help run, Friends & RPCVs of Guyana.

As the administrator I was asked to post the collective “Abilities” of people in your “Community,” from mentoring to web design to mechanics, you can put anything. Then I was asked to post any “Needs” that my “Community” has. I posted our need for help with finding grants.

Individuals can post “Initiatives,” which are “jobs that are bigger than just one need. They encompass lots of needs that are related in some way. An initiative organizes needs under one umbrella. Facilitators are the only users who can create initiatives.”

If you want to affect real change, this services does a decent job at helping you or your organization figure out where to start.

Lifestreaming

Many of us use a number of websites and services with posts and pictures and videos all over the web. Lifestreaming takes all that content and puts it into one place. According to Wordspy, lifestreaming is “an online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos.”

It’s basically a very easy way to aggregate your web activity and share with friends and family. According to Wired Magazine, it’s “the new black.” For the laziest among us, I can see this replacing blogging.

A few lifestreaming services below -

• Correlate.us
• FriendFeed.com
• Iminta.com
• Life2Front.com
• LiveZuu.com
• MyBlogLog.com
• OneSwirl.com
• Profilactic.com
• Socialthing.com

Google App Engine

Earlier this week, Google launched App Engine, a web service that takes care of hosting, servers and databases for developing web-based applications, all using Google’s own infrastructure. This frees up the developers to work on their applications while relying heavily on Google to maintain the nuts and bolts.

Though the service is similar to Amazon’s AWS, it lacks the ability to use App Engine’s features a la carte. According to TechCrunch.com, “applications cannot use more than 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day” and can only be written in Python.

Potentially I can see apps built on App Engine used on Android, Open Social and iGoogle, building Google’s dominance in advertising and social networking.

From NPR -

At college commencement time, some graduates explore Peace Corps opportunities. For nearly 50 years, the agency has been sending Americans all over the world. Scott Simon talks with Robert Strauss, former country director of the Peace Corps in Cameroon. Strauss says that the Peace Corps has lost its edge for assisting developing countries and the U.S.

It is now time for FROG to begin its election process. Please see the attached document on how you may nominate people for the FROG board. Thank you.

frog_election_letter.pdf

Flickr Video
This week, Flickr introduced the ability to upload video to their website. The point isn’t to compete with YouTube but to allow users to upload short clips taken with a digital camera or cell phone. The limit for each file is 90 seconds in length and up to 10 megs.

Is this useful? I think so, I was able to unload a number of short clips that seemed too short for YouTube but just long enough to capture a story. Photojojo, a photography blog, suggests using Flickr to take Long Portraits. What’s a Long Portrait?

[It's] a 30-second (or less) portrait of a person, kind of like a video snapshot. It lets you capture the essence of a person: not just what they look like, but who they are right now.

The thing is, everybody thinks they don’t change that much from year to year. But what if we told you we had video of you singing your favorite song from 7th grade? See? You’ve changed. We all do. This is why home videos are so poignant: they capture a moment of time that inevitably goes by.

Flickr

Build a Book with Blurb
If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, but didn’t know where to begin, Blurb is a great place to start. Blurb is a micro-publishing service that enables you to create your own bounded book from any media. You can create a book from your blog content, your Twitter or Flickr accounts or from just about anywhere else.

Blurb also introduced a group collaboration feature, permitting a number of people to work on a book together. Taking this idea a step further, Blurb recently release a Facebook app that allows you and your friends to build a photobook through Facebook.

You are only bound by your imagination, and your pocket book, to what you can publish.

Blurb

The Felton Personal Annual Report
Graphic designer Nicholas Felton is the author of Feltron.com, a site that chronicles much of his work as well as The Felton Personal Annual Reports. In 2005, Felton began publishing personal “annual reports” where he accounts for much of his day-to-day minutiae, such as days worked, number of vacation days, purchases, movies watched, beers consumed and so on. He combines this information with attractive infosthetics that ties all this data together.

Upon request, he mails these out. I actually have one if you’d like to see what one looks like.

The Felton Personal Annual Report 2005
The Felton Personal Annual Report 2006
The Felton Personal Annual Report 2007

You’re doing it wrong

Twitter is extremely useful beyond the “I had a ham sandwich for lunch” or the “I’m watching Sanford & Son” tweets. There’s a lot you can do with 140 characters of text. Lifehack.org has a few suggestions.

Quick Human Answers – Ask folks on your friend’s list which digital camera to buy for under $300 US, and you’ll get back a stream of responses.

Conference / News Briefings – The last several major tech events were covered by Twitter. I heard about the Apple iPhone faster through Twitter than I would via blog surfing. Similarly, I’ve watched people in San Francisco report earthquakes that took news sources hours to confirm.

Friendsourcing – Last Tuesday, I asked about a web designer for a project. I got back 14 emails in 10 minutes from different sources on Twitter. It’s a great place to find folks to help with things. We once helped a friend out of a bind when he got stuck at an airport, strictly by Twitter.

Micro-Attention-Sharing – Lots of us use Twitter to direct folks to blog posts we’ve written, news we find needs sharing, or entertaining things we’ve found on the web. It’s *like* using del.icio.us to share, but it’s instant, and you wouldn’t drop 100 links on someone in Twitter in a given day.

Direct People to Good Causes – I’ve seen plenty of posts of someone doing a walk for hunger or a collection for diabetes. Twitter allows people to use their friend lists to propagate that information faster, and try to draw more direct help down to a problem.

And Twittown writes of two users who covered the fires in California in October of 2007.

“Twitter users Nate Ritter and Viss have been busy posting rapid-fire updates of the current wildfire situation in Southern California. Both of them are on the scene in San Diego, and they are doing an excellent job of providing information and news about evacuations, meeting points and anything important that local residents would need to know. Viss is also on Flickr and he’s posting photos.

Nate and Viss are using the hashtag #sandiegofire. Twitter users can enter “track sandiegofire” in SMS or IM and receive notifications whenever a tweet goes out with that tag in it.”

What else can you do with Twitter? Check out these three links.

Twitter

Playlistism

I’m sure you remember the worst of the DJs you’ve ever run across, it doesn’t matter if it was at a party or someone playing their favorites at the office. The experience of listening to the best of Abba, Debbie Gibson b-sides and the Vanilla Ice/Limp Bizkit mashup album is seared into your psyche for eternity.

According to the Urban Dictionary, Playlistism is defined as “discrimination based not on race, gender, or religion, but rather on a disturbingly horrible iTunes music library discovered through a school or job network.”

Thanks to the amazingness of the interweb, now everyone can create and share their wonderful taste in music with millions of people quickly and easily! Mixwit and Muxtape are two services that help you do this.

With Mixwit, this service helps you find mp3s already hosted on the internet somewhere, allowing you to link to each song from their site and share the mix you’ve made. Muxtape allows you to upload actual songs, up to 10 of your own mp3s. You can share that playlist with your friends too.

Not sure where I heard this, but it sounds about right, “Hell is other people’s music.”

Mixwit
Muxtape

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing takes a function or project normally done by an individual and outsources to the public, Wikipedia is an example of this. Sometimes there is financial incentive to participate in a crowdsourced project, as with Predictify.com, but usually not.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an innovative crowdsourcing tool that uses “artificial artificial intelligence.” Mechanical Turk utilizes a network of humans to complete tasks submitted by site customers, completed tasks are then incorporated into the customers applications.

Dolores Labs is a company that helps organizations best use Mechanical Turk to solve problems. Some examples of how they have used Mechanical Turk -

O’Reilly Media wanted to find the sentiment of thousands of blog comments on a news event. In less than 24 hours, every comment was labeled “pro” or “con.”

Zvents collected 100,000 hand labeled judgments to classify local events as whether or not those events might be interesting to people. Zvents then used that effort to train their machine learning event classifier.

Prices from popular shopping sites, many of which are impossible to accurately scrape, were extracted.

Scribd, a YouTube for documents, classified thousands of documents uploaded by users and used that data to build an automated classifier.

In September 2007, Steve Fossett, a famous aviator and explorer, went missing while flying over the Nevada deserts. Using Mechanical Turk, 50,000 people searched through satellite images provided by Google to hunt for the missing aviator. These online volunteers scrutinized images of the 17,000 square mile area where Fossett’s plane is thought to have crashed. This innovative use of distributed search showed the usefulness of the technology.

Mechanical Turk

(via friendsofdaniel.blogspot.com)

The Peace Corps website last week, on the Peace Corps Response page, quietly posted a historical job description. It describes the first vacancy for a PC Volunteer in 19 years. Peace Corps Response is the new name for the agency’s short-term volunteer program, formerly known as the Crisis Corps. At the request of the Liberian government, the first volunteers back in Liberia will work in education.

The job description looks like this -

Partner: Possibly local and international NGOs, government ministries, and other organizations
Projected Start Date: September, 2008
Description: Peace Corps Response will play a pivotal role in Peace Corps’ re-entry into Liberia.

(via stabroeknews.com)

Guyana is seeking further assistance from the Indian Government in such areas as training, bio-fuel and agricultural development, food security and health and the two have begun crafting their work programme for bilateral co-operation over the next two years.

The two sides met yesterday for the fourth Session of the Guyana–India joint commission at the Ministry of Foreign Trade boardroom. Declaring the session open, Foreign Trade Minister Dr. Henry Jeffrey and head of the Indian Delegation, Minister of State, Ministry of External Affairs, Anand Sharma commented on the good relations existing between the two countries. Indian High Commissioner S.K. Mandal was also part of the delegation.

Sharma said the session would also be used to review the state of engagement between the two countries and noted that it would cover areas of interest in which Guyana could share India’s expertise.

He said both sides would also consolidate their commitments.