Tom's Blog

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where are the bloggers :-D

Here is a little demonstration and the link to send geogreetings:

Geogreeting

Now, is this a mashup? And what would be the value ;-)

FYI - NBA Mashup on GoogleMapsMania

see for yourself

Hopefully MapYourBuddies will join soon; I recently put it on Programmableweb but it takes some time until its published...

Here is the list of remaining topics I could have commented on by Blog-posts or links that are just interesting or funny and fit into IS696 context.

Useful Yahoo Pipes mashups

Firefox as an IDE

Facebook Releases Their Thrift Software

The Web 2.0 buzz (word)

How to Build a (Web 2.0) User Community

Check out Google’s Blogsearch

Check out Google’s Sketchup

Why Google won't buy you

Right Tool Right Job- Social Media

Dev Chair: Web 2.0 and future of desktop blogging clients

Watch TV shows online (tv-links, alluc)

Hottest startups

Web2.0forsale.com

All I Need To Know To Be A Better Programmer I Learned In Kindergarten

Underrated Web 2.0 Search Engine

What does the hot girl at the party think of your programming language?

My contribution to the PC-MAC discussion

How to Sign Up for GoogleTV Beta - Is that a joke; I mean… look at the guy’s hair ;-)

I was right! It’s a joke-- but a good one ;-)

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Here you can access the final version of my mini project. It is a small mashup of Route 66 hostels from Hostelz.com which I put in an XML file and fetch from another host while putting them on a GoogleMap. It is basic but I think it will do the job; fulfilling the requirements… For iteration three I mainly worked on the DOM integration and avoiding innerHTML. Also I have inserted some kind of logo which immediately lets the visitor know what the site is all about. Much could be done for further iterations, for example the PERL script which gets newest hostel data into the XML file. Also GoogleBase could be used as storage place for the hostels. More information, news and events on the route could be included on the site and the code and the layout could certainly be optimized. Volunteers?

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Another post about blogging itself – this time very funny.
Blogging and Web 2.0 gave birth to a new species- the “first” poster:

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While I was writing about blogging itself I also want to address some problems associated with it. For these problems, age can be helpful as it mostly affects kids and teenagers who grow up with the web and make it what it is today.

Emily Nussbaum writes in her interesting article "Say Everything - Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy" (NY Magazine):

"As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited"

The article is about a new "generation gap" and possible consequences for the new generation kids of today which are described as:

"They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another"

As an example, Caitlin Oppermann’s digital life is presented on a nice graphic. By the way – she is going to be the "Customer of Tomorrow".

There is even a “think before you post” initiative to prevent kids from posting too much:

Lastly two quite new articles on the "Open You" and "Online communities and you" which suit the topic.

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I think letting write us five Blog-posts per week was a very good idea from Bud - especially in terms of didactics. To write meaningful posts and to contribute to the knowledge of the class, students have to really and (pro) actively deal with the subjects instead of just listening and consuming. Students are required to go out and to gain new knowledge that is interesting for others as well and how Bud put it in his blogging guideline “knowledge discovery is aided by allowing largest number of people to participate.”

Here, I feel myself in the role of a journalist or author, writing about pros and cons and trying to make my contributions interesting and attractive. But even by giving just status updates or copying or citing other sources exposes one to ideas outside the classroom. Although it’s sometimes hard to keep up with latest developments and not to “fall behind” because nothing new happened in the projects, people still can write about topics related to the course or post 20% about off-topic issues.

However, not everybody might be comfortable with this form of open discussion – which the whole world can follow. I think that there must be a certain kind of extrovert behavior in a blogger that can not be generated or motivated by grading ones blog- one must post for the pleasure of posting ;-) and not because of external influence.

As our IS696 course is the major’s capstone we are required to write some kind of documentation and I now personally prefer the blogging alternative. My Word-document containing all my posts exceeds 40 pages now and I think the page count equals a small software proposal – with the difference that it was fun to write it ;-)

The value of taking the Learningremix site online and not keeping it a private forum in which only class participants can login is questionable. There might be a few good comments (i.e. that this Chidambaram guy is right :-D) but it mostly attracted spammers and possibly prevented comments which weren’t meant to shared with the outside world(?).

To conclude, I would like to thank Bud for being so innovative and to expose us to the latest technological trends of which we might still be unaware of and to give us the full experience of Web 2.0!

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Recently I was wondering why the counter of my webpage is so high (almost 1300) after less than four months. I checked it by logging in to my counter; there you can display where your visitors are coming from and through which pages they find to you. When the semester started, most of my visitors where you students from the IS courses but now as the search engines and crawlers found us, visitors arrive from all over the world:

Here is the list:
extract facebook friend emails from facebook --> The Facebook API for our Project

FACEBOOK LOGIN proxy --> More on the Facebook API for our Project

google map's --> Google Map's new Marker Manager

livesearch maps --> Woooow, check out Microsoft's live search (maps)

Google Maps Marker Manager --> Google Map's new Marker Manager

aim api --> Team Project: AIM API

css rss graphic --> Graphics and CSS for Web 2.0

lesbian sistas --> SPAM or: Lesbian robots kissing Learningremix

From here I found that Google Labs started a new service called Goog-411. It’s a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and it is a $7 billion/year market. The project originally started in 2006. How Google describes its service:

“[…] we’re testing a free service called Google Voice Local Search. Using this service, you get fast access to the same local information you’d find on Google Maps. But you don’t need a computer, you don’t need an Internet connection, and you don’t even need to use your cell-phone keypad. It’s voice-activated, and you can access it from any phone, in any location, at any time.

Here are a few of the features:

• You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example.
  
• You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS.
  
• The service is fully automated, so it doesn’t rely on human operators.”

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