Oy this is a doozy. Darren meets Joan on J-Date, the online dating service for Jewish singles. They go to dinner at China Grill in NYC (yummy, by the way). Darren pays for dinner, despite Joan’s offer to split the bill. When Joan doesn’t call him for a second date, ‘DarrenStalker’(tm) emerges, hounding her to pay half the bill. Wonderful recordings of his messages to her in the link that follows…
Tags: Web
Can’t make it to the hinterlands of Tennessee? 
The good folks from AT&T are showing off their ability to show stuttering video via their high speed networks with a live video webcast of many of the acts from this year’s alt music festival and arts extravaganza happening about 200 miles north of Atlanta. Two of my faves - Ben Folds is on the air at 3pm ET today and Elvis Costello will be up at 6:30pm Saturday - will be featured. Unfortunately, neither Death Cab for Cutie or Radiohead will be streamed from the AT&T site. Link to AT&T’s ‘BlueRoom’ live streaming is here.
This spiffy web app maps the contents of web pages into a tree with different nodes representing various types of page elements - blue for links, red for tables, green for divs, violet for images, yellow for forms, orange for blockquotes or br or p tags, etc. Rather a beautiful construct, don’t ya think. The image at right is of our very own Trotz.com. The creator of this applet also has a rather more estoeric project - onethousandpaintings.com. Yes - pick a number (not previously taken) between one and one-thousand and the artist will paint the number for you on canvas. Unfortunately, the number 42 is already taken, darnit!
From Websites as Graphs [hat tip to a crank's progress]. And you can see other examples on flickr here.
On the Flickr blog today, George Oates reveals a slew of site changes coming next week:
It was a little funny for us to win a Webby Award for Best Navigation/Structure (we also won for Best Practices - yay!). “Funny” because we’ve always felt like there were some big changes we needed to make. As Flickr grew organically, the site became a little, well … “rambly” over the years. So, we’re changing it
The highlights include a new navigation IA, improved boolean search, the Organizr rebuilt from the ground up, a new ‘person menu’ to get directly to users photos, profile, favorites, etc, and perhaps most usefully an increase in the number of images you see on most pages of the site, with an option to toggle between thumbs and larger versions. I’m most happy to hear the Organizr will get an upgrade - it’s a bit clunky today, but has a lot of potential.
Tags: flickr, Photography, Web
C|Net.com reports on a new feature user-generated content play YouTube rolled out yesterday - the ability to recieve and post content sent directly from mobile devices. As evidenced by the role Flickr has played in events like the London 7/7 bombings, still images have flown around the web like wildfire in our mobile-happy world. Video has been more challenging, although major news outlets have carried some of these grainy clips on-air and on-line. But this new feature at YouTube suggests the next major news story may include plenty of citizen journalism video coverage if this feature gets even modest adoption.
It’s amazing what’s available on the web today. Who needs user-generated content when you can post network TV? Guba.com appears to be like most of these services - another storehouse for UGC material. Some enterprising soul has searched that site for nuggets - not gold, mind you, but network and cable television full episodes. They’ve organized all that content into another site - peekvid.com - that offers up a nice handy list of episodes from shows like 24, Family Guy, Monty Python and The Sopranos. Not that these can’t be found on BitTorrent, but I can see the cease-and-desists flying through the air now… (via Thomas Hawk by way of Digg).
Tags: legal, Television, ugc, Web
Microsoft has been awarded a patent they applied for in 2000 to extend the functionality of cookies and web beacons. Trouble is, I really can’t discern where the originality in this concept lies - thousands of web sites do this every day. Ars Technica (quote below) suggests the focus may be on the addition of an API to these ‘permanent cookies’ - of course how permanent can any file be on any computer device for a savvy user?
Provide developers with an Application Program Interface (API) which can be called from languages such as JavaScript, ASP, and VBScript. The permanent cookie can contain four data types consisting of bits, counters, dates, and strings. In the patent description, Microsoft also notes that the cookie is flexible enough to allow for new data types in the future.
M-Dollar: Microsoft patents the super cookie
The patent itself is lengthy and obtuse, but I wonder what’s really ‘new’ in here. The abstract suggests that it’s the application of the cookie info to what content a user is presented on subsequent visits; I believe that’s been done in many forms by many web sites using cookies and databases in the past.
technorati tags: microsoft, cookies, patent
Tags: Web
Just weeks after closing their deal to buy Meedio, a software developer of a ‘roll-your-own’ digital entertinament solution akin to Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition, Yahoo! has put a branded version of the software out for free download. called Yahoo! Go. Download the software here and give it a spin. It includes features to access video, music and photos on your local PC, as well as TV tuner integration should you have one, including DVR features. I do wish the Flickr piece was a bit more feature-rich; currently there’s no way to select your own photos or specify a tag to view, it simply includes a half-dozen or so pre-selected tags/groups to view as slideshows. One nice bit of integration is the ‘Video’ area - with Yahoo video content presented alongside your own, as well as search features for other video content. Overall, a very nice UI with a ton of features.
technorati tags: yahoo, mediacenter, mce, meedio
Tags: Television, Web, windows media center
01:02:03 04/05/06 - a moment that can only happen once every 100 years (assuming a two digit format for the year). It’s coming on Wednesday morning. Some have suggested the blogosphere post what they were doing at this auspicious moment. I’ll be sleeping, thank you very much. Thanks to my cousin Herb for emailing me about this. It’s apparently all the rage.
technorati tags: singularity, meme, 01:02:03 04/05/06, 010203040506
Tags: Web
Wider format, most popular emailed/blogged/searched feature and a new horizontal drill-down navigation added with more prominent multimedia. Also a very smart ‘Today’s Paper’ feature that let’s you find articles as they are organized in the print edition - would like to see more scans of the printed pages there however. Editor in chief’s letter to readers is here. Mytimes.com feature which is supposed to allow users to customize a page with both Times and other web site’s content is touted in the letter, but it has a ‘coming soon’ message when I visited it. Sounds like a custom RSS aggregator to me….
technorati tags: nytimes, redesign, rss
Tags: Web
