web2.0

Spotback is now in public beta

urig — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:41:31 GMT

Spotback which advertises itself as the "rate everything!" platform for the web 2.0 is finally out of private beta and available to the public.

Spotback provides widgets that blog writers can embed in their blogs. The widgets enable readers to both rate blog posts and see which blogs posts have received the highest ratings from others.

Spotback users are also provided with a personalized recommendation service that takes their past ratings into consideration - a bit like outbrain.com.

I haven't given Spotback a "run for their money" (note that the service is totally free :) ), but it sounds promising. Their public launch should spice up the competition in the emerging arena of personalized rating-based content.

Check back here for a full review of Spotback's new public features.

Outbrain.com - Personalized blog recommendations

urig — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:49:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I've had the pleasure of attending outbrain.com's "friends night out". A small get together of bloggers, outbrain.com crew and sympathizers. Not only was it great fun, it was also educational as Dr. Nahum Sharfman (of shopping.com fame) gave a short talk about the recent web 2.0 startup boom.

Dr. Sharfman's bottom line seems to be that nobody knows what's going to catch on and what isn't, with the one exception that a viable business model should be the prerequisite for anyone thinking of getting involved.

I heartily second that. I dread the thought of a repeat of the .com bubble and its collapse. I think that if investors avoid spending money on ideas that have no clear way of returning that money, then that would keep the it market stabler and give a better chance for the genuine articles to succeed.

But I digress. What I'd really like this post to be about is outbrain.com. Outbrain's idea is to give you a steady feed of blog posts that are custom tailored to your interests and reading preferences. The key concept is that you rate whatever content you happen to read, wherever you get to read it, and based on these ratings outbrain's algorithms will supply you with relevant new sources.

Rating content is done through a small FireFox extension that gives you a standard "5 stars control" at the bottom of your browser:

An IE7 extension is to be released soon. The FireFox extension has recently been upgraded to also embed the "5 stars control" inside Google Reader, adjacent to each post:

Now how convenient is that? (With the exception of it currently only working in Expanded View :) )

In return, outbrain gives you an RSS feed with up-to-date blog posts that match your interests. This personalized feed is a great way to get to know blogs and other sources that you might not have the chance to find in other ways. I've already added 3 new blogs to my reader and I'm sure I'll be adding more.

Bottom line - You should definitely check out outbrain.com for yourself!

Barcopedia - Turn your webcam into a barcode scanner

urig — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:48:00 GMT

StreetTech just ran an item about a website called LibraryThing. It lets you populate an online catalog of your books by scanning the barcodes on the covers into your computer.

The interesting question is - How do you scan a barcode into a PC and onto the web? Gareth from StreetTech suggests using something called a CueCat. This is an old barcode scanner gadget that was distributed freely to magazine subscribers a few years back (all Wired subscribers received them at some point).

These things are no longer manufactured - the company went bust after it was discovered that the company kept track of what specific users had scanned violating their privacy. Buying a standard barcode scanner like the ones you see at your local supermarket is somewhat expensive (starting at ~100$). Problem.

The solution? Barcopedia! This website connects to your webcam and if you point it at a barcode, it will scan it in real time and give you the full details for the item (provided it's is in their DB of course).

I can tell you I was as excited as a little boy the first time I scanned a book, the website pinged and the details showed up on the screen.

I wonder what other magic can be done to barcodes via Barcopedia and how extensible it is. If it has a decently open API, I can imagine myself cataloging my entire library through their service.

Gliffy - Free online graphs and diagrams editor

Uri Goldstein — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 16:56:00 GMT

With Gliffy around, who needs Microsoft Visio anyhow?

Credit to digg.

YubNub - A command line interface for to the web.

Uri Goldstein — Mon, 22 May 2006 12:47:00 GMT

I've just learned about the coolest web app - YubNub. I read about it in Roy Osherove's blog.

What it does is, it gives you a "command-line interface" to the web by allowing you to type in simple commands and then transfering you to corresponsing URLs.

For example, to browse an entry in WikiPedia, I usually type-in to my FireFox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X where X is the entry I'm looking for. In YubNub all I have to do is type-in wiki X and whammo! I'm there.

YubNub has tons more of useful commands that users added to it, there's a command to list them and search through them (the command is 'ls' of course :) ). Anyone can add new commands pretty easily. In addition, it's available as a FireFox search plugin (which I've installed ASAP).

And in a counter-revolutionary sort of way, there's a YubNub command that does "anti-YubNub". The command 'gui' accepts another YubNub command as its argument and gives you a GUI for inputting arguments into that command. Tres cool.

Now all we need is a batch language that can harvest the output from YubNub commands and funnel it to others we'd have the easiest framework ever for making mashups. Anyone up for it? :D

New! Web 2.1 is finally here!

Uri Goldstein — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:28:00 GMT

Check out a live demo at http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html

del.icio.us direc.tor - Powerful UI for del.icio.us

Uri Goldstein — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 13:24:00 GMT

I've just discovered del.icio.us direc.tor which is an innovative and powerful user interface for managing your del.icio.us bookmarks.

You add a bookmarklet to your FireFox (or MSIE) and launch it when browsing del.icio.us. What you get is a drop-down list of all your tags. Choose a tag and another drop-down list is populated with all related tags. Choose a tag from that ddl and the process continues.

This is an excellent way to find links through tags and to see which of your tags are useful and which are not.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Also, has anyone encountered annoying javascript errors on MSIE when using this? Doesn't happen on FireFox, that's fur sure.

del.icio.us is down again :(

Uri Goldstein — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 23:56:00 GMT

It gets scarier:

del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we'll be back as soon possible.

Yikes!

del.icio.us is down.

Uri Goldstein — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:42:00 GMT

Oops. del.icio.us are having some serious availability issues:

System error
error:  	Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /www/del.icio.us/comp/user/get line 13.
context:  	
...  	
9:  	my $usedb = 'master';
10:  	my $ret;
11:  	
12:  	if (!$auth_user) { $usedb = 'user' }
13:  	if (!exists ($db->{$usedb})) { $usedb = 'master' }
14:  	$user_name_q->{$usedb} = $db->{$usedb}->prepare('select * from users where user_name = ?');
15:  	my $query = $user_name_q->{$usedb};
16:  	$query->execute(lc($user_name));
17:  	
...  	
code stack:  	/www/del.icio.us/comp/user/get:13
/www/del.icio.us/comp/posts/all:35
/www/del.icio.us/site/index:82
/www/del.icio.us/site/autohandler:110
raw error

del.icio.us bought by Yahoo!

Uri Goldstein — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 23:42:00 GMT

Just got the word from boingboing : del.icio.us is now part of Yahoo! I sure hope impact on del.icio.us is going to be minimal. http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html