Software: Psst, Want Another RSS Feed?

By | November 24, 2011
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 Here’s another way to get your daily dose of blogs, news and RSS feeds (blogs that dripfeed their way through to your desktop without you having to do anything). NewsMonster is “a news, weblog, and RSS aggregator that runs directly in your web browser.”
 
 
“NewsMonster offers a superior web experience and outstanding integration with existing websites and weblogs that support RSS. Even sites that don’t support RSS can work with NewsMonster.”  NewsMonster also incorporates an advanced reputation system to prevent spam and discover and inform you of important news. I have to say that I haven’t checked it out yet.

News: Checking the Pulse of Blogging With a Mallet

By | November 24, 2011
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 From the We’re In Trouble, The Dataminers Are Showing an Interest Dept, a company called Intelliseek (description: “a business intelligence company that leverages a breakthrough technology platform to help marketers, researchers and other business professionals transform unstructured data into insights!”) have pointed their datamining skills at blogs. The result: BlogPulse.
 
 
BlogPulse uses the datamining thing — machine-learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques — to comb through massive amounts of text and “look for meaning, trends, spikes and interesting facts”. Gosh, I wish them luck. The vast majority of blogs are unvisited, unappreciated, and, if this one you’re reading is anything to go by, unreadable.
 
No, seriously, it’s good to see marketing folk actually looking at blogs, which at their best are a repository of repartee and modern thought. But I suspect it’s somewhat typical that, instead of actually reading them and getting a sense of the intellectual flow behind (some of) them, they just throw a massive datamining bot at the whole kaboodle and hope to dig up some interesting “buzz”. Or am I being hopelessly cynical? Intelliseek, let’s hear your version.

News: Don’t Smile At Me, SMS My Teddy

By | November 24, 2011
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 From the That’s Interesting, I Think, But Why Exactly Do We Need It Dept comes news that the boffins at British Telecom — BT Exact, to be exact — are working on interactive toys that are linked to mobile phones so that SMS communication can be displayed through the toys’ actions. “This enables the texting experience to become more personable and fun”, reports The Register, who could well be making this up.
So it would work like this: Send a message to the toy — a smiley šŸ™‚ or whatever — and the toy would convey the emotion. For example, if a happy symbol was sent to a toy dog it would come to life and start barking. Alternatively a love message could be sent to a teddy bear, which would trigger its heart to glow and become warm to the touch. Lovely. The researchers, apparently, reckon this would “create a more natural and tangible mode of communicating for adults and children, which will encourage more imaginative text messaging”. Er, OK. Your medication’s ready, Sir.

News: WiFi To Go

By | November 24, 2011
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 Now you don’t need sniffers and chalk anymore. The Premier Online WiFi Location Directory, launched a free searchable database today, featuring over 8,900 WiFi HotSpot locations representing 136 Network Providers worldwide. 
 
 
Of course one person’s ‘worldwide’ is another person’s ‘Hey! Why d’ya leave out my country? Not WiFi-ey enough for ya?’. I couldn’t find anything in Singapore, only one place was listed in Thailand and the Philippines threw up a ‘records not found!!!’ [sic] message. Sadly, this kind of thing is a mug’s game: Getting an uptodate list and keeping it uptodate with something like WiFi is a thankless, neverending task.