Aaron Koblin – Work some very cool visualisations of data–and surprising sources, including 8000 people drawing sheep for two cents on Mechanical Turk. Go figure (tags: web visualization interaction inspiration dataviz map) Yahoo! Glue – Web Search interesting multiple search and virtual page creation tool from Yahoo–but available only via the Indian domain, apparently (tags:… Read More »
I’m nearly always disappointed when news comes out that one of the big four (Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!) buy out a company I like. Nothing is ever the same again; usually the product just disappears into the ether. Is Jaiku, the Twitter-like presence tool bought by Google a few months… Read More »
A few weeks back I wrote in WSJ.com about Bezurk.com, a great travel website that’s on a par, if not better, than Kayak, Sidestep, Zuji and Yahoo! FareChase. Here’s what I wrote: What I like about Bezurk’s site is that it follows what I think are the best unwritten rules of Web 2.0, the new,… Read More »
Whatever useful stuff the good guys come up with, the bad guys ain’t far behind. A few months back I wrote about researchers at Carnegie Mellon coming up with a way to use CAPTCHA tools to help decipher words in text by the Internet Archive. The basic idea is that the effort to prevent spammers… Read More »
This is an edited version of my weekly column for Loose Wire Service, a service providing print publications with technology writing designed for the general reader. Email me if you’re interested in learning more. Sometimes it takes something like an earthquake to realize that you’re vulnerable. Once the ground stops shaking and you’ve begun to… Read More »