Site maps ‘Universe’ through constellation of news |
Jonathan Harris wants to show people a picture of their universe through the news. An artist and storyteller, Harris has created a graphical depiction of the world from a conglomeration of daily new headlines on the Web. His interactive Web site, called Universe, launched Tuesday.
With the tool, people can see a visual image of events, organizations, individuals or concepts that dominate the news on any given day, week or recent year. More importantly, it shows the relationship of these news items, or “stars” in the galaxy, to each other.
Source: Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com, March 13, 2007
Solving the phone number blues
A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, nips all of these problems right in the bud. It is a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.
Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number[...]. From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uni-number, all of your phones ring simultaneously.
Source: David Pogue, The New York Times, via the International Herald Tribune, March 15, 2007
Wired News, Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net invite you to join an open-ended experiment in distributed journalism. Project leader Jay Rosen explains all.
Source: Jay Rosen, Wired News, March 14, 2007
Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg - sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service. [TechCrunch looks at the strengths and the weaknesses of several Digg competitors.]
Source: Nick Gonzalez, TechCrunch, March 16, 2007
New technology enables mouse-free Web surfing
Imagine surfing the Internet using only your eyes and a keyboard. With the new Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design project (GUIDe), computer users can now navigate software using eye-tracking technology instead of a mouse. Computer science doctoral student Manu Kumar created the software that enables every day computer users to use eye-tracking technology. His applications will allow users to navigate the Internet, scroll through text documents and type passwords — all without the use of a mouse or track pad.
Source: Kelsey Mesher, The Stanford Daily, March 14, 2007
This 52-inch screen goes on your head
Companies have tinkered with the concept of wearable monitors for years. This summer, Santa Monica-based Headplay is going to see if the public wants to buy them. In June, Headplay will begin selling its Personal Cinema System (PCS), a portable movie viewer whose principal component is a sun visor that sports a monitor under the brim for close, personal viewing.
Source: Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com, March 16, 2007
Norwegians empower the camera mobile
Norwegian mobile phone specialist, Plutolife, is claiming massive success for its cameraphone application — Mobimodels. It’s currently available to 74 per cent of Scandinavian mobile phone users just eight months after launching. The product is simplicity itself. Participants use either picture messaging (MMS) or WAP to upload their own photos, rate other people’s photos and attempt to win prizes. They can also forward their favourite photos to friends and relatives.
Source: Tony Dennis, The Inquirer, March 17, 2007
Twitter is an interesting and practical real-time messaging system for groups and friends. It’s just not completely obvious how to get into it. So, here’s a quick newbie’s guide to this new platform. This guide doesn’t cover every feature of Twitter, but it should help to get you started.
Source: Rafe Needleman, Webware blog, CNET News.com, March 15, 2007
