Del.icio.us

  • I by no means am I an expert on processing payments online and can’t speak intelligently on the subject, but Amazon’s new Flexible Payment Service has me excited as a consumer. There are alot of web services and applications online that I just don’t use because I can’t justify spending a fixed rate every month for the amount of activity that I would actually create. There are alot of services, right off the bat I can think of Basecamp and Blinksale that I would rather pay on a per usage basis. The question now is, are these companies going to change the way they charge the members using their service? I would probably bet that they won’t immediately, until enough of their user base begins to demand it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the coming few months with subscription based services and how they react to this new payment processing capability.
  • Not sure if anyone has been checking this site or not or wondering what happened to my feeds, but this site was temporarily in the domain graveyard. What happened was, while I was in Haiti, this domain expired and I forgot to have the settings on my registrar set to “auto renew”, things became very confusing when I discovered that my domain registrar Registerfly had transferred all of their domains to another company, eNom. eNom was contacted, the situation was explained and long story short the domain was re-registered. I have a few updates on work and life that I’ll be posting to the site hopefully sooner than later.
  • Alot of people complain about projects like Google’s Book Search, making silly claims that people are going to stop reading or buying books, etc. but the fact of the matter is as more and more people get online there is a serious danger of the word on print being left behind. If Google isn’t going to scan books and put them online for people to consume, who is? You might have some small projects pop up here and there, but in my opinion I would rather have a company with vast resources like Google take on this task. Footnote is another great endeavor, to take millions of original documents, some never before available online and make them accessible to the public. I would concede that there is alot wrong about the web generally, but Footnote is one of the reasons why it’s so great.
  • StoryCorpsIf anyone reading this is a fan of NPR’s Morning Edition, then they are probably familiar with the American Folklife Center’s StoryCorps project. I am consistently touched and inspired by the audio interviews of regular people this project records. That may sound corny, but it’s true, if you’ve never listened to any of the interviews from StoryCorps, I would highly encourage you to visit the site and give a listen to a few of the stories.

  • It’s interesting to see how the command line is re-manifesting itself these days on the web.

    YubNub
    I believe YubNub was one of the earliest web applications to use command line functions. It works in conjunction with Google, allowing you to input combinations of words to either execute commands, you can even create new commands.

    AIM Bots
    With AIM bots you can retrieve information by writing conversational type lines of text.

    Google Advanced Search & Operators
    Google enables you to mix and add certain characters into their search field to perform specific functions.

    Stikkit
    Stikkit is a new application that I posted about recently. It uses keywords to categorize and classify the notes you write.

    Quicksilver
    Any mac geek is familiar with Quicksilver. It would be wrong to label this application as just a launcher because it really does so much more.

    Twitter
    Twitter uses certainkeywords in what they call “lingo” to perform specific commands.

  • Stikkit I have to admit that I’m getting a little over web apps these days, there are just too many popping up to keep up with and so when I saw posts about Stikkit appear in my feed reader this morning I didn’t pay much attention. As I saw the name appear across many of the feeds that I read I decided to check it out out of sheer curiousity and I’m glad I did. If you want to read more in depth reviews on Stikkit you can go here I just want to add that Stikkit’s UI is beautiful. As a designer, the first thing I look for when playing with a new web application is the design and Stikkit doesn’t disappoint. It really does say a lot when you see a site or application that has been designed beautifully, it tells you that the people running the show actually care and that’s big in my opinion, it also just makes the whole experience of using the application fun and enjoyable. Stikkit is way more than a simple notepad for the web, it combines bookmarks, notes, to-do’s and calendar all in one. Now I currently use a variety of services for all of these funcitions, but Stikkit is the first “all-in-one” application I would actually consider using full time if they continue to develop the product. I’ve always really wanted this type of “all-in-one” type service but past attempts that I’ve used just really didn’t execute things properly. Definetly check this application out.