randomosity

Check out Aid­eRSS — an excit­ing new tool to help man­age inform­a­tion over­load. It takes your exist­ing RSS feeds, ranks posts and returns a list weighted by per­ceived qual­ity.
Won­der­ful paradigm shift­ing tech­no­lo­gies are sup­posed to stream­line our lives and allow us to rise to new cre­at­ive heights. The prom­ise of the paper­less office was to provide elec­tronic com­mu­nic­a­tions to free us from dis­trac­tions and the minu­tiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile tech­no­lo­gies were to unchain us from the phys­ical offices to let us quickly com­plete neces­sary tasks while sim­ul­tan­eously par­ti­cip­at­ing in those past­times that we want to. You could ‘seal the deal’ while watch­ing your son’s soc­cer game for example. But, for all the prom­ise, we now deal with more inform­a­tion and have to find ways to cope with greater engage­ment in more tasks than we have ever faced.
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Web2.0 seems to be a lot about invite-only betas. We hear about them through a vari­ety of media and we patiently wait and often sal­iv­ate. We sign up to receive invites or even just sign up to be noti­fied when a ser­vice becomes more mature. Invites cre­ate a buzz and cer­tainly the whole GMail launch strategy made an art out of this mar­ket­ing strategy. I will admit to being a vic­tim of much mar­ket­ing. I like my toys. There’s a new ser­vice that I stumbled across the other day that allows you to ask for, receive and then share invites to these sac­red sites: Mash­able Invites.
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I am a big fan of wikis for note-taking, research mater­ial col­la­tion and organ­iz­a­tion. There are a wide vari­ety of easy to use, free wiki ser­vices online and an increas­ing num­ber of small foot­print, simple stan­dalone wikis. I prob­ably should have blogged about this earlier and shared some of my exper­i­ences, but an excel­lent art­icle by Dustin Wax at lifehack.org does a superb job of explain­ing the rationale and gives some great how to tips.
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Tan­gler offers an innov­at­ive approach to open test­ing of online products. A com­bin­a­tion of instant mes­saging and real-time for­ums, Tan­gler provides a repos­it­ory of join­able dis­cus­sions and archives dis­cus­sions for ref­er­ence. The site seems geared towards test­ing of new products in an inter­act­ive envir­on­ment, but noth­ing pre­cludes dis­cus­sion around any topic from the eso­teric to the deeply philo­soph­ical. The inter­face allows for con­veni­ent mix-media embed­ding of objects and a pop-up wid­get to allow for you to be noti­fied of activ­ity in the groups you par­ti­cip­ate in.
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This is one thought­ful piece of webart…if we are con­sid­er­ing beau­ti­ful evid­ence…this short video by Michael Wesch gets it very right. Its abso­lutely bril­liant. I am sure its going to start to get some atten­tion over the next few days. It is per­haps best paired with this won­der­fully cre­at­ive , but a little more fanci­ful, web2.0 video that won a First Post Award Com­pet­i­tion a few months back. Wesch’s video gives you a bril­liantly logical pro­gres­sion through the latest buzzwords actu­ally using tech­no­lo­gies them­selves to demon­strate them­selves. What bet­ter place to throw it up for com­ment than YouTube?

A few weeks ago I blogged about Swivel, a cool place for kids to play with data and com­ment on oth­ers data­sets and visu­al­isa­tions. Today Geof­frey blogged about an IBM Alphaworks site that takes this concept in a dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion.

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We had a short spate of con­ver­sa­tion at the TAPoR meet­ing on forms of dis­ag­greg­a­tion (and I guess corol­lor­ar­ily demand aggreg­a­tion) when look­ing at online swap/consolidation sites. I cam across a fur­ther swap site this morn­ing that illus­trated this concept…and is one more example of the way in which inter­net col­lect­iv­iz­a­tion is chan­ging nor­mal modes of eco­nomic exchange through con­trac­tual inter­me­di­ation and intro­du­cing another layer of ren­tier beha­viour. Cell­Swap­per, is a P2P exchange that con­nects people want­ing to get out of long term cell phone plans with those look­ing to pick up a shorter term plan without the costs of activ­a­tion of of can­cel­la­tion. That is they are trad­ing on that thin layer of admin­is­trat­ive costs that car­ri­ers demand. The site is unfor­tu­nately for me only avail­able to the US, but they are prom­ising broader geo­graphic cov­er­age shorty. A fur­ther form of aggreg­a­tion is demon­strated by the microlend­ing sites such as the two that I men­tioned in an earlier post, Zopa and Prosper.

Another inter­est­ing list I came across dur­ing the sea­son of list­ing. This one comes from a bit of a site of paranoia…but maybe we should be afraid :-0. On the upside, this is a list of 13 Easy Ways to Safe­guard Your Pri­vacy in 2007 which seem like some very prudent steps. Although I don’t advoc­ate run­ning scream­ing in the streets, these seem to be some con­crete simple things one can be aware of or prac­tise to safe­guard one’s iden­tity. Its real and after I had those 15 laptops shipped to my Que­bec address a few years back, am cer­tainly more on the watch. Things such as avoid­ing the use of your middle ini­tial is some­thing that I wouldn’t have thought of but you know…it makes some sense.

It’s that time of the year when we are bom­barded with these, and like all of us I am try­ing to develop the appro­pri­ate strategies for win­now­ing out the chaff. The list of Web 2.0 Com­pan­ies I Couldn’t Live Without is one that kept my interest. Michael Arring­ton has com­piled an intriguing list of service-based com­pan­ies that you may or may not have tried before. Some such as blue dot are provid­ing a new spin on exist­ing ser­vices, in this case the social book­mark­ing model of del.icio.us.
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