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Archive for February, 2006

Metropolis For Download

26 Feb 2006

Last year in November ‘M‘ has been released, now it’s Fritz Lang’s other work of art, the vintage silent movie ‘Metropolis‘ from 1927. The link goes to the ipod version, other formats are available at PublicDomain.

It is the future, and humans are divided into two groups: the thinkers, who make plans (but don’t know how anything works), and the workers, who achieve goals (but don’t have the vision). Completely separate, neither group is complete, but together they make a whole. One man from the “thinkers” dares visit the underground where the workers toil, and is astonished by what he sees…

There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.

Metropolis

More posters on IMDB
Metropolis on Wikipedia

via [WMMNA]

 
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Posted in Geek

 

Guerrilla For Public Restrooms

26 Feb 2006

Apparently New York is in need of some public restrooms. The Privy Council, a group of New Yorkers who see the need for a working system of public toilets for thier otherwise great city, have started a campaign to urge all New York City residents to contact their city council people and suggest that they will pass legislation which will result in the creation of a comprehensive, city-wide system of clean, accessible toilets for all. Saatchi & Saatchi takes things just a little further with this brilliant guerrilla street marketing.

Privy Council Cardboard 1

Privy Council Cardboard 2

From Frederik Samuel’s Advertising/Design Goodness:

This guerrilla campaign from Saatchi & Saatchi takes the New York restroom shortage to the streets. Cardboard people were placed around certain locations to highlight the public restroom shortage in New York.

On the website, they are urging all New York City residents to contact their city council people and suggest that they will pass legislation which will result in the creation of a comprehensive, city-wide system of clean, accessible toilets for all.

via [Adverbox]

 
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Posted in Advertising, Campaigns, Marketing

 

Coolz0r Stats

24 Feb 2006

Why is a Belgian blogger writing in English?

From America (North & South)
Readers from America

From Europe & Africa
Readers from Europe & Africa

From Asia & Australia
Readers from Asia & Australia

Here’s another stat:

Stats

So now you know why Coolz0r isn’t written in Dutch.

Here’s the webalizer statistic, click to go there.

 
2 Comments

Posted in General

 

Paper About Blog Search

24 Feb 2006

Gary Price posted about a new academic paper that offers a review of weblog searching. The paper will be presented at the 28th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’06) 2006 in April and is titled ‘A Study of Blog Search.’ It was written by Gilad Mishne and Maarten de Rijke from the University of Amsterdam.(13 pages, 287kb, .PDF). Here is the abstract;

We present an analysis of a large blog search engine query log, exploring a number of angles such as query intent, query topics, and user sessions. Our results show that blog searches have different intents than general web searches, suggesting that the primary targets of blog searchers are tracking references to named entities, and locating blogs by theme. In terms of interest areas, blog searchers are, on average, more engaged in technology, entertainment, and politics than web searchers, with a particular interest in current events. The user behavior observed is similar to that in general web search: short sessions with an interest in the first few results only.

Download this paper – via [SearchEngineWatch]

 
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Posted in Blogging, Search

 

3Bubbles Partially Launched

24 Feb 2006

I’ve reported almost two weeks ago something was cooking at 3Bubbles. Yesterday I was on TechCrunch to check something about the Mabber Mobile IM and I saw they had integrated the 3Bubbles function already, so I went to the 3Bubbles website to see what was going on.

3bubbles unites chat and blogs to create real-time conversations in the blogosphere. If you add a link to ‘Live Chat’ in the footer of your post, say next to the comments and trackback function, you’ll enable your readers to interact about that specific post in a pop-up window that shows up when the link is clicked. It displays a chat function, with a very easy-to-join method. It looks like this (example of the Live Chat linked to the post about Mabber on TechCrunch):

3Bubbles Example

I’m still waiting for an invitation to join the beta. The 3Bubbles blog says that those who’ve signed up for the public beta will be hearing from them shortly, so patient as I am, I’ll expect an invite soon.

However, from the looks of what I’m seeing, this isn’t the application I’ve been waiting for, and I’ll explain to you why.
Read the rest of this entry »

 
2 Comments

Posted in 2.0 +, Blogging, Technology, Tools

 

Swicki, The Tagcloud Search

24 Feb 2006

Swicki is a living search engine that can be tailored to your blog, site or community. The setup is very easy to do, it only takes three simple actions and you’re in. First you customize your swicky, then you train it and lastly, you add it to your site.

That looks like this:

You can choose for a ‘narrow’ version too, to fit it in the sidebar of your blog or site, and there’s also a wide version that could be placed at the top or bottom of the page.

A swicki is a natural extension of personal publishing on the web. Just as you can create a webpage, blog, or podcast, now you can publish a community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want!

A swicki shows a buzz cloud of what is hot in your community and makes it easy to find the best content, news and info on the web.

I’m not quite sure about the possibilities this swicki thing has when it comes to a decent site search, but I’ll give it a try. If it makes sense and returns what I want to search for, I’ll probably integrate it.

Get your own swicki, right here.

UPDATE: The swicki search isn’t up to date at all. I hope it’ll change because of its activation on this site, but as for now, it still lists files from the previous blog that have been removed over a month ago… Their cache really needs an update.

 
1 Comment

Posted in 2.0 +, Blogging, Search, Tools

 

The Whirlpool You Need

24 Feb 2006

Whoah! I just want this so bad in my house. This goes on the ‘one day’ wishlist. I’ll be all wrinkled and shrunken, but I’ll take a bath every day. Now if I could just have a waterproof floating keyboard and mouse, I’ll blog straight from this tub !

The La Scala bathtub treats you to the ultimate home theater surround and entertainment system right in the luxury of your own whirlpool bath. With plenty of room for side-by-side bathing, you can nestle in for a long soak and the finest motion picture experience ever imagined. Thoughtful touches, such as a floating remote control and ten fully adjustable jets for the ultimate in head-to-toe relaxation. An ideal complement to your master bathroom.

This is the coolest bathtub I’ve ever seen ! Connect your computer to this multimedia wonderland and you’re off ! Clean-Geeks-R-Us :)

La Scale Bathing Fun

From [A Bathroom Guide] – Hat tip: Ben

 
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Posted in Gadgets & Digital Toys, Technology, Trends

 

Mabber Mobile And Web IM

24 Feb 2006

Mabber is Instant Messaging based on the Jabber/XMPP standard, either web-based and as a mobile application. It can be accessed from any browser, and there’s Safari support coming up too for the Mac lovers. You’ll need a recent mobile phone equipped with Java and some sort of data-plan to run the app on your mobile. An estimated 1 kb of data allows for about 7 messages. That makes it less expensive than SMS.

Mabber Beta

Mix open instant messaging protocol Jabber with mobile phones and you get Mabber, a new product from a team based in Cologne, Germany. The team at Mabber were early adopters of the Jabber protocol and with the lower mobile data charges in their home country decided to develop an application that would allow mobile users to communicate with each other using the protocol, thus save on SMS costs.

Mabber integrates ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo and Jabber in one web browser-based instant messager. After logging in you can transfer the existing contacts from other instant messaging networks (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!) to your account.

There’s a chat history (which can be fully searched later), a grouping function and group chat and context menu’s to bring up the numerous options.

To install the mobile application you go to the site and enter your mobile number, you in return receive an sms with a download link, you follow that, it installs, executes, you enter your username and password and you are online. From that point you are able to access all your IM contacts and communicate with them using a standard mobile keypad.

Take the QuickTour if you need more info.
Try to score an invite via TechCrunch.
(They’ve got 50 invites if you send an email with the subject line mentioned at the bottom of the review post of this service)
Check out Mabber – via [TechCrunch]

 
1 Comment

Posted in 2.0 +, Mobile & VoIP, Social Networks, Technology

 
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