Brokekid.net

I’ve been working on this video for the past few days. Check it out.

Yahoo Pipes

Pipes is a web service that allows users to easily build web-based applications from aggregated web feeds, web pages and other sources of content. The drag-and-drop user interface makes it dead simple to quickly create useful applications from various data sources.

Some examples below:

Content Keyword RSS
This pipe will search news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News, compare content to remove duplicates and output a unique RSS feed full of content related to your keywords.

YouTube tags to RSS
Be alerted when videos on Youtube are tagged with specific keywords that you may be interested in watching.

Social Media Firehose
This is a big, fat, wide-reaching net of social media searches to alert you every time your brand or product is mentioned by anybody on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.

Bestselling Books
Keep up with the Amazons bestselling booklist. This Yahoo Pipe creation is updated hourly to include the most popular books on Amazon.

GeoAnotated Reuters News
Uses the geonames.org RSS-to-geoRSS webservice to add location information to Reuters newsfeed. The result is displayed using the Yahoo!Maps AJAX API

Nonprofits will find the service beneficial for augmenting their own data, with Pipes geo-location mashups, buzz monitoring tools and data analysis. To get started, take a look at this simple tutorial -

Dapper is a similar service, based in Tel Aviv, that also makes it easy to reuse content from any web site.

Yahoo! Pipes

Google Gears

Gears “is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser.” With Google Gears, you can -

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

I use Gears to run GReader offline, to check Remember the Milk and more recently, I’m able to to use Google Docs when disconnected.

Gears is exploring implementing other uses as well:

• Multiple File Upload: Using the File System API, Chris demonstrated a multiple file upload experience.
• Resumable File Upload: He then showed a YouTube mockup that showed uploading multiple files, seeing their status, and after a connection died showing how the file resumes and doesn’t start from 0% All using a ResumableRequest that sat on top of the Blog API and HttpRequest
• Find nearby stuff! A Google I/O demo searched for beer, resulting in local places around the Moscone Center. This example used the Geolocation API which uses GPS, Wifi IDs, Cell IDs, and IP address to work out where you are

Google Gears

The third death of someone I knew and trusted in as many months.

http://www.daily-jeff.com/news/article/3861132?page=0

ISO50 Obama Print Out

Fuck you Hillary Clinton.

TheCommon.org

The Common is sort of like a dating site aimed at non-profits, community organizations and philanthropically minded folks. They connect these groups by matching the needs of one to the abilities of the other. The idea is akin to time banking thrown on top of an online social network.

So how does it work? I signed up for an account as the administrator for a non-profit that I help run. My nonprofit was added as a “Community” from which I was able to invite people that I knew shared a common interest nurturing its development.

As the administrator I was enouraged to post the collective “Abilities” of my “Community.” From mentoring to web design to mechanics, you’re only limited to what your community can provide. Then I was asked to post the “Needs” of my “Community.”

If an organization has an “Ability” that fits your “Need,” you can choose to “Blend.” “Blending” will help address your need while bringing like-minded people together.

Individuals can post “Initiatives,” which are “jobs that are bigger than just one need. They encompass lots of needs that are related in some way. An initiative organizes needs under one umbrella. Facilitators are the only users who can create initiatives.”

For now, the service is little more than a “feature,” not quite a “destination” site, though the idea is promising when you add the power of Open Social, time and location aware mobile platforms and other online tools, to quickly organize and promote the sorts of projects The Common is trying to nurture.

http://www.thecommon.org