Each year, people around the world spend billions of hours playing computer games. What if all this time and energy could be channeled into useful work? What if people playing computer games could, without consciously doing so, simultaneously solve large-scale problems?
GWAP is Luis van Ahn's answer [PDF, HTML cache] to these questions, a collection of easy and engaging games that make computers smarter.
posted on May 27, 2008 - View this thread

Brand Tags Tag a brand/logo and see what others have tagged it. Because "whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is", depending on what your meaning of is is, I guess. Or play the reverse tag game and identify brands by their tags. And now, there's Celeb Tags! This will not wendell.
posted on May 11, 2008 - View this thread

Photosynth. Blaise Aguera y Arcas (second one down) does a live demo (with some subtle humor) of the product we've discussed previously. Via the wonderful Ted (mentioned a few times).
posted on Jun 6, 2007 - View this thread

Remember Third Voice, the controversial browser plug-in that let you add public notes to any website? Enough webmasters complained and it was shut down in 2001, after only two years in operation. Maybe attitudes have changed, because the folks at Trailfire are trying this idea again. Available for Firefox or IE.
posted on Nov 14, 2006 - View this thread

As a public service, tagged mapping can be used for much more than finding pizza parlors and Craigslist rental entries. Here it gets used to plot criminal activity, like bike thefts and other crimes in West Philadelphia and the larger Philadelphia area, as well as Chicago.
posted on Feb 6, 2006 - View this thread

Welcome to Supr.c.ilio.us, the World's First Social Social Tagging Site Tagging Site™. This is the place to come to tag all those other tagging sites. (But...is it Web 2.0 Or Not?)
posted on Oct 7, 2005 - View this thread

Livemarks. Watch Del.icio.us live.
posted on Oct 6, 2005 - View this thread

CiteULike is a site for tagging online academic articles. It lies somewhere in the intersection of del.icio.us, CiteSeer, and EndNote. When you tag an online article, you can add your own metadata, develop your own collection, and share other people's collections. You can also export your collection to BibTex or EndNote. While you can't access articles that you or your institution do not subscribe too, there seems to be a fair amount of CiteSeer stuff in there, for instance in relation to collaborative filtering. There are also some groups, such as The Philosophy of Information.
posted on Feb 24, 2005 - View this thread

Rebirth of the Semantic Web. On the heels of the Technorati taggregator, the Oddiophile bookmarklet, the tag search (new today!) and much ensuing buzz, Jeff Jarvis brings up people tagging. This concept drove Friendster and FOAF, both of which petered out. But with Technorati's elegant synthesis of photo, link, and post tagging, the web may once again tap into networked individualism.
posted on Jan 17, 2005 - View this thread

Recently we've all been thinking about flat (or better, faceted) hierarchy web apps that organize email, photos, bookmarks, and general knowledge. The common threads are metadata (tags, categories, labels) that enrich relationships within and hence searchability of large collections. But besides marketroid hype (buzzwords, snark) and a computer that plays Twenty Questions what else can we do and study using faceted data structures: searchable culture references in The Simpsons, library science, computer filesystems, A.I. development, models for human memory and cognition?
posted on Dec 5, 2004 - View this thread

RFID to track students in Spring, Texas... the information is fed automatically by wireless phone to the police and school administrators. That's right: constant and continual monitoring of all the schoolkids in the district by the local police department.
posted on Nov 17, 2004 - View this thread

The Army are tagging honey bees to find UXBs. Now technology lets you silently locate mobile phones in the UK. Now you don't need to be 007 or Austin Powers to track someone. Is tagging offenders the soft option? How could someone already be watching you?
posted on Sep 30, 2004 - View this thread

From the creators of the OpenDirectory Project comes their new effort: a classifying news crawler : Topix.net. They've got some cool text processing that allows them to classify each story in terms of content and geographic location. Very cool ideas in agreggation!
posted on Jan 13, 2004 - View this thread

VandalSquad Always fancied yourself as a "Writer" but don't want to get covered in paint or arrested? This download allows you to deface a train wagon to your hearts content and then upload it to a gallery. Not the real thing but as close as most of us will ever get...
posted on Mar 28, 2003 - View this thread

Remember Bullet Time? Remember how it got damn annoying from overuse really quickly? When was the last time you saw something neat done with it?
Take a look at Lumasol.
posted on Sep 12, 2002 - View this thread

Blogdex at media.mit.edu (The link may not work, I've gotten through twice now, both times between noon and 4pm PST, but every other time I've tried I've gotten server not available errors.)Does anyone know what this is? The times I got through it looked like an interesting cross tabulation of what is being covered in the web log world, like a handy index for people looking for entries on a certain topic. It was not complete looking when I got in last, the site mostly consisted of the front, and an "about" section, but the front page did have a list of the top ten links being talked about on currently indexed blogs. I found the link in my referer log.
posted on Jul 21, 2001 - View this thread