87 Cool Things
posted by mattoxic on Oct 17, 2009 - 23 comments

Google began inviting volunteers to a public preview test of their new Wave web-based collaborative email and document communications platform yesterday, which enables users to "communicate and work together in real time." Initial reviews this past May seemed positive. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by zarq on Oct 1, 2009 - 75 comments

NPR Backstory is an automated Twitter feed providing helpful links to news items from the past 14 years that might be relevant to current events. For example, when masses of people started googling medical information after a news item about 200,000 patients' medical histories being accidentally exposed, NPRbackstory linked to an April 2008 analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of storing patient records online. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee on May 14, 2009 - 7 comments

Tag! You're It! The Brooklyn Museum is inviting its user community to tag its online collection.
posted by Miko on May 1, 2009 - 26 comments

Web Tech Guy and Angry [Museum] Staff Person. A very funny animation for the museums workers and librarians subset of Mefites. From Michael Edson at Smithsonian 2.0.
posted by LarryC on Mar 9, 2009 - 47 comments

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there's no activists, it doesn't work well.
Some interesting commentary from an early employee of Tripod. Systems designed for the sharing of cute cats and other banal user-generated content will inevitably attract political activists, provided they work well enough.
posted by CrunchyFrog on Feb 28, 2009 - 18 comments

York University is no stranger to strikes (even breaking its own length record), and the latest is shaping up much like the previous - TA & Lecturers' union on the picket line, admin in the ugly concrete buildings, and undergrads looking cold and confused all around (YT). But since the last strike in 2001, a few things have changed. No, not the issues (same as always - living wages for TAs, job security for lecturers) or the effect (disruption of undergrad education) - but last time there were few discussion forums, no facebook groups or videos by the local newspaper, and definitely no (somewhat obvious, but still mildly entertaining) Apple ad parodies. [more inside]
posted by jb on Dec 18, 2008 - 15 comments

Koblo, a company from Denmark that makes virtual synthesizers, seeks to reinvigorate it's name with a mash-up of social networking, distributed music production and interactive music distribution. [more inside]
posted by Pecinpah on Oct 17, 2008 - 14 comments

Tired of the current web? Have all the cool domain names already been registered? The second web bills itself as geocities 2.0 with a web browser-esque interface stuck on top of it "a completely new World Wide Web. A new Web Browser, a new domain name system and completely new websites."
posted by slater on Sep 30, 2008 - 46 comments

iHitch is to hitchhiking that CouchSurfing is to hotels. iHitch is just an idea, but key technologies (GPS phones, GPS in cars, Web2.0) are coming available in critical mass that could transform 'hitchhiking' into a mainstream, safe, reliable and cheap form of transportation. Some metro area carpool websites have already successfully started down this road.
posted by stbalbach on Aug 14, 2008 - 21 comments

Anthropologists in the digital domain tend to be a day late and a dollar short as far as us early adopters are concerned, but Michael Wesch managed to capture the popular imagination with his YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us. He recently gave a presentation to the Library of Congress titled An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube in which he talks about the best of the web (not to be confused with The Best of The Web.)
posted by PeterMcDermott on Aug 4, 2008 - 29 comments

So Open it Hurts. Web 2.0 visionaries Tara Hunt and Chris Messina blogged and twittered about their romance to all of geekdom as if it were one of their utopian open-source projects. Sharing their breakup has been a lot harder. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Jul 29, 2008 - 53 comments

Google is testing a Digg-like social interface to Google Search results, Techcrunch has an early preview video. This is bad news for Jimy Wales's Wikia since this is what they have been trying to build. Perhaps related it looks like Google is buying Digg.
posted by stbalbach on Jul 23, 2008 - 59 comments

Please turn off the lights. The founders of flickr are joining the executives leaving Yahoo. Caterine Fake left Friday; Stewart Butterfield will leave July 12th.
posted by timeistight on Jun 18, 2008 - 61 comments

Video on Flickr! Paying members of the popular community photo sharing website are now able to upload videos up to 90 seconds in length or 150MB in size. At first critical of the length limitation, some think it's a good decision. Check out the FAQ for details on what is/isn't accepted and why, and watch some videos in the first video group pool.
posted by patr1ck on Apr 8, 2008 - 67 comments

Revenge of the Experts. The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals. "Fueling this is advertising revenue, it is easier to woo advertisers with the promise of controlled content than with hit-and-miss blog blather. 'Nobody wants to advertise next to crap' ".
posted by stbalbach on Mar 10, 2008 - 25 comments

Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles.
posted by dhammond on Feb 23, 2008 - 19 comments

Gardeners unite! Folia is a new website for gardeners to organize, document and share their adventures. And now you too can obsess about your seed saving and hardiness zones. [more inside]
posted by Stewriffic on Feb 7, 2008 - 7 comments

Opencongress.org is a website for keeping track of the U.S. Congress. (previously) But, now it also a social network. So, sign-up and see what your favourite Senator has been doing, track bills and, follow important issues. Then, share that information with your friends or write about it on your blog.
posted by geos on Feb 4, 2008 - 20 comments

The murky demimonde of Amazon's Top Reviewers. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon's customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: "an intelligent and articulate conversation ... conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits..."
posted by farishta on Jan 28, 2008 - 44 comments

Overstream: Add Your Thoughts to Video Have you ever wanted to customize an online video by adding your own comments or subtitles in any language, or wanted to send a custom video postcard?
posted by psmealey on Jan 15, 2008 - 7 comments

It's round robin, user generated, choose-your-own-adventure style, web 2.0 fiction. My productivity is now permanently crippled. The cbc gives some background, if you care about that sort of thing.
posted by mock on Jan 9, 2008 - 9 comments

Twatter - A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: Who are you doing?
posted by chrismear on May 14, 2007 - 33 comments

Doxory. Often in life we are faced with a choice of 2.0 possible courses of action. Should I do X or Y? Now you can harness the wisdom of the web crowds to resolve those painful dilemmas for you!
posted by chrismear on Mar 18, 2007 - 27 comments

FanNation | The Republic of Sport It was bound to happen. A fully-featured social networking site for Sport Fans, includes, ability to track community events on a regional basis, hot topic tracking, blogging capability, player tracking, and ability to gather articles and stories from favorite news sources. Overall, a nice set of functionality, even if at launch, it is only focused on US Sports. Our beloved SpoFi probably doesn't have much to worry about until this site builds a following, but it does seem to have something new to offer sports fanatics.
posted by psmealey on Mar 3, 2007 - 12 comments

Mac users have the excellent Omnigraffle, Windows users the ubiquitous Visio. Now there's an AJAX diagramming tool called Gliffy. What's next in the Office suite for AJAXification?
posted by dmd on Jun 29, 2006 - 34 comments