Archive for the 'Information Overload' Category
Twine going for semantic connections rather than social. Clive Thompson from Wired explains.
Twine applies a set of natural-language and semantic tools to any text you feed it — Web page, Word document, email — to determine the key content. It’s omnivorous: You can even email it all your bookmarks, and it’ll quietly venture online, examine the content of each link, and file the information away in your Twine account…
I’ve experienced this myself. My Facebook page attracts my friends, with whom I share social bonds. Meanwhile, my science blog attracts complete strangers, with whom I share a common interest in a topic — like a scientific study I’ve blogged about. It’s a semantic relationship, based on shared meaning. So those strangers tend to tell me things — and point me to links — that are more useful than the social stuff on my Facebook page. Information trumps friendship…Read More
Give Away Your Books and Get Free Ones
De-clutter your shelves. Use BookMooch to get rid of old books that you are never going to read again. Gain points and then use your points to ‘buy’ free books. Or just give your points away to charities, so they can get free books.
WellSphere - local health and wellness resources, classes and activities, videos, news announcements, blogs, nutritionists offering advice, nearby fitness clubs, dance studios and support groups. The company hosts a public website for consumers at http://www.wellsphere.com and creates proprietary communities (such as BeWell@Stanford) for large organizations seeking to improve the health and well being of their members and reduce their healthcare costs.
Search video archives of the Congressional Record. Metavid, a tool created by Michael Dale and Abram Stern of UC Santa Cruz’s new Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) graduate program, uses public domain video feed to create video archives. The tool is fully indexed so that users can listen to keywords in context. It is also searchable by speaker.
If you are new to a city and don’t know your way around, try using Ask’s Walking Directions. Walking from a subway stop to a local musuem can be a lot less stressful if you know how to get there by foot.
Retail Me Not will save you time and money by providing instant access to store promotion codes for more than 13,000 stores and 70,000 coupon codes. How’s that for useful!
The Firefox browser has many useful extensions that are easily downloaded from the Firefox website [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/]. If you find yourself squinting at the monitor, you may want to try the No Squint add-on. No Squint allows users to set a default zoom level for a website and remembers this level even after you leave the site and go back and visit it again another day. This is a nice feature, because it eliminates the need to adjust the text size of websites that you visit frequently. Save time as well your eyesite!
Twittering can be a faster way to get help than sending an email to a list serv. The Twitter service is a form of micro-blogging that allows users to write brief text updates either to be viewed by anyone or by a group on contacts. Users receive messages either by cell phone, instant message software or a web-based program. The immediacy of the messages helps build the community. The downside is that texting can cost money with the phone carrier. Get a flat rate with your phone carrier to mitigate this.
Imagine getting an email from yourself two years in the future. Just one of the many uses for the Time Machiner. Choose the subject, the email of the person and the time it will be sent. Maybe you can set up Happy Birthday emails for the year. Or send an email to yourself reminding you to call your mother on her birthday.
Sign up for classes that are worth taking. Know just what you are getting in a professor from Ratemyprofessors, a listing of collegiate professor ratings, with more than 6.8 million student-generated ratings of over 1 million professors. This is useful aide for students planning their class schedules. The site rates current and past professors on attributes such as helpfulness and clarity.