Category Archives: Reviews

Sex+Commerce = What?

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The wacky world of blog networks never ceases to amaze. The inevitable has occurred and a network of sex blogs is being launched. I emailed Madge Wienstein about it to make sure she was privy. But you know what? I don’t think I like the tag line on this network. SugarBank: Sex + Commerce. After watching the PBS show “Sex Slaves” last night it seems all the more inappropriate.

I was disappointed that even PBS documentary neglected almost 100% to address the fact that…“Trafficking of women and children for the sex industry and for labor is prevalent in all regions of the United States. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually to the United States…” From Cia.gov

Now I’m sure that a blog written from the perspective of a sex slave trafficker wouldn’t be accepted into the SugarBank network, and I don’t mean to bait anyone by saying that, but where does the line get drawn by readers, writers, aggregators, etc. in this new web world of easy publishing? (Presumably a blog written from the perspective of some one fighting sex slave trafficking wouldn’t be accepted into the network either – and that’s interesting isn’t it?)

I don’t know how much clarity there is around this and related issues at all. Perhaps at some level it’s a personal question, but there must come a point where it’s not anymore. I’ve subscribed to the SugarBank RSS feed and will be interested to see how it turns out.

Related: Check out this blog The Center for Healthy Sex.

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Pew Study Says the Net Will NOT Ruin Your Life

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Another striking survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project has been released; this one is titled “The Strength of Internet Ties.” The summary reports that,

Rather than conflicting with people’s community ties, we find that the internet fits seamlessly with in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live nearby. Continue reading →

The Mapspace Takes on Podcasts Plus Upgrade Updates All Around

Podcastdirectory.com is a new discovery for me and looks quite good. Via ProgrammableWeb/mashups I discovered that this directory has a feature that the otherwise excellent Podcast Alley and Podcast Pickle don’t appear to offer: a Google Map of podcasters’ locations! Both of these other big directories have good forums and interesting classification systems, but the combination of local connection and visualization offered by PodcastDirecotry.com is really nice.

I like the idea of knowing what podcasts are produced in my area, I don’t want to lose all connection to my bioregion for goodness sake. Other purposes I can imagine using this map for include knowing who’s podcasting in a city you’re going to visit if you want to try and meet them, finding another mulitmedia source for research on a local issue anywhere and finding good promo possibilities for geographically inclined campaigns.

Call me a web-goober, but I had no idea that there were several podcasts produced right here in my home town. I like it.

Related: The very nice google maps tool Community Walk has undergone its much awaited site redesign, performed by IdeaCodes (half of which is Emily Chang of eHub fame.) The site looks great and appears to have many new features.

Furthermore: The awesome RSS to IM service immedi.at has also upgraded its site and it looks great. I wrote about Peter Brown’s tool as the bleeding edge of RSS awhile ago and I stand by that opinion. It’s a great way to either impress or horrify your friends by consistently knowing right away when they add new content to their sites. There’s also lots of important things you could do with this system, of course. I interviewed Brown some time ago as well. I would put immedi.at on my top 5 list of tools I’d tell anybody about who really wanted to leverage the heck out of Web2.0. (ooh, there’s a blog post waiting to happen, huh?)

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Proposed Mashup Presentation

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So next week I’m going to facilitate a discussion over at CPSquare‘s Web 2.0 online conference about mashups. CPSquared is a community of practice about communities of practice.

I’m not going to pretend that mashups are something I know a whole lot about, but degrees of knowledge are relative and I think I’ll be able to show some people some things they hadn’t seen before and inspire them to do some things they might not have done otherwise. That’s the plan anyway.

I wanted to post an outline of my intro here and get some feedback. Plus I imagine there are readers here who would enjoy seeing these resources as well. So let me know what you think:
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Site Mod Rockstars – Who’s Your Favorite?

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This morning I discovered Swedish programmer Johan Sundström’s EcmaNaut Blog and am still marveling at the sheer beauty of what he’s done with it. As if that weren’t enough it’s a Blogger site! Have you made fun of anyone lately for having a blog on Blogspot? Well go check out EcmaNaut and you’ll want to repent. It’s not just the use of several Google Maps to show his home and his most 100 recent visitors on multiple scales that’s impressive. Look all over the site and you’ll be impressed. The text will probably be unreadable to all but the most tech savvy (I had to stretch to get the most basic idea of what’s going on there) but it’s basically about a part of the JavaScript programming language family that Sundström used to modify the site. If you’re technically inclined, it seems very cool. Jon Udell wrote an article about how cool EcmaScript is yesterday on Infoworld.

Also in the Site Mod Rockstar category – check out my buddy Justin Kistner’s MySpace profile. See especially the blog post there on the top of the list “ATTN MySpace: Please Don’t Delete My Account.” He’s got a real interesting discussion there about how and why he’s changing the MySpace profile code, how he’d like to work with them on it, and how he doesn’t want to end up like his inspiration Tim Benziger. Benzinger’s MySpace account was shut down after he modified the heck out of the code.

Anyone else have sites in mind from code mod rockstars?

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GMail’s AJAX Spell Check Evolves Further

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Disclaimer: I do not love Google. I may use its websearch all the time, it’s blog search too, its news and image search, it’s maps – etc. but I am not in love with it. There are so many alternatives. See, for example, Jux2, Clusty and Feedster. Heck, MSN Search gets great results and offers RSS feeds for every web search. Beat that! Well, a great spell checker is pretty cool.

Is it just me, or is the GMail spell checker not only one of the best things online but also built with AJAX? And it appears to have just been updated to become way more functional. Like in the last 10 minutes it was updated!

That’s rad. I already use it as my default spell checker for all that blog software out there that doesn’t have spell checking built in. Now it’s even groovier. Check it out, or if you don’t have a GMail account and would like to try one of the best email services available – send me an email and I’ll send you an invite.

Update: I wrote this late last night, and this morning it appears that the spell checker is back to its previous version. The new version allowed you to continue typing in your email after clicking “spell check” – instead of freezing everything in blue like it does now. There were a number of other small, additional features. Knowing Google’s habit of throwing up new services and then taking them down, I should have grabbed a screen shot. It was cool though.

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