Tweet Clouds allow you to put in your Twitter name (or anyone else's I suppose) and get a tag cloud back. Alternatively create a word tag from free text. Mine is below:
Tweet Clouds via kwout
Sad to say I seem to spend most of my time talking about search, Google, engines, web and so on rather than having any sort of life at all!
I've updated my listing of Storage and Backup resources. It's a listing of over 60 resources, with a pen picture for each. If you need to keep backups of your data, it may be worth exploring some of these utilities. Some are free, others commercial. If you want to store data, there are a lot of utilities that will give you free space, in some cases quite substantial.
Splashup is worth taking a look at if you're looking for a graphics package. Of course, it doesn't do everything that PS2 does, but it's not bad, and of course it's free, which provides something of an attraction in its own right.
Wikipedia Cleared in French Defamation Case - New York Times. A French judge has dismissed a defamation
and privacy case against Wikipedia after ruling the free online
encyclopedia was not responsible for information introduced
onto its Web site. "Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of
information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their
illicit nature," Binoche said in his written ruling released at
the Paris civil law court earlier this week.
Link: The ad generator. "Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly." This is worth spending some time looking at, since it sometimes gets some fantastic words/images together. They do race by though, so if you want something, be ready to try and grab it there and then - I'm not sure if you'll ever see it again.
Badged.net - Add your favorite social networking badges to your blog or web site. This is very nice - you can use this resource to make it easy for people to add a page or blog entry or what have you to any of 46 social bookmarking systems. Simply enter the page title and URL, choose your badges, and then cut and paste the code.
I wrote a while ago about BYOMS - Build your own mobile search, which allowed you to create 'buddies' on AIM so that you could search various sites by IM. BYOMS was created by a company called Korozu, but both websites are down and not responding. I'm guessing they're dead, but it's slightly surprising that there isn't any kind of message on either site, or emails to users. Ah well.... such is the Internet I guess.
In common with lots of other internet observers I'm always talking about the new stuff that comes out, and how it's going to make a difference to what we do on a daily basis, and how it's the best thing since whenever. And that's usually all that you hear. So I thought that, for once, I'd talk about a few of the things that I've stopped using and why.
NowPublic. I wrote about that a while ago. You could use it to create blog entries, have other people add to them and so on and such like. Great except for 2 things. Firstly, while it would add to my TypePad blog without any problem at all I couldn't assign categories, which meant that I had to go back in and do it by hand. Secondly it created 2 entries for some reason, which meant that I had to also delete one. Sorry - life just isn't long enough for that amount of annoyance. Status: Gone!
claimID is a resource that you could use to track, classify, annotate, pritize and lord alone knows what with your identity. My understanding (which could be wrong of course) was that it was supposed to get a nice high ranking with search engines so that if anyone did a search for me, this would pop up and I could use it to provide lots of useful information about me. Well, I looked thru the first 50 results in Google, and couldn't find any claimID links. Waste of my time. Status: Gone!
Squidoo is the real surprise here. I do have a bunch of lenses over there on a variety of different things, and it's really easy to add to them. I'd have liked to see a really easy link checker to see if stuff was still up and running, but that's trivial - I can get that anywhere. I wasn't fussed about making money (which is a good job because I think I've made less than a dollar so far), so that's not the problem. The Squidoo people are great at keeping me informed about stuff, so that's not it either. I think, when all is said and done, Squidoo is... boring. That's a dreadful admission to make, but it's just not fun. I look at things like Google gadgets, widgets and bunches of stuff like that, and Squidoo just looks really tame by comparision. I'll continue to use the lenses, because they are useful, but it's really not quite what I was hoping it would be. Status: not quite gone, but on the back boiler.
LinkedIn is one of those early 6 degrees of separation things, and you could in theory use it to make business contacts with people. The trouble is, I have this collection of people that I'm linked to - I don't have the first damn idea who most of them are! You get an invite from someone who sneezed over you 6 months ago in a queue for the loo at a conference and it's kinda rude not to add them isn't it? And there's a bunch of people I'm connected to by other people that I've never heard of either - the whole thing is a mess. And has it ever been useful? No. Will it ever be useful? I really doubt it. I've got stuff up there, but I can't be bothered to do anything with it. Status: Gathering dust.
(Hey... this is really good fun folks - it's like a spring clean. Try it for yourself - take 5 minutes to look at the junk, especially the stuff cluttering your toolbar, and get rid of it!)
Blinklist is another thing that I tried. Delicious kinda took over however. Nothing wrong with it, just... bleugh. How many of these things can a fellow use at once? Status: Lost out to Delicious.
Vox is a blogging resource and I've written exactly one post to it. I haven't added any more because I don't have the time. They haven't given me a quick post option as far as I can see. I have one for Typepad, but not for this. I'm sorry, but I'm not about to faff around logging in to post something - I want to do it there and then from wherever I am. What a minor error they've made, but how important! They've missed one of the absolute basics... I want my time saved, not wasted. And they're wasting it. Status: Forgotten.
RIght, that'll do for now. It was great fun as well - try it yourself! What things have you given up using and why? Leave a comment...
Link: BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft's browser gets upgraded. No big surprise here, and hardly worth mentioning since everyone and their dog is going to know about this. I'm not going to go and get it myself since I'm more than happy with what Firefox is doing, and besides, I'll get it as an automatic update to XP sometime in November.
New features include tabbed browsing (actually that's not new, since they had a work around of that in IE6 which I used), the ability to search the net directly (yawn) and an anti-fraud system. Importantly MS isn't defining what the default search engine should be, which is a good thing of course.
If you can't wait however, you can get it from the download page.
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