I continue to love article tools. We've evolved beyond simple "Email this Article" and "Printer Friendly Version" to article tools that change the way we read, share, and manage articles. I ran across this nice little Article Tool bar on the Chicago Tribune's site. It's not visible in my image, but the "Share" link actually includes Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, MyYahoo, and other bookmark sharing tools (the little animation just stopped on Digg when I screen captured it). When you click on it the link expands to show all the bookmark sites. Very nice."Single Page View" hides the side columns while the "Print" view strips the page down to one of the more bare bones printer views I've seen. I'm a little disappointed with the "Reprints" link though. I expected to take me to a form for ordering reprints of that specific article, but instead it took me to a generic form and FAQ about reprints. Something to work on there I guess.
Since I'm in the process of taking a seminar on "Critical Thinking" which includes things like the Socratic Method and Mind Mapping, I thought I'd share a great Mind Mapping tool that I've discovered. It's called bubbl.us and it's a free online tool that helps you brainstorm ideas and build very snazzy Mind Map charts.
To see an example of a Mind Map, click on the image to the right, which is a map for building a tree house (and also proof that I have no idea how to build a tree house).
The interface is intuitive and Web 2.0ish so can get up and creating within a few seconds. The keyboard strokes are simple and brilliant. Don't expect a whole lot of customization like adding pictures or special icons, just really clean, attractive shapes.
If you want to save your work of mind art, you can register (name, email, password) and then not only save it, but collaborate with others on it. Mind Maps are probably best created in a room with everyone sitting around a screen or whiteboard, but I'm curious to see how this concept translates to individuals collaborating in non-real time.
I just discovered a very intriguing site via dexly.com. The site is called Many Eyes and announces itself thusly:
"Welcome to the alpha version of Many Eyes! View your data, ask questions, and share your discoveries. Harness the collective intelligence of the net for insight and analysis."
Naturally, that does nothing to explain what it is. What it is is a community of data-philes who share and visualize information. For instance, someone uploads data about the unemployment rates in the U.S. by state. Now the data is available for everyone and anyone can go create a visualization of the data using Many Eye's intuitive interface. For instance I could easily create a bubble chart from the data where the states with the higher rates have larger bubbles.
Basically you choose your data set (by browsing what's there or searching), click a chart type, preview it, then publish it. You can tweak certain parts of the chart as well.
If you'd rather just browse though, there's plenty to see. The chart below shows companies by NAICS (industry classification) code in a very cool treemap. You can right-click on each section to blow it up and see the sub industries with in the main industry.
It would be nice to see this kind of community-based analysis show up in other places. I think some of the major news agencies might benefit from checking out some of the stuff people are coming up with on sites like Many Eyes.
Well, I've finished my first Yahoo! Pipe. I decided to create a feed that pulls from several "life hacking" blogs and limits results to posts containing lists of tips (which I often find myself drawn to). I rounded up feeds from a list of popular life hacking blogs like Lifehacker, 37 Signals, and WebWorker Daily and told Yahoo! Pipes to Fetch them. Then I connected that to the Content Analysis operator, and then connected that to a filter. I had to set the filter up to permit only blog post titles that contain keywords common in "Tips" type posts. I chose: "tips, top, some, favorite, best, steps, and ways." This was based on reading through several of the blogs and noting what words commonly appeared in the titles of "tips" type posts.Lastly, I told it to sort by Publication Date and filter out duplicates. Here's the result:http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/xMKQRnW92xGrLKYelvXiAA/run?_render=rssIt worked pretty well. A few non-tip posts made it in, but for the most part it did what I'd hoped. I remain very excited about Yahoo! Pipes and will mess with it as much as time allows. It's still beyond non-techies, but I can see this becoming a powerful tool for Webmasters who want to display targeted content and power news junkies who want to create truly unique "newspapers." Yahoo! Pipes plus a newsfeed aggregator like Netvibes or Protopage equals the world's greatest online newspaper.
I continue to love article tools. We've evolved beyond simple "Email this Article" and "Printer Friendly Version" to article tools that change the way we read, share, and manage articles. I ran across this nice little Article Tool bar on the Chicago Tribune's site. It's not visible in my image, but the "Share" link actually includes Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, MyYahoo, and other bookmark sharing tools (the little animation just stopped on Digg when I screen captured it). When you click on it the link expands to show all the bookmark sites. Very nice.
