Will Widgets Kill the Webpage? (Exclusive Netvibes video). (Erick Schonfeld/The Next Net)

I was discussing widgets with a friend recently and they thought widgets were to complicated for most casual computer users. I think if anything, they're easier. They focus on one thing and leave out all the other impediments to finding and using information.

Check out what NetVibe's founder thinks:

Will Widgets Kill the Webpage? (Exclusive Netvibes video). (Erick Schonfeld/The Next Net)
http://www.techmeme.com/070212/p107#a070212p107

Famous Princeton ESP Lab Closes

Amazing ths place was still around. Interesting history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/science/10princeton.html?ex=1328763600&en=2f8f7bdba3ac59f1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Web 2.0 Explained Through Video

This is a cool Web 2.0 video that's popping up everywhere from Lawrence Lessig's blog to Boing Boing. It's very cool and shows the evolution text and the Web. Very slick.

That Would Be a Great Band Name

If you're like me, and pray God you're not, you occasionally realize something that just came out of your mouth would make a great name for a band. I think this happens to me at least once a day. You'll be talking to a coworker about stepping on a rancid peach outside the produce stand by your house and suddenly you stop and say "Rancid Peach would be a great name for a band!"

Well you can now save time in this ridiculous pursuit by using the Band name generator.

Either enter a few words of your own to mix into the generator or just create utterly random band names like "Pungent Lager Wormlings" or "Crafty Hamburgers." I'm pretty sure I don't want to hear the next download from "Sphincter Bulbous Holidays," but who knows, maybe they're the next "Speedcake Protocol Cherries."

Jobs Votes to Give DRM the Heave-Ho

As sick I am of Steve Jobs and despite the fact that I consider him an arrogant, overrated shill, I am really heartened by his essay favoring the drop-kick of DRM. He makes some great points and I'm sure this essay will become the next big thing (probably it already is).

Especially well-written are the last few paragraphs where he points out that record companies have always sold DRM-free music in the form of easily-rippable CDs:

"In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves."

Great point, Mr. Jobs. I still won't buy an iPod though.

Apple - Thoughts on Music

The Morning is Your Friend

In Tapping the Power of Your Morning Routine, Yahoo! Finance writer Jim Citrin collected responses from 20 business leaders about their morning routines. The main bullets:

1. Start early.
2. Get a jump on email.
3. Exercise every morning.
4. Be thoughtful about the source, form, and timing of your news.
5. Problem-solve.
6. Be creative with your morning routine.

These all sound fine except the exercise bit. I have a hard time exercising in the morning. Sure, I walk about two miles every morning during my commute, but to lift weights or run before 7am messes me up. Everything else sounds fine.

I've always said that any idiot can get to work early. However I've seen people who consider this the height of work ethic. Never mind they spend 7-10am reading CNN or shopping on Amazon, as long as they're at work before the boss, they're golden. However, if you can plan out your day, catch up on e-mail, and get a little research done before 9am, I'd say you've made the most of getting an early start. A tip If your boss is impressed by early risers: few days a week make sure to send your boss an e-mail early. Make sure it's relevant though, or you'll look like a brown nose. You might try holding off on response from the afternoon before and then sending it when you get in the next morning.

One thing the article doesn't mention directly is breakfast. I've started eating breakfast every morning and I can say from experience, it helps. For a good article on the subject check out "How to Feel Like Eating Breakfast First Thing in the Morning" on WikiHow.

The article didin't mention RSS either, which may be because many business leaders may not be geeky enough to use Feed Readers or other RSS tools (granted, some may be using it without realizing it on their My Yahoo pages and such). RSS can be a powerful way to catch up on industry and business news in your morning hours. Build a page of RSS feeds with Protopage, PageFlakes, Netvibes, etc. and make browsing headlines faster and more thorough.

The Bears Have Made Me Sad

The Bears looked awful last night in the Super Bowl and had it not been for copious amounts of Guinness I may have cried when the game ended. So this frigid Monday, which I wisely took off well in advance, will consist of moping, whining, and likely some punching of inanimate objects. Tuesday will be better. After all, it looks like the Bulls will be in the playoffs and Spring training (Go Sox!) is right around the corner.

MetaWeather: A Good Idea with Mixed Results

MetaWeather is a weather aggregation site that describes itself as "An automated weather data aggregator that takes the weather predictions from various forecasters and calculates the most likely outcome." Oddly enough I was just chatting with someone about how a "Metacritic for weather information" would be a good idea and it could be called "MetaWeather." So I checked the URL and sure enough, there are no new ideas under the sun.

Disappointed that I hadn't come up with the idea first, but excited that it existed, I checked it out. It's got a definite "side-project" look to it and has some rendering issues in the three browsers I tried it in (IE7, FF2, and Opera). For instance, it shows temperature ranges on a bar graph and if the range is small (for instance between -12 and -9 the two numbers are smashed on top of each other.)

The sources for Chicago listed are Weather.com Homepage, Weather.com weather for Chicago, BBC Homepage, BBC Weather for Chicago, Weather Underground Homepage, and Weather Underground weather for Chicago. I'm not sure why it lists all those weather site home pages, which don't list anything about specific cities. Also, I'd rather see Accuweather and The National Weather Service incorporated. However this may be an API issue.

Again, this looks like a side project and maybe that's all it is. Or an experiment. But I'd like to see a full-scale version of a meta-weather site at some point tricked out with more features and a little more polish. After a quick check of all the weather sites metaweather.com uses and the ones I mentioned, I'm amazed at the disparity. Averaging all this data in a slick way could be very helpful.

So while I really like the idea and initiative the Metaweather folks have shown, I look forward to its maturity even more.

Top Ten-A-Palooza

This Seth Godin post gives me some good ideas. How about a search for the phrase "Some of my favorites..." or "Some good ideas for getting started..."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/the_top_10_ways.html

The Best Yahoo! Widgets

I, like many, have grown to love widgets. I was just starting to use Konfabulator when Yahoo! bought them and I was glad to see Yahoo! did nothing to ruin them. I tend to visit the Yahoo! Widget Gallery a few times a week to see if there's anything new and useful, but I find the interface for finding Widgets a little annoying. Like I wish they had an advanced search that let you filter based on user ratings. That would save me a lot of time sifting through a lot of sub-par widgets. However, I recently found a site called "The Most Downloaded Konfabulator Widgets" by Jon Aquino, which lists all the widgets by popularity and helps hunt down the cream of the crop. Why won't Yahoo! do this?

Anyway, I will likely spend some time hunting down more to add to my cadre. For now, here's what I use now:

• Yahoo! Weather A beautiful looking widget that shows everything you need at a glance.
• NY Times Reader Another attractive interface with a lot of customization.
• MultiRSSFeed A little on the ugly side but crams a lot of feeds into a small space.
• AllRecipes.com Recipe Finder VERY slick design from a terrific recipe site.
• Acura RDK Traffic A very polished interface with great traffic information.
• Yahoo! Notepad Access to quick notes from all your PCs. Very handy.

Most of Yahoo!'s own widgets are very well done and really take advantage of having a Yahoo! Account. It's also nice to see companies like Acura and AllRecipes.com creating more than just ads for themselves, but actual useful tools. That's good branding.

100 Ways to Finds Stuff

Charles Knight breaks down the search engine landscape and you're sure to find some great new search tools. I'm already digging Music Map and The Find and they're just in the introduction. I'll plow through the list and see if I can come up with a Top Ten from his Top 100.

MMMmmmmmm, search.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_100_alternative_search_engines.php

Is Flickr Editing Your Photos?

An interesting discovery by Kara at the Colors...Pretty blog. Apparently, she alleges, Flickr sharpens and improves images when you upload them to their service. Nice for amateurs, but possibly annoying for professionals. What if you intended a photo to look blurry in parts or altogether? Some Photoshop mavens might also prefer to do their own sharpening as well. Does Flickr use an unsharp, a sharpen, a smart blur, contrast enhancement? As Kara points out, this should probably be up to the user.

Colors...Pretty

Seth's Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint

While I can't completely agree with all of Seth Godin's points in his "Really Bad PowerPoint" post, I think he definitely makes some great points. You need to pass out detailed handouts after you present, which means you don't have to cram everything you want to say into every slide. Tell a story and use visuals to back it up. However I don't think bullets are evil and I've seen "minimalist" slides that simply don't work.

I like the concept of giving folks a visual and then letting them wonder what the heck it has to do with what your talking about, but you can't do that on every slide. Bullets help people who may have zoned out momentarily and unless you're the most compelling speaker in the world, zoning will happen.

However, I know a lot of consultants that could learn from Seth's guidelines.

Seth's Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint

A Real Desktop?

Courtesy of the Human Productivity Lab, this is one of the coolest and most breakthrough tools for handling digital files that I can recall. It's called "Bumptop" and uses the analogy of your own physical desktop and how you might lay down paper-based documents and objects and takes it to an amazing new level. Microsoft, or more likely, Apple will grab this technology I'm sure. Check out the video below and be sure to check out their channel on YouTube.

U.S. Flight Pattern Visualizations...Wow!

Saw these on Digg. Very cool. It's a series of visualizations showing airline flight patterns on the U.S. It's a bit mesmerizing to watch. Flight Pattern Visualizations.

Presenting the "iBle"

I was bummed to find out I missed the deadline for entry in the Worth1000.com’s recent contest wherein people are asked to come up with a design for Apple's next big product. Above would have been my submission. I felt given the Mac's cult status they probably needed a "Good Book" of their own.

Lose a Few Hours on Similicio.us

I think there is a "Right-click/Find similar pages" function in one of the browsers, which, as I recall, sorta sucked. However Similicio.us doesn't suck. In fact I just lost a few hours playing with it. Just enter a site you like or use and Similicio.us will find similar ones using Del.icio.us. Brilliant.

http://similicio.us/

Maybe a Change Will Come

All it takes is one big label to go DRM-free and the rest, including Apple, will fall in line and be equal. Then they can start dropping prices to compete and we can play our music anywhere.

Digital Music News reports from Midem:

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/012307drm

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC plans online children's world

Why do I get a horrible feeling this idea will be corrupted by pedophiles no matter what steps they take to prevent it? Sigh.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC plans online children's world

Second Life is an OS

Someone asked if Second Life was some sort of game and I said it was more like an operating system. It's essentially useless until users add applications to it. As a blank slate like a freshly installed copy of Windows.