Digital(Analog)

I got my new iPhone 3G yesterday. I just found out about the wordpress application, so I figured I’d give it a try.

Here is a picture from outside my window:

I’ll follow the crowd here as well… Thanks for the fun app Johnathan!

The IBM GLBT group (Eagle at IBM) had our first event in the new dedicated Second Life space. It was a great time seeing some new people turn up, and exploring all of ThomThom’s creative building. We had some conversation in the clubhouse lobby:

Then we did a little dancing at the disco. (I played DJ for a bit - thats me with the blue spiky hair)

Thanks to Andy and Suz for blogging (and blogging) about the 50 Ways To Leave Your Bookmark article that we co-wrote for developerWorks.

Andy’s got a great description of the premise, so I’ll lift his shamelessly

A little while ago my colleague Frank Jania posted a crazy thought on his internal IBM blog. The idea was that since Dogear (our internal social bookmarking system, and also part of Lotus Connections) has an API based on the Atom Publishing Protocol, and that just uses HTTP POST, it should be pretty simple to come up with a range of different ways to add bookmarks to Dogear using different technologies.

The gauntlet was thrown down, so a number of us started to contribute to Frank’s wiki page, coming up with our own code examples.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

collision detection: Why solitary workers can be faster workers

From the article:

“For years, I’ve worked in isolation — either sitting alone in my office, or, recently, sitting in a rented cubicle in New York. I haven’t had a job that required me to work physically alongside coworkers since 1998.

And maybe that’s been a good thing for my productivity — because according to a new study, when you can see other workers performing different tasks out the corner of your eye, it slows you down. Tim Welsh, a kinesiologist at the University of Calgary, organized a nifty experiment in which he asked a subject to perform a task on a computer, alongside a partner performing a different computer task. Then he’d get
the subject to perform the task while his partner went off to another room…”

I’ve made the cut. Along with unsubscribing to a shockingly large
number of newsletters in my personal email account, I’ve canceled both
my MySpace and Friendster accounts. I’ve had them for some number of
years and they’ve lied fallow in comparison to my activity on Facebook.

I have some friends that are primarily active on MySpace or Friendster,
but maintaining updates on both of them was just really more than I
wanted to do. So we’ll see how all this works out. I’m still on
last.fm, Facebook (of course), flickr, dopplr, fireeagle, etc etc, but
the sites that were primarily a personal profile have been
consolidated. Ahhh.

“Sort of” is the new “like”.

Listen for it.

downloadsquad has a post about enabling the firefox spellchecker to work in regular text fields, not just textareas…

How to eliminate speling mistkes in Firefox text boxes - Download Squad

Sweet.

Neat-o Torpedo! Google docs now lets you put a form in front of a spreadsheet if you just want to use it to collect data…

Official Google Docs Blog: Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information

“We’re really excited to bring you forms!
Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone
with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond
directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web
page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the
form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet
automatically.”

Hmm.. how about this. This is an social app that allows people to record themselves as “sick” with various degrees of granularity:

From the site:
Who Is Sick was started in 2006 with a mission to provide current and local sickness information to the public - without the hassle of dealing with hospitals or doctors. With a strong belief in the power of people and a faith that user generated content can be extremely valuable, our team set out to create an entirely new system for tracking and monitoring sickness in your area and obtain sickness information. Information retrieved by tracking sickness in my area can also be used to map sickness trends in my region.

Given the relatively slower adoption of internet and “web 2.0′ technology by much of the healthcare industry, our team of healthcare professionals, technology entrepreneurs, mothers, fathers, and caregivers set out to create a simple, user-friendly, and valuable website for the average consumer. We are currently building out our team and expanding our technology breadth across new and exciting areas of healthcare with Who Is Sick as our first offering. Stay tuned for more!