It's official - SourceForge.net has joined the OpenID bandwagon. SourceForge, the world's largest open source software development website, is a little late to the party but nonetheless, it's nice to see a leader of the open source community adopting OpenID and walking the walk.
OpenID is an open source, decentralized, digital identity user system which allows users to have one identity across the internet and alleviates the hassle of having multiple user names and passwords to log-in to different sites.
OpenID is gaining traction with big companies such as AOL, Sun, Microsoft, and Novell who are accepting and providing OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins. Thanks FF!
Yes. It's true. Now, you can broadcast to the world what you eat, want to eat, feel like eating (hey, let's keep it clean) on a site dedicated to doing just that, called FoodFeed. We guess there's no end in sight to the banal, continuous, slog of bytes that people feel they must ingest and digest too.
Among the amazing features FoodFeed offers is the ability to search by yes, you guessed it - Food! Now you can put a search term in like, say, chicken, and bingo - everyone who has eaten chicken pops up. Wow. After you scroll through all the exciting chicken eating people, you'll probably either a). want to find all the beef eating people b). throw up or c). find some other place to explore on the interwebs or d). go outside and get some fresh air.
If you must tell everyone what is on your plate, well you can set up a feed, but first you need a Twitter account. Just add "having" as a friend on Twitter. Then check your feed out at "http://username.foodfeed.us." You can post by sending tweets to @having (showing up in your Twitter updates) or d having (not showing up in your Twitter updates).
What do you think? Do you think people are interested in your food itinerary? Are you riveted to others' food moods?
The folks at Aviary are at it again and today released their latest webbased photo tool called Dodo. Unlike any other photo editing tool, Dodo allows users to age people, places and things. So for instance, if you wanted to see what you might look like in say 25 years, you would upload a picture of yourself and choose different settings, set a year and click to generate. See below screenshot of Dodo in action.
What's really cool is you can reverse the process as well - a nice touch especially for your aging grandparents - like a face lift without the surgery. Dodo is a great tool to have in your editing arsenal and since it's web based, you can have it with you anywhere you go.
You can sign up for an Aviary account at http://a.viary.com. Be sure to log in, then log out and log in again to activate the Dodo tool.
We've covered Animoto before. It's a rocking web app that allows you to create a music video with your own photos or video in about 5 minutes or less. Now, Animoto has recently won the Film/TV Web award at the 2008 SXSW conference and has some new features we thought deserved a revisit.
For starters, Animoto has a new Facebook app which allows you to produce unlimited free 30 seconds spots using your Facebook photos. If any of your photos are tagged with your Facebook friends' names, they too will get an alert in their News Feed informing them.
If you're not too excited by that, (is it possible to get excited by Facebook apps anymore?), you can also now export any of your Animoto videos directly to YouTube by clicking a little button. The beauty here is there's no video camera or video editing software required to produce professional results.
And there's the ability to post your videos to most every social network around, like: MySpace, Friendster, Blogger, TypePad, Freewebs, Webwag, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Windows Live.com, iGoogle, Orkut, Hi5, LiveJournal, Xanga, myYearbook, LiveSpaces, Tagged, Multiply, BlackPlanet, Eons, Piczo, and Vox.
In our previous post, we said we wanted the ability to add text to the photos. Apparently that idea has registered with Animoto but it is not live yet. A work around is to add your text to a photo and save it as a JPG or GIF and upload it like your other photos. They are also still working on the ability to send videos to cellphones and downloading videos to your computer.
No word yet on a Lessig Method video tool. Now, wouldn't that be something?
Remember when you put together mix tapes on cassettes and lovingly wrote the song titles in microscopic script on the tape label, maybe even including artistic doodles? Remember the recorded intro you did for the recipient? Remember the songs you selected? Each one chosen for its particular meaning - a special code for you and the receiver's relationship. Yeah, we don't remember that sappy stuff either.
Well *cough,* not that anyone would do that, but Mixwit is a site where you could if you wanted to theoretically speaking, do something kind of, sort of, like that, if you were into that type of thing, which you're definitely probably not.
Making a mix tape with Mixwit is super easy. You can upload your own artwork for the tape skin, search for songs online and drag and drop them on the playlist you're creating, share by publishing it on Mixwit or even embedding on your blog or website. It's absolutely free too. We think you'll love it.
We've noted the widening gulf between Obama and Hillary's online campaign strategies, but according to one marketing executive, the Obama campaign is waging a digital strategy while the Hillary campaign is more along the lines of analog technology.
While both campaigns hope to eat each other's lunch through typical traditional media buys, Obama harnesses the full capabilities of the internet to his advantage, according to Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer of the media buying division of Publicis, the French advertising giant. For example, the Obama campaign uses email to keep supporters informed up to the minute on matters ranging from "Watch the debate now," to fundraising challenges synchronized to Hillary's own fundraising efforts.
While Hillary's strategy is almost entirely reliant on traditional media, the Obama campaign pulls in from the blogosphere and co-ops content that is not just campaign generated, effecting a more credible grassroots movement where people have a voice from the bottom up. One example is the Black Eyed Peas music video which garners over a million views a day and is featured on the Obama website, although not created by the campaign.
It seems Obama is more in tune with the idea that in today's digital world, the buyer is in control and he deftly adapts his message to this reality. His campaign uses the words "you and me" which are inclusive. Hillary's campaign is more in line with the seller is in control. Her language is "I and me", which in this new era of the wisdom of crowds is not resonating as well.
"Experience from day one" versus "We are the change we seek." What do you think? Which one speaks to today's digital reality?
Forget about paying street vendor prices for the magazine covers with your face on them like you see in Times Square or other tourist haunts. You can create them yourself at MagMyPic, which has realistic fake magazine covers ready for you to grace them with your uploaded image.
After you upload your photo you can choose from several magazine covers such as People, Vogue, National Geographic, well you get the picture. After you select the cover size (small or medium), you're done and you can post it to a slew of your favorite sites like Facebook, Blogger, etc. or just grab the code and embed on your website. No sign-in required.
MagMyPic is an affiliate marketing campaign to help sell actual magazines, as in those print kind. A link to purchase magazine subscriptions is available, but we bet you'll just bypass that.
Google is gearing up for their 4th year Summer of Code 2008, where students developers get paid $4,500 to write code for various open source projects over the summer, starting about May 26 and ending around August 11.
To qualify as a student, you have to be enrolled at a college or university as of April 14, 2008 and no, you don't have to be a computer engineer major to apply, but it is helpful to know how to code. Sorry to those who hail from Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Mynamar (Burma), who are ineligible to participate due to U.S. law.
Google is expecting over 130 organizations to be paired with over 900 students for 2008. The goal of the program is to inspire students to work on open source projects, and to help open source projects recruit more developers.
Applications for mentor organizations are being accepted March 3-12, 2008 and student applications will be accepted March 24-31, 2008.
It's fun to follow all your friends on Twitter and get updates from Darth Vader but now the bomb is getting Tweets from your little plant friends. If you have a burning desire to get tweets from your plants advising you on their need for water and nutrition, well, there's an interesting DIY gadget you can build courtesy of the folks at Botanicalls.
Basically, using an Adafruit Ethernet shield from Arduino, some nails, a soldering iron, a healthy plant, and a few other things, like your computer, as well as Arduino's software environment, (an open source, cross platform electronics prototyping system), you can build a gadget which will provide you with online Twitter status updates for your green leaf friend.
If you're smacking your head saying, Sheesh, I wish I had thought of that - well, imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right? Let us know what you build for your aquarium fish who are known to have the Twitter fanatic witihin, and while you're at it don't forget your little pond friends. They have so much to tell us.
With Congressman Tom Lantos' recent death, some attention has been given to the idea of Lawrence Lessig, running for the vacant Silicon Valley seat in a special election in June. The idea is purely speculative at this point, however, there are some signs that a bid could be in the works.
For one thing, Facebook has a new group, "Draft Lessig for Congress," with 425 682 members at the time of this writing. Another interesting development is Lessig's purchase of domain name change-congress.com. He is also on record endorsing Barack Obama, the presidential candidate whose message of change has undeniable momentum. Additionally, in his blog he is posting oblique references to the meaning of "real" change.
Clearly, the idea of change is one Mr. Lessig ideally suited for and whether the tea leaves we're sifting through here indicate he's going to run for Congress is wishful thinking or quite possibly the real thing, only time will tell.
Aviary is an ambitious suite of web based image editing apps created to enable collaboration among artists of all genres and to provide artists a direct distribution channel to the marketplace. If you're already discounting online flash applications as a plausible alternative to desktop apps like Adobe Illustrator, Gimp, Photoshop, etc., Aviary agrees with you to a certain extent.
What Aviary is offering, make that "soon to offer" is a score of online tools that integrate with one another in one package. The idea is to provide online collaboration capabilities to artists, especially hobbyists and budding artists. The tools are especially useful for quick collaboration, mock ups, and initial team feedback, in ways where file sharing from desktop apps just aren't. And that's Aviary's niche.
Aviary's tools aren't your typical crop, resize, take out red eye kind of tools. Think 3D modeler, vector editor, Flex based pattern generator, color swatch generator, video and sound editors, desktop publishing, and the list goes on and on.
Musicovery is a site where you can discover new music based on how you're feeling. Visually it's eye candy. Songs are represented in color and are connected by their relationship to one another based on tempo, and positive or negative lyrics.
No log-in is required to start testing it out. Simply pick out your music category: rock, latin, rap, disco, soul, etc. Then go to the mood/energy matrix and click where you want to start. Music based on your mood preference will appear and you can click on different songs to explore the sound.
We found it annoying the site has no information page outlining its features so you're kind of on your own to discover if you want to register or not. On the other hand, the site is intuitive. You select a song based on your mood, and then like magic, the music just plays. No brain cells required.
Apparently, if you do decide to register, you can save your favorite songs and ban the ones you don't like. Music quality is low-fi on free accounts and comes with those ads you've come to expect.
A paid account starts at $4, features high-fi, allows you to save your favorite songs and has no ads. Even if you don't register, you can buy songs via iTunes, Ebay, and Amazon. We gather the site's name is a combo of music and discovery, but it could also be argued it's a combo of music and recovery. If your mood is low, you could choose happy songs to get you out of a funk.
GreenPrint software launched a new free edition today to help home users and non-profits reduce home and office printing waste. Known as GreenPrint World edition, this edition has fewer features than other versions and includes advertising. The software works by analyzing every page of a document sent to the printer, and looks for banner ads, pages with just a logo or URL, legal jargon, etc., and then highlights and removes them before they ever reach the printer. You can also remove images with a click.
According to GreenPrint, users can save up to $90 per year and eliminate 1,400 wasted pages. In addition, the software quantifies your toner and paper savings in a nice report which you can review to help you feel better about all the trees you are saving. The company estimates that with widespread use GreenPrint can save 100 million trees and reduce greenhouse gasses by over 30 million tons globally.
We're all for technology which helps save trees and automates mundane tasks helping to make your printing sort of idiot proof. It's a big step in the right direction, however, there is just so much software can do. We continue to recommend print preview as an important part of your ongoing safe printing practice.
Stop the Spying is a campaign organized to get citizens to literally "show" Congress their opposition to the telecom immunity issue now being fought in Congress. Rather than the usual letter campaigns and phone calls, Stop the Spying is asking voters to speak out against the issue by sending in videos and photos of themselves portraying their opposition.
The addition of multimedia messaging to Congressional leaders is an interesting development in campaign tactics and one that is certainly richer and more powerful than blast emails and jamming Congressional phone lines.
Telecom immunity refers to proposed immunity legislation which could let telephone companies off the hook for any assistance they provided to the National Security Agency's surveillance program after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Such immunity would block lawsuits like EFF's case against AT&T for violating privacy laws by providing the government with customer information without court warrants.
If you would like to join the effort, all you have to do is write your message on a piece of paper and include your city and state, take a photo of you and your statement and send it in. If you would like to send a video clip, include your city and state, and tell your message in a 60 seconds or less video.
Stop the Spying is organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and People for the American Way. To view other photo messages, you can visit the Stop the Spying Flickr site.
Gmail invited users a few weeks ago to share their stories about how they use Gmail on video. About 1500 Gmail users responded with their video comments, the results of which have been put together in a 1.34 sec YouTube collaborative video.
While we didn't learn any new ways to use Gmail, the clip is entertaining, sometimes humorous, and gives you a slight warm, fuzzy, albeit brief, feeling. It's warm and fuzzy because people use Gmail to connect with others. Brief, because when it's over, you still have all those email connections to read, delete, respond, report spam, and archive.
Remember when you put together mix tapes on cassettes and lovingly wrote the song titles in microscopic script on the tape label, maybe even including artistic doodles? Remember the recorded intro you did for the recipient? Remember the songs you selected? Each one chosen for its particular meaning - a special code for you and the receiver's relationship. Yeah, we don't remember that sappy stuff either.
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