NoteMesh looks like a great new application for Wikis. It allows students to contribute to a common set of class notes. Everyone in the class can view, add, or edit the same notes. I can see a lot of potential for this site, but like all user driven content sites, it’ll suck without an active user base. I imagine the first people to go to a site like this are the ones who slept through class rather than the ones who went and took good notes.
As you can see from the graph, Firefox leads IE in vulnerabilities for the first half of the year. What it doesn’t show is that most Firefox bugs were fixed within 24 hours.
There are unpatched bugs in IE that Microsoft has known about for years.
Someone finally gets it! Many comsumer electronic devices have been hacked with cooler features, and it’s helped them gain popularity. TiVo, PSP and Linksys routers are just a few devices that have very popular mods availble for them. Now Neuros is taking the concept further by designing their system to be modded from the start and reaping the benefits of the community effort.
Get all the details here.
Here is a collection of photos of vending machines in Japan. You gotta check this out there are some weird ones.
PhotoMann Travel Photgraphy - Images of Japanese Vending Machines
Yahoo has offered about $900 million for Facebook after the previous offer of $800 million was rejected. All these amounts seem arbitraty when it was only a few months back that Facebook said they were looking for $2 billion. I’d be interested in what kind of vistors per month to dollars conversion rate Yahoo gets out of it’s current properties. I’d imagine Flickr would be a good one to compare against, in as much as it’s got a “social” element to it and it was very popular before they bought it. Are they solely in a competition with Microsoft and Google for market share or is there a real bottom line plan to this and other aquisitions?
Is Ze like Dr. Phil 2.0?
This article talks about why metadata is often metacrap. He makes a lot of good points about the weaknesses of depending on humans to classify information. Some of the problems he talks about could be somewhat fixed by standards, but we all know what a big bag of worms that opens up. In the short term, I don’t have too outrageous expectations for metadata… I’d just like to be able to Google something like “meta:review solar powered flashlight” and get actual reviews of a product rather than useless crap and ads about where I can buy said item. Right now Amazon or sites like Tom’s Hardware are my best bets for reviews. (Why the hell does InfoWorld never show up in search results?)
This is a really great post that sumarizes a lot of past posts about seach engine optimization. I never really gave it much thought, but now I’m starting to pay attention to it more. I’ve just skimmed some of the articles, but it looks like I’ll have a lot of reading this weekend!
Here’s a handy registry mod I had forgotten about. I ought to keep a running .reg files with all the mods I use so I don’t forget one when I reload a computer.
I’m kinda a Google-a-holic, so of course I use their personalized home page to keep up on important headlines throughout the day. I keep shuffling stuff around cause I never scroll down to look at the stuff lower on the page… I still use stuff like popurl.com for the high volume news feeds and an offline news RSS reader for sites that are only updated once in awhile. Never got into the Google RSS reader (or the others like Bloglines, etc); they just didn’t feel comfortable to use.
