useful sites

12th March 2008

I was Skeptical of Twitter at first… but…

Twitter saves the day in the following video as alex harris (http://www.alexthinks.com) hitches a ride to SXSW using the service.

Twitter according to Alex Harris from michael galpert on Vimeo.

Very briefly:

I use twitter to track:

- traffic around the beltway

- keywords of interest that people are using (like iphone for instance)

- engage influentials in conversations

- follow interesting peoples’ thoughts

- follow news makers and news stories

- rant at the world without imposing on the world

More on twitter.com in future posts. In the meantime, start following my twitters at twitter.com/constantskeptic

and no, I am NOT getting paid to push this service, since it is after all, free.

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9th March 2008

Quote of the Day - Karl Roves on the joy of decapitating animals

“My name is Patrick Fitzgerald … I like to tear the tops off small animals.”

– Karl Roves before rapping at the Radio-TV Correspondents’ dinner (Watch video)

MARINES AND PUPPIES

Speaking of decapitating animals… I find it terrible that the video of marines throwing a puppy off of a cliff went viral all over youtube and most of the other inter and outer nets. I started to watch the video, but I could not finish it to the climax because I just don’t need to have the memory of seeing it.

AUTOMATIC SELF-FILTRATION

My refusal to watch this video made me realize that this may be a turning point in our infotainment evolution as cyber-beings. As more and more content reaches our brains through our senses everyday we are going to have to develop better filtration systems as we evolve. I am thinking the ability to automatically self-blind ourselves and self-deafen. Sound farfetched? I guarantee someone is working on it out there.

SUNDAY BONUS:

what I am doing currently

drinking Jones root beer in a coke glass with three pieces of ice from a blue ice tray

reading “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson (catching up on selling more of less)

reading “Jihad vs McWorld” by Benjamin R. Barber (about the coming cultural wars)

reading “Sun and Cross” (about Megalithic culture in Ireland)

downloading new music via skreemr.com (mainly the Grizzly Bears and Great Lake Swimmers)

and a happy Sunday to all!

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7th March 2008

it is official - Google is no longer top doggy

While it is true that Google has had a comfortable lead among search engines across the world (check out Alexa’s stats), Yahoo has been quietly number one for some months now.

Here is the graph for the traffic rank which rates the popularity. You can see yahoo.com has been number 1 for the past six months while Google is faltering, if you consider second and third most popular site in the world as faltering.

yahoo vs google

Why is Yahoo more popular?

1. Maybe yahoo is paying alexa.com to up their rankings. This can be evidenced by the static flatline at number one while google’s line looks like real data.

2. I noticed that Yahoo’s image search yields much better results than google. Try it out yourself.

3. Yahoo provides news and updates on their news page, while you have to go to igoogle to get the same content rich information. I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing that google.com is purely search. It has been working for years, but maybe the model is changing… maybe users want to get all of their information in one place without having to necessarily search for it.

Hat tip to GigaOM for the inspiration behind this post.

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3rd March 2008

Top Sites That Are Actually Very Useful

Yes, this is a top ten list.

It is simply the top ten sites that I access everyday.

No, it is not a shameless ploy to get more page views.

This is meant to inform you all about some very useful tools that are out there for free on the web.

10. del.icio.us

filed under social bookmarking: del.icio.us allows you to search for a topic based on popularity of a site’s tags

9. clipmarks.com

filed under web tools: clipmarks allows you to clip and share the best parts of the web pages you are browsing

8. current.com

filed under social news sites: current is a great place to watch the latest news and get updated information

7. mint.com

filed under financial services: mint is a free service to track where your money is going

6. netvibes.com

filed under rss readers: netvibes is the best rss aggregator, period, as well as a blog, video, and search tool

5. soonr.com

filed under remote desktop: soonr lets you access your desktop folders from anywhere online

4. technorati.com

filed under tagging sites: technorati searches the blogosphere for current topics of interest

3. popurls.com

filed under multimedia aggregators: popurls displayed the most popular videos, articles, news, blog posts, etc.

2. stumbleupon.com

filed under social recommendation: stumbleupon lets you rediscover the web as you never have used it before

1. constantskeptic.com

filed under best of the web: the constant skeptic web site is simply the only site you need to read

I hope you enjoyed the list, I am sure that some may disagree with my choices.

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28th September 2007

The Truth About Television (Great Video)

So, ready to turn your TV off yet?

If you are check out adbusters.org for other tips on how to live without needless distractions.

Technorati Tags: television , video , five minute video , truth about tv , antitv , constant skeptic

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24th September 2007

In Case You Haven’t Heard…..

Ahmedinejad is speaking at columbia today….

check out the link to see the live blog updated as the conference goes on.

Allegedly there will be a debate, but I think students had to submit written questions before hand and then the authorities were going to pick out of the handwritten ones the most appropriate questions to ask… doesn’t sound like an open democratic debate to me…. but not surprising.

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21st September 2007

You Know Your Blog Sucks When….

Ok, here are some helpful hints that can act as indicators to gauge the ‘goodness’ of your blog:

1. If your mom or any other family member is your #1 commenter, then your blog probably sucks. It is time to move out of the house and get your own place…. you can’t sponge off of your family forever. Get a life.

2. If you constantly misspell words and do not fix them until your commenters tell you about your mistakes, you probably suck at writing and you should give up right away, or have someone dictate your items for you like J. D. Salinger and John Steinbeck did. Basically go pro or go home. Or, you could just get firefox, which underlines your spelling mistakes as you type. Too bad firefox cannot point out your mistakes in the real world as well, but it may be available in the next beta.

3. If you constantly syndicate other people’s content to the point that other bloggers are complaining about you, you should probably get a life, get creative, and come up with some original content, or else your blog will suffer and die.

4. If your url contains the words ‘blogspot’ or ‘blogger’ or any of the other various free hosted sites out there, you should consider throwing down the 8$ a month and get your own url, I did and it did wonders for me. (can’t you tell?)

5. If you spend time reading self-help sites like lifehacker.com and posts entitled “You Know Your Blog Sucks When….” instead of spending time making your site sleeker, more usable, and content rich; then stop it, and get at fixing your blog up to save it from making the worst of the web list.

ta ta for now, hopefully you take my advice to heart, or wherever you take things that you consider important….

my heart is a black hole of deceit, carelessness, and freedom

and freedom is really just the ability to have any thought you want in your own mind, without anyone else knowing what that thought is, ever

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