Mashup: Gawker Stalker

GawkerStalker is a mashup between Google Maps and people's sightings of celebrities.

The useful web: Walk it

Walkit.com is a lovely little site that encourages people to walk more.
It produces a map to get you to your destination as well as information about how long it will take you, how many calories you'll use and how much CO2 you'll avoid.

Mashup: Trippermap

Trippermap.com is a "web service that allows you to put a flash based world map on your own website or blog. Trippermap will then automatically search your photos at Flickr for location information and plot the photos on your own Trippermap, on your own website."

Mashup: News Map

Newsmap visually demonstrates the ever changing landscape of Google News (a news aggregator.)

Newsmap: "It divides information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe."

Mashups

Mashups is a phrase for something that has used an existing popular web tool (such as Google APIs or Flickr APIS ) and combined it with another level of functionalilty (e.g. adding an estate agent service to Google Maps).

The Wikipedia explanation: A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Find out How to create a Mashup
Discover the principles for making a good Mashup

Digg

Digg is a site that acts as a filter for the mass of web content. It allows people to submit interesting things that they've found online, the content is then rated by the Digg community, allowing the most popular content to surface to the home page. Essentially, it's about harnessing the power of communities to edit the enws.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a system for storing links and then sharing them. It was created by a Joshua Schactter, who was working as an analyst on Wall Street. He also wrote a blog in his spare time. In order to keep on top of all the links that he got sent, he created a database in which to store them. He made this database accessable by a web page and allowed links to be tagged to make everything super findable.

LastFM

Last FM finds out what music you like (based on what you play) and then recommends other music that you might want to check out. It allows people to share their music with friends and create a sort of personalised radio show.

Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, says of that 'the fundamental idea of Wikipedia is to create and give away a freely licensed encylopaedia in every langauge in the world'.

Anyone can edit a Wikipedia article. And at its core, the site is about community.

It now has over 1.4 million articles and has, in a report by Nature, to be found to be about as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Buzz: tweet volume

Twitter is a bit like having a mini blog from which you can tell the your friends what you're up to. You could almost think of it as a digital postcard. Sign up and give it a go (you can even use it inconjunction with Facebook).

Tweetvolume is a service that lets you see what people have been talking about on Twitter - it's an interesting way of seeing what phrases are buzzing.

Buzz: finding out what's being said on forums

Boardreader:
Find out what people are saying on messageboards. This service lets you search under your keyword, directing you to forums where talking about the brand you're researching.

Buzz: searching podcasts and YouTube

Podzinger:
This service lets you searches podcasts and You Tube for keywords that you enter. This could give you an interesting audio & video selection of top content that people are creating that references the brand you're researching.

Buzz: use the online community for quick polls

Yahoo Answers:
Ask a question to a responsive and broad community of people. This service can be used as a sort of online focus group and is great for testing out a hypothesis or getting a steer on perceptions. Depending on the question, you could make interesting graphs and support them with nice quotes.(A little tip, the simpler the questions, the better response rates).

Buzz: listening to what's being said on blogs

Blogpulse:
A brilliant service, this super easy to use. It enables you to assess blog buzz and contrast different terms. You can select a date range from one month to six months. You can also link off to blogs that refer to the terms you entered to find out a bit more about what the blogger is saying.


Icerocket:
Again this allows you to search blogs and rather nicely, what's being said on MySpace.

Buzz: measuring Search

Google Trends:
Enables you to look at volume of searches on different search terms. It plots them along a time line with news stories relevant to the keywords you input. By presenting this on a timeline, you can look at any trends over time. You can also compare different search terms and see what cities & regions people where people are searching from



Yahoo Resource Centre:
Another interesting way to look at what people are searching for. You can different search terms to see what people are looking for when they think about the brand.

For example look at the types of related terms people are using. Can you see any trends here - are they drilling down to specific products or are they more likely to search for a competitors product?

Go the here, then click on the term 'Keyword Search' in the right hand navigation.


GoogleFight:
A quick way of showing 'fame' online. Use this to make a direct comparison between two brands or products.

Buzz: Snakes on Plane

Read about the online phenomenum of 'Snakes on a Plane', here.

Tutorial: Buzz monitoring with Netvibes

Technorati advanced search
Use the 'Blog search directory' at the bottom of the page to find good blogs

BBC news search
Any search on the BBC site can be used as an RSS feed. This is a great way to get live news updates on a brand, campaing or issue.

BlogPulse
An automated trend discovery system for blogs from Nielson Net Ratings.


Add the 'BA Buzz' tab to your netvibes page using this button


Add the 'Nokia Buzz' tab to your netvibes page using this button

Viral Marketing

Looks like a handy place to learn about buzz

How to do a Skype Conference Call

7 Top Podcasts

Hello here is a list of some top podcasts:
1. Johnnie Moore (Great for marketing related interviews)

2. TED (podcasts on inspiration subjects such as 'How the mind works' and 'Evolutions Genius'

3. Aurgasm (new music)

4. The Guardian (top quality podcasts on a wide range of subjects from culture, news, media)

5. Boing Boing - Get illuminated (interviews with creative people)

6. Spout (interesting movie reviews)

7. AskaNinja (Send your questions to the Ninja)

Ricky Gervais

Multi-award-winning writer/comedian Ricky Gervais has done some pretty popular podcasts. In fact, 'The Ricky Gervais Show' podcasts were so popular, they entered the Guniness Book of World Records as the most downloaded.

Find out more about Ricky's podcasting exploits, here.

Podcasting

Some notes from Wikipedia's defintition of Podcasting:

Podcasting's initial appeal was to allow individuals to distribute their own "radio shows," but the system quickly became used in a wide variety of other ways, including distribution of school lessons, official and unofficial audio tours of museums, conference meeting alerts and updates, and by police departments to distribute public safety messages.

Make your own Semacode

To make your own Semacode (or 2D Barcode as they are also known), take a look at the service delivered by Shotcode. Have a go, make your own offline web link and download the Shotcode application to your phone to enable you to read shotcodes too.

Here's one we've created for the PAA site.

What do people really do with their mobile?

Research from Nokia shows that the mobile is the indispensable gadget. 94% of people intend to have one in the future, and one in five say that they would prefer to lose their wedding ring. A mobile is not all about talk:

• 73% don't wear a watch or have a separate alarm clock
• 67% would like the mobile to be their mp3 player
• 68% would like to be able to control household appliances with their mobile

Having always gained hero points on all camping holidays with the torch mode of my K750i. I was wondering what other unusual things make a mobile the swiss army knife of gadgets. I really expected to find a plethora of surprises, but only cooking an egg was really unexpected.

Suggestions welcome, the list needs to made....

More interesting things you can do with mobile

1. According to Sony Ericsson, one of the most popular uses for a phone when not making calls, is using the phone as a torch. For extra power, use your camera's flash to light up a dark space.

2. Cooking with your mobile

3. Compare prices on your mobile - with this service you can check a price of a book on Amazon when you're in a bookstore.

4. Wine Memory Jogger, a great little idea for using Flickr to remember the wines you had at a party.

Challenge inspiration: Sound Gardens

This project enables people to create virtual 'sound gardens'. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), people can "plant" sounds within a city. These plants are then mapped onto the coordinates of a physical location. You can wander through these virtual sound gardens, listening to the different audio tracks, by wearing headphones connected to a connected to a WiFi enabled device.

Challenge Inspiration: Yellow Arrow Project

The Yellow Arrow project, allows you to link personal messages to physical locations by using yellow sticky arrows (which you can order from the site). Your personal messages are then permanently linked to that place. It's a really nice way of publishing your journeys, for other people to discover.

Challenge inspiration: Twitter

You may have heard about Twitter. It's a sort of nano blog, where you can let your friends (& the world what you're doing right then and there). Think of it as a little digital postcard to the people in your network. You can twitter via the web, IM or mobile.

Take a look at twittervision.com for a view on what the world is doing right now. There is also a version for mobile, which is quite

Mobile inspiration: ZoneTag

Take a look at ZoneTag, a service from Yahoo Research. The service allows you to automatically add location tags to pictures that you upload to Flickr.

Mobile inspiration: Semacode

What are semacodes ? Wikipedia says:

a URL can be converted into a type of barcode resembling a crossword puzzle, which is called a “tag”. Tags can be quickly captured with a mobile phone’s camera and decoded to obtain a Web site address. This address can then be accessed via the phone’s web browser

Developed here in the UK they're like barcodes for mobiles phones. Nike is already using them in Japan where they are far more well known. You basically take a picture of the code and this immediately stores the book mark and takes you to a mobile version of the site.

Good post about it on crackunit

Find out more here

Here’s how it’s been put to use

Mobile inspiration: Shazam

Take a look at Shazam. If you're ever out and about, hear a good track but don't know what it is, you can dial 2580 (easy to remember because it's the number down the middle of your phone) and Shazam will text you with the track title and artist. Nice service. (You never know when it might come in handy...)

Mobile inspiration: Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk is a lovely 'to do' list application that makes organising easy & fun. This is based online with nice features such as sharing tasks with other people, a module for your Netvibes page and adding tasks to your Google Calendar. And, you can also access it via your mobile, which is just great for all those times you're out & about.

Take a look, have a play and let us know what you think about it.

Mobile inspiration: Scanr

Scanr is great little service where you can turn your camera phone into a scanner, copier or fax machine. It's particularly handy for recording whiteboard or flip chart notes and business card details.

Mobile inspiration: WidSets

Widsets is great little application that enables you to download some of the best mobile widgets to your phone. Some top widgets include BBC News, Flickr and Wikipedia.

Mobile inspiration: Shozu

Take a look at Shozu. It makes sharing pictures or video clip easier by enabling you to upload them to a website (such as Flickr) in just one click too.

Have a play around and let us know you what you think - you can always add a comment to this post.

Tutorial: Your personal homepage with netvibes (3mins)

You really can sell anything on eBay

Take a look at this experiment to test the theory that you can sell anything on eBay.

etsy - the eBay for handmade things

Etsy is site where you can buy and sell handmade items. Get in touch with crafts people from around the world. They have some great tools for selecting items too (such as navigating items purely by colour).

YouTube - could it become an eBay for content?

People who upload their own films to video-sharing website YouTube will soon get a share of the ad revenue.

Read the full article

I love eBay - YouTube tribute

Personalised Love Heart from firebox

How disappointing "yes, romance fans, this incredibly cute piece of hallmarked sterling silver is modelled on the classic sweeties". I thought they would be edible...

Top blogs

Technorati is the 'google' of blogs, continually scanning over the worlds growing 50 millions. This has a service where is tracks the worlds most popular blogs. It's a good place to strat if you are looking for a blogs on a particular brand or topic.

Engadget
Boing Boing
PostSecret
Seth's Blog
TreeHugger
Creating Passionate Users
Overheard in New York
gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

myspace is the civil society of teenage culture

myspace is the civil society of teenage culture
Originally uploaded by lynetter.

PEW data on social network site use

Great commentary from a blog about social networking
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/01/07/pew_data_on_soc.html

"66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. They limit access to their profiles."

Top tips from a top blogger

===================================================================
Phil Gyford is a bit of a celebrity in the blogging world. He set about the task of creating the Samuel Pepys Blog, a site where an entry from Samuel Pepys diary is posted each day. Started on 1st January 2003, this is a blog with another six years of diary posting to go!

Phil has put together a list of his top tips for us:
===================================================================

* Decide on a theme.
If you want to create a site focused on a particular subject then stick to it - if you start a weblog about breeding tropical fish but occasionally can't resist commenting on politics you may turn off tropical fish fans. But there are no rules and you don't need to have a specific topic at all.

* Consider your audience.
If you're writing on a particular theme decide whether you're writing for people who already
know about it or those who are new to it. Thomas Mahon began writing about tailoring assuming his audience knew nothing about the subject. So he educated people, publicised his business and increased his sales enormously. He could equally have decided to write a weblog just for tailors - news, gossip, techniques - which would have been very different but no better or worse. If don't have a specific theme you should still think about your audience - who you're writing for changes the tone of your writing.

* Behave like you're in public.
It's tempting to feel you're writing privately for a few friends or family, particularly if you're just starting out. But remember that anyone in the world can read what you write. If you write about a person imagine you're saying the same thing to their face. If you write something that's very personal and revealing about yourself consider whether you'd tell everyone you know. This isn't email or a letter but publishing to the world. If you want to write something angry or personal consider saving it, unpublished, then re-read it the following day before deciding whether to publish or not.

* Connect to the rest of the weblog world.
You don't need to trade links with other sites, but do link to weblogs you like. Post comments on the weblogs of others, or quote their posts and write commentary on your own site. Weblogs can feel much more like part of a global conversation than traditional print writing, which is more of a broadcast, one-way nature. So join in the conversation!

* Don't worry about the size of your audience.
If you find yourself obsessing over every slight rise or drop in your readership ask yourself why you're writing. It's more satisfying to write what you're interested in, rather than what you think people want to hear. Most weblogs have very few readers and that's just fine. Write for yourself, care about it, and you'll find your audience.

Tutorial: Personalising your blog (7mins)

Tutorial: Getting a blog from scratch (7mins)

This tutorials shows you step by step how to create gmail account, create a blog and make your first post.



Note: You may be better off with headphones when listening to this tutorial

Kickoff presentation

The kick-off presentation is available online at the cyberchase flickr account.




If you would like to add images to this pool then please email game.master@cyber-chase.co.uk for details.

Generative visual identity

Generative graphics and organic information design are making their way into the world of the applied arts:

Michael Schmitz' gave a recent thesis presentation at the UDK digital media class. Mika has a history of meshing up biology and graphic design, for example breeding fonts in Genotyp. This time he took to the creation of dynamic logos and corporate identities, in this case the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG). They are very much concerned with how cells organize themselves to become tissue and other so-called emergent
effects.

Looking for a suitable design solution, Mika soon learned about cellular automata, especially Conway's famous Game of Life, subject of many art pieces. His software basically follows the same rules in creating a dynamic logo for MPI-CBG in time, but the parameters are coupled to certain factors: number of employees = density, funding = speed, number of publications = activity. Different logos are being "bred" and then picked by fitness in relation to theparameters or voted for by the employees. Thus, everytime the logo is displayed on a website as an animated icon or printed out on a letter, it reflects the current state of the lab as a living organism.

World Of Warcraft T2 Rank 14 Mage Plus Bank Character - $495.00

Originally uploaded by cyberchase.

Level 60 Grand Marshal (Rank 14) Tier 2 Male Human Mage Reset Talent Points. Fully geared and ready to own! Exalted with 7 factions! Good Luck and Happy Bidding!

Current ebay bid: US $495.00

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
Originally uploaded by cyberchase.

Wikipedia has a good article about online identity which references this famous New Yorker cartoon

'Online identity is far more malleable than "real life" identity; the latter is shaped by factors that are difficult to control (including race, class, occupation, and level of educational achievement). By means of online identities, people are free to redefine themselves as they wish. (In Peter Steiner's famous New Yorker cartoon, a canine computer user says, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.") '

Other presentaions from slideshare

Can You See the Real Virtual Me
- has nice way of breaking down identities into 3 types dependent on how they relate to the offline identity


The Avatar as Communication
- breaks down the progression of an avatar based on interaction with community, also has some identity refernce books, seems academic



Secondlife



Bloglines lesson



Social Information Architecture
this has a very nice experise around feedback on slide 39 / 40


Podcast guide


Tools for Collaborative Working
- has an idea for shared home page, could be used as the monitor screen


Brand Blogging 101
- 300 slide monstrr, but nice idea with post it at the beginning in describing yourself


"blogs" and "community"
- has simple theory on the different reasons why communities form


Web.2.What?
- fresh and simple look at the changies in the web


User-Centric Identity
- quite academic look on the subject with good references

The Social Web: Wikis, RSS, Blogs, Flickr, and MORE!

This pulls out the main social software web apps. Also attempts an explaination of each. It focuses on Wikis, Blogs, Youtube, Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm, libraryThing, Myspace, Slideshare, squidoo, amazon and second life. The only one we have completely missed is last.fm. This requires a software install & itunes, so could be an IT issue.

10 Ways to a Killer Blog

"I had too many Friends that I didn't know anyways."

Interesting article about teens attitude to digital identities:

"Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change."

"Clarification: This post is not intended to negate or devalue my previous work on how people use different nicks to represent different facets of their identity. This latter practice is common to people of all ages and has great value for impression management. How you represent yourself on LinkedIn is very different from how you represent yourself on Friendster and you don't want these collapsed. This post is meant simply to highlight another aspect of shifting handles amongst teens that is not common amongst adults; it is not intended to say that this is the only reason for new handles. (While losing passwords is common amongst adults as well, starting over happily isn't.)"

Semacode

http://sohne.net/projects/semafox/formats/xhtml-css?title=cyber-chase.blogspot.com />

powered by performancing firefox

Semacode

dorfcode.jpg
Originally uploaded by sns2006.

Blackbeltjones's icon is a semacode. The picture is from a project where some people have mowed a gaint seamcode for consumption by Google Earth. Have alook at the flickr photoset