Web Tools
MapJack is a mapping web site that offers street views similar to Google Maps, but with a better interface. Currently it only offers views of San Francisco, Sausalito, and Chaiang Mai in Thailand. While similar to Google's Street Views its interface is much nicer and it also offers views from parks and walking paths, not just streets.
Lombard Street, San Francisco...
Photo Dropper is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to easily search for and place Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr in your weblog posts. The Plugin provides a search field within the post interface that allows you to search via key words. It provides the option of placing a small, medium or large images in your post and automatically includes the attribution.
The setup options allow you to automatically exclude images that are not commercially usable and also allows you to sort your search returns based on "interestingness."
This is something I plan to add to our school weblogs that are powered by Wordpress.
Note: Please see Paul Left's comment below regarding validation...
photo credit: christopherdale
Via Read Write Web
Craig Nansen has developed a nice little Google Maps mashup called Tweet Map. Kind of like Twittermap, except it only notes those that you follow. I tried it yesterday at work and ended up keeping the window open on my second monitor. Kind of a nice way to keep up with folks throughout the day.
Technorati Tags: google maps, maps
iRadioapp.com is a web based application designed for use on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, but available through any web browser. It uses radio station listings from Yes.com and returns live information about currently playing and recently played songs for the top 30 US radio markets. Once you have found your station you can drill down to a specific song, you have the option of emailing the song information, looking up the song in the iTunes Music Store, reading the lyrics, or playing the song (this feature is only available over WiFi.) Clicking the play song link will stream a copy of the song. This feature is dependent on if the song is available or not. Clicking the play song link initiates a web search using seeqpod.com and if found, the song is streamed and played.
Seeqpod.com is worth a closer look. It is basically a playable media search tool. It allows you to create an account and you can create playlists from your searches. An interesting way to find audio and video media...
From their web site:
We are passionate about search and discovery algorithms and believe that one day, everything on the Web will need to be 'playable'. So, we decided to apply some very sophisticated technology to 'Playable Search' so that anyone, anywhere can mine the deepest crevices and corners of the Web for media that is publicly available, yet it is not always so easy to find...
By way of Fabric of Folly...
Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information:
The Google Docs Blog posts today about a new feature in Google Docs Spreadsheets called forms. It basically allows you to share a Google Docs Spreadsheet as a form with others and the data they enter in that form is automatically added to a Google Docs Spreadsheet. So rather than sharing a spreadsheet with others, you can send them a form to fill out and the data they enter is automatically entered into a Google Docs Spreadsheet. Lots of possibilities here... I tested it on my iPhone and the form works nicely. Think I'm going to redo my Learning Walk form tomorrow...
CoveritLive is web based software for live blogging of events such as conference sessions or lectures. Through an iframe, your commentary is published on your web site in real time like an instant message dialog complete with time stamp. You can easily add polls, videos, pictures, and audio clips to our live session. Viewers of your live session can add comments and questions with you controlling what gets published. This looks like an interesting tool for folks who like to blog live events. It might be useful for participants at FETC and Educon to take a look at.
Update: The content through the iframe displays nicely on the iPhone too...
Hal MacLean has a short review of the Asus EeePC, the ultra light web enabled lynux laptop. I have one on order, according to UPS, it should arrive today, and I am looking to order about 20 if they live up to expectations.
Pingie is a web tool that allows you to sign up to receive SMS (text messages) messages whenever a particular RSS feed is updated. Might be useful to monitor sites within my district that are updated on a less frequent basis. An interesting way to keep up with your information flow. Regular SMS charges apply. Read more on the Pingie Blog...
Official Google Docs Blog: New features for 2008!:
Google has added some new features to its Google Docs applications. These include the ability to create sub folders and the ability to rename documents within the Docs home toolbar view. The one that is of most interest to me is the ability to embed Google Docs Presentations into a web page. This is similar to what is available on sites such as SlideShare. The key benefit being that you can now do this from within your Google Docs workflow. This feature is available when you publish a Google Docs Presentation. Some code is generated that you can then past into a web page or weblog post.
I am wondering if Apple will update their iLife applications to take advantage of this. They already have an export to YouTube option within Keynote. It would be nice if they added the ability to directly upload and publish a Keynote presentation in this way.
Below is a screen shot...
Slideoo is an interesting little tool that allows you to create horizontal photo slideshows from Flickr photos. The interface allows you to select from public images and define the width of the slide show and the image size. The example below is from one of my Flickr photo sets and the image size is medium. Notice the slider at the bottom of the image. Click and drag the slider to view the images.
