Products/Services

There is a pointer on Lifehacker today that made me smile: an Ask MetaFilter discussion about a question regarding the use of Excel. The Ask MeFi community was able to answer the query so it proved to be useful, as it often is. Regardless, my reaction to seeing that pointer was that the person asking this question probably does not know about the ultimate resource for advice about Excel: MrExcel.com. It is THE place to search for, and if unsuccessful, to ask about advice regarding Excel. I have already blogged about it.. but looking back in my archives I realize now that it was three years ago. I think the site is worth another mention (if nothing else because now compared to three years ago there are many more people reading what I blog about).

The people on the Mr.Excel forum (not necessarily all misters from what I can tell) give free advice about using the program from the fairly trivial to the extremely complex. They will write original code for you if that’s what’s most helpful. I have had some incredibly wonderful experiences with the site getting crucial help with cleaning up some dissertation data way back when and recently while editing some spreadsheets to a more manageable format. I highly recommend that resource if you are stumped by any Excel features (or even if you are not just to see what shortcuts you may be able to dig up).

As I noted in my post a few years ago, I hope there are people studying communities like this. There seems to be quite a bit of work, for example, on the free/open source community. There is also quite a bit of work on various online communities. But I have seen little scholarship (granted, I have not looked actively) about studies of online communities that provide so much tangible value for free to active members and outsiders alike.

PS. Random observation: My initial post about Mr.Excel was on July 10, 2002 and my post last year about online communities was on July 6. I guess I like to blog about this stuff in July. I’ll leave it to Kieran to run a more systematic analysis on the topics of interest by time of year among Timberites.:-)

A propos the spread of social bookmarking and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week that file-sharing programs can be held responsible for copyright infringement, this article in today’s NYTimes does a nice job of summarizing some of the ways in which various new online services are leading to more and more bottom-up creativity and content whose sharing does not necessarily constitute copyright infringement.

But bottom-up creativity may depend on more traditional avenues at times and the article doesn’t address this other side of the issue at all. For an example, take note that some photo labs (e.g. Walmart, like they really needed to come up with more reasons to alienate people) have decided not to print people’s photos if they look too professional. The burden seems to be on the amateur photographer to prove that the picture was really taken in her own back yard. ARGH.

The speed with which the major online players are coming out with new services these days is quite impressive. Yahoo! just launched the Beta of My Web 2.0. An important new feature is that they are now offering social bookmarking. Think del.icio.us (or Furl or Spurl or Jots or .. you get the point), but now available to millions of Yahoo! users without them having to find their way to such a site and create a new user account. It’ll be interesting to see if social bookmarking takes off at a larger and more mainstream level (read: past super-savvy Web users). If you have no idea what social bookmarking means (as tends to be the case with most of my friends who are not in geek world) you can start by reading a review of related tools or Yahoo!’s FAQ for a better idea of My Web 2.0 in general.

Using del.icio.us has allowed me to find some great sites that would have been unlikely to show up in my browser otherwise. You go to a Web site, you decide to bookmark it (but doing so on del.icio.us is like bookmarking it publicly) and then you can add tags to it to classify it according to your liking. The exciting feature of del.icio.us (and other such services) is that they show you how many other people have also tagged that same page. Clearly you share some interest with those people. You can then click to see their entire list of bookmarks or just the ones they have tagged similarly to the shared link. Chances are good that you’ll find some additional pointers of interest.

Yahoo!’s twist on all this is that you don’t have to make all the bookmarks public. You can make them completely private (you’re the only one with access), available to your community (people you’ve linked to your Yahoo! account) or completely public. I do think – just like with Yahoo! 360 – that Yahoo! should allow you to distinguish between different communities (e.g. “make available to friends”, “make available to colleagues”) and am hoping they will implement that feature at some point. My hunch is that they will also have to offer all the features available on sites like del.icio.us (and do so without requiring the installation of an additional toolbar) to get users of that system to bother with Yahoo! for social bookmarking purposes.

Apologies if My Web 2.0 is not available to everybody. I can’t quite tell. I was required to sign in to my Yahoo! account, but I don’t know if it let me proceed only because I am already a Yahoo 360 user.

UPDATE: Reading this article I just noticed that Yahoo! is calling the ranking of pages that comes out of this new way of organizing content “MyRank”, which is cute given Google’s famous “PageRank” algorithm.

If you thought Google Maps and the corresponding satellite images were cool then you’ll be hard-pressed to find a word to describe the experience of using Google Earth. Before you get too excited, do check to see if your computer meets the current requirements.

I don’t think you have to be a geography geek like me (I did take four years of high school geography after all) to appreciate this service. It’s amazing. You can zoom in more than on GMaps, you can tilt the image, you can get driving directions superimposed on the satellite images, you can get road names added, dining options included and much more.

In line with this article in today’s NYTimes, neither the directions nor some of the locations of things are always correct, but they’re close. Go play.

[thanks]

The other day I found myself in the curious position of having to prove that I had been on a flight in order to be allowed to return home. The only explanation I could come up with for the airline having no record of my presence on the flight there is that the gate agent had failed to scan in my boarding pass. As far as I can tell I had done everything “by the book”. In this day and age of being tracked in so many situations and so many ways, I found it an interesting twist that I could think of no way of proving (no way that the ticketing agent seemed to find satisfactory) that I had, indeed, been on the plane and should be allowed to return home on my originally scheduled flight. Details follow.

[click to continue…]

I found it curious that in March of this year The New York Times mentioned the Web site BugMeNot.com in an article on sidestepping life’s little annoyances. Curiously, a new NYTimes article (scroll down to the bottom of the page) published this weekend repeats this recommendation.

For those not in the know, BugMeNot helps you find a username and password for sites that require registration. This means that you can proceed to viewing articles on, say, sites like nytimes.com without having to create an account for yourself on such sites.

Firefox users may be interested in this helpful extension that allows one-click use of BugMeNot. When you are on a page with a form for entering your username and password, place the cursor in the username or password box, right click on the mouse (or do the corresponding equivalent on a Mac) and you get a BugMeNot option in the menu. Select it and the form will be filled in automatically with registration information.

In the discussion below about charitable giving, foreign aid and so on, I mentioned the figure of 1 per cent of GDP or of first-world person’s income as being enough to make a real difference to third-world poverty. I got that figure from a footnote referencing the Liam Murphy paper, somewhere in Thomas Pogge’s excellent World Poverty and Human Rights . Whether that’s actually the right figure I don’t know. But anyway, today I came across the new Pledgebank site. As Chris Lightfoot writes:

bq. PledgeBank is designed to solve what I’m told are called `collective action problems’ — things that you want to do, but can only get done if enough other people will help. Why go out on a limb and say you’ll do something difficult or expensive or embarrassing if you don’t know whether enough other people will turn up to make it worthwhile? Anyway, PledgeBank is designed to help you get around that problem by letting people sign up to say they’ll take part, and telling you when enough people have done so for your plan to succeed.

One of the pledges is from Nicola and it has this content:

bq. I will give 1% of my gross annual salary to charity but only if 400 other people will too.

To make the link to third-world poverty, the charity would have to be an appropriate one (such as Oxfam, perhaps), but that’s up to individual pledgers.

But first. The Economist’s new venture is “an inspirational lifestyle magazine which instead of helping readers make decisions in their professional life, helps them do the same in their personal life”.

“Take white-collar boxing – the latest stress reliever for Wall Street and City elite. Tired of punching a bag at the gym, they have now moved on to punching each other in front of a paying audience. If smacking around your colleagues doesn’t sound appealing, how about brushing up on your space travel tips so you can be first in line to book your space flight? If all that sounds too strenuous, check out the dos and don’ts of selecting massage therapy. Other articles include the latest on gadgets, health innovations, luxury items and how to order your own bespoke car.”

I suppose they forgot the first rule, that we don’t talk about fight club. And also the part about status-seeking through rampant consumerism being a bit of a trap. Especially if you just acquire the same crap everyone else has. Which you will if you buy this magazine. Worth noting if you’re one of today’s busy global managers and hoped Intelligent Life would give you an executive summary of all that culture stuff.

Google arrives at Yahoo! 1999.

[Image extracted from the Web Archive.]

For something that’s been around for so long (personalized portal pages) My Google isn’t offering much at this point. But how interesting that they have picked sites like Slashdot as one of only a dozen options to feature for now. I would like to see the behind-the-scenes of what led to these twelve particular items being featured. Some are quite obvious (e.g. redirection to Google movie searches or Google Maps), but others probably have to do with deals. Gosh, all this reminds me of my article in 2000 on the role of portals in channeling user attention online. I discuss the implications of the underlying commercial decisions in this piece.

A fellow user of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has created a wonderful hack for Google Maps using Greasemonkey. By installing the script in Firefox, it is now possible to get addresses to overlay on the CTA system map. This was a feature seriously lacking on the Transit Authority’s own site and has caused many frustrations for me in the past. This is an awesome feature. [thanks]

Before I link to yet another advertisement for your amusement, I thought it was worth noting the interesting twist in some of us actually seeking out and making conscious decisions to view ads. Aren’t consumers supposed to hate advertisements? Isn’t the great fear about TiVo and similar devices that audiences skip over all the ads? That may be the case if the commercials are horrible, which many of them are. But the fact that people voluntarily visit sites that feature ads suggests that there is room for advertisements in our world. They just need to be good enough to capture our attention. Remember the Honda commercial called Cog? Talk about creative. I personally liked the Get Perpendicular Hitachi flash movie to which I posted a link yesterday (although that may be a bit too geeky for some). The Ad Forum hosts thousands of ads from across the world (although only a small fraction seem to be freely accessible). Again, some of them are creative enough that people will voluntarily go to the site to check them out. Here are some recent popular ones: Frogger and The Banana. So dear advertisers, instead of getting upset about new technologies how about getting creative?

I’ll take this opportunity to give a shout-out to David Krewinghaus to whom we are grateful for our cool header banner. Some of his work exemplifies well what I am talking about above.

UPDATE: I had also meant to post a link to the video depicting the shot made by Tiger Woods the other day. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll understand the connection to this post once you view it.

Now that Meetup has decided to start charging for its services, I wonder if Upcoming.org is going to take off. It seems like a promising service and many new features are being added these days. It’s not clear why it’s been so slow to spread. It seems it’s still lacking the necessary critical mass. It’ll be interesting to see how the recent additions of features to it and the changes at Meetup may influence its future.