The Learning Journey

It’s that time again where a new application catches my eyes (and mind). Zoomii: the [near] real online bookstore.

I remembered Alexaholic/Statsaholic’s story and wondered how long will Amazon allow Zoomii to survive.

via FocusShift

Via reddit, and from there to the best quote I read in a while:”Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.” - Joel Spolskey. The quote is highly interpretive, but, to a great extent it bears the truth.

After using the CSS Framework from Content-with-style for a few years, I grew tired of how it’s structured, and how difficult it is to customize.

Along came Blueprint-CSS. A great concept, and wonderful implementation. And with the new BlueprintCSS Generator plugin for Rails from Ariejan.net, how can I resist using it. I’m rolling it out in my current project and starting to feel the ease of customization.

Stay tuned for more updates on how it would turn out.

Great Captcha idea from Railsify

Tempted to signup again for a new one.

The most innovative imaging service I’ve seen since Riya and Photosynth. Fotowoosh, a real innovation, through Freewebs.

The service (currently in alpha) takes your regular 2D images and transfers them into 3D ones automatically.

I guess this makes freewebs a very good buyout candidate to <place_your_favorite_company_here>

via TechCrunch

I still can get a laugh seeing some applications. Web 2.0 Application for sale - helping you flip

http://web2.0forsale.com/

Well … I guess it’s never too late.

I’ve seen this video a while back, but, why not share the admiration with few more.

“The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less” by Prof. Barry Schwartz - Google Tech Talks series.

A Great paging pattern has been implemented by Unspace. The 'Pageless Endless' pattern uses Ajax to load the 'next' result page content at the bottom of the current (single) result page. Easy and simple, I like it. Similar patterns have been around (Rico's Activegrid et al), but, this is the least intrusive I've seen.

Demo: Live Filter
Via: Quoted-Printable

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I'm off to Amman, Jordan, to meet the team behind iToot.  We'll be mostly talking RoR, the web, and whatever we'll come up with.

I first came to know itoot from their posting on jobs.rubynow where they announced a need for a RoRailer. We started corresponding back in April, but things didn't materialize except in the last couple of weeks.

Despite the fact that I'm a bit worried (you know: uncharted territory, people I don't know in person, leaving family, etc…), yet, something has been pushing me to go. I think it's the team's prespective about the web, its power, and what seems to be big plans for the future.

So, wish me luck and keep me in your prayers.

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Remember the idea I once had? (as if I have dedicated reads :-).. Well, it's resurfaced again.

As I was reviewing itoot, I wanted to know what itoot bloggers are really talking about. So, another Mashup? pretty close. My idea was to aggregate the feeds, parse them, pass their contents to an auto-tagging service/API, then put the result in a Tagcloud-form. Ruby to the rescue. After reviewing the quickest shortcuts, here's what I did:

1. Getting feed urls (directly from FF Web-Developer  adorable plugin)
2. Using Feedtools ruby script for parsing feed contents and generating a unified Atom feed.
3. Zoomclouds.com for the rest (auto-tagging the unified feed + tag-cloud).

Here's the result. Do I like it? Absolutely not. It's seems that the tag cloud was based only on the first few “English” feeds.

So, are there any “better” auto-tagging services/APIs? here're my finds:

• Tag-the-net (no non-English support, REST API, no weighed results, strange result structure, Ruby API)
• Yahoo Term-Extraction Service (no non-English support, REST API, No weighed results)
• Tagcloud (getting-an-overhaul status)
• Tagyu (Thank's-for-all-the-fish status)
• Zoomclouds (no non-English support, REST API, Weighed Results).

According to Ryan King, Yahoo term extraction (which is “sometimes” used by Zoomclouds as their backend) seems to use a statistical analysis to arrange the extracted terms. Yes! I agree. Tagging (as per delicious) is a human based activity, and automating it does not serve what it was really intended for. BUT, in the case at hand, Tags (aka terms, aka keywords) are an intermediate product, and in this case, service some functional need rather a presentable end product.

Now, back to my “evolved” idea. Using the technology at hand, I can use RSS to get information, come up with some BI tool that do some text-processing and correlate information about organizations, products, people, and events (nodes?), then present these information to the end user using some neat visualization. Something along the lines of a central semantic web

The technology still lacks the part that does text-processing and correlation of information. If I settled for an auto-tagging or term extraction service to help cover this part, then coming up with such service sounds like a good idea. Especially if the system covers some non-English languages (Arabic to name a few), is pluggable (REST) and has some output format options.

I feel that the idea is obvious that it must have been handled some way or the other. Can u point out any?

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