This brilliant zinger and more await you at Dear Blank, Please Blank.
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Tag: cool links
This amazing composite image hosted by NASA and other cool images are hosted over at Thought Bubbles, a running archive of occasional wallpaper images and quotes I’ve been curating since 2005.
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More LinkedIn Visualizations
A couple more visualizations that use the LinkedIn API that I missed on the previous post.
LinkedIn Maps announced yesterday creates a poster-ready view of your LinkedIn network complete with color-coding showing how everyone is related. This type of visualization can reveal interesting things about your career. In my case, it looks like my colleagues from Dow Jones are really off on their own while my Six Apart, Yahoo, and web 2.0 friends are much closer together with my more recent connections from Nokia are scattered in between.
LinkedIn Infinity uses the cooliris technology to let you look at nothin’ but faces. Nothing really innovative about this but a crowd-pleasure nonetheless.
Finally, LinkedIn Signal, while not a visualization, is extremely useful way to parse your social network feeds using your LinkedIn networks as a filter. This is really powerful because it lets you filter away the noise and see updates filtered by Industry, Location, School, or Company. If you add multiple filters together, you quickly get very focused results. Want to see what people in your network (and their friends) that work at Microsoft in Japan are saying about Facebook? Tick a few boxes and you have it.
All this and more are featured on the LinkedIn Labs page.
Just re-discovered Dipity which was a cool tool for creating timelines. They now have jumped onto the lifestreaming bandwagon and provide a way to publish and share a portion of your lifestream in a visual way.
Larry and Andy Wachowski made their name with The Matrix trilogy of movies. In their first release since that series of movies, Speed Racer (due out in May 2008) is an on screen adoption of the popular Japanese cartoon from the Sixties. Today Warner Brothers released a few stills from the movie and it’s looking pretty amazing.
USA Today has the full story with more stills.
UPDATE: AOL has the trailer in High-Def!
Just to see if I could do it, I went way beyond my normal running course and took the long way home. When I got home I used runningmap.com to measure the distance. Very cool tool.
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Found with Davy Rothbart
While my normal commute hour is filled with podcasts from the usual tech talk shows and NPR highlights, every now and then I dip into the vast archive of talks over on itconversations.com and pick a few interesting lectures.
Today I found a gem! Davy Rothbart runs Found magazine and speaks at Pop Tech about the weird and wonderful ephemera people find on the streets of America.
Davy Rothbard @ Pop Tech 2005 (about 35 minutes)
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Surfing One Huge Wave
The site that hosts this video tries to pawn this off as a shot of someone surfing Hurricane Ivan but the comments seem to agree that this 70 foot plus monster was off the coast of Hawaii at a place called Jaws and that the guy did make it after all. Still, the video has to be seen to be believed – you don’t really realize how big the wave is until it begins to break.
Amazing!
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Wonderful Web World
As I look for the cross-section of schools and interesting-but-reasonably-priced places to exist (does such a thing exist in the Bay Area?) I found myself wanting for a school district map overlayed on top of a map showing available placed to live. I’ve found pieces of the puzzle:
SF School District Map
greatschools.org
SF Zip Code Map
If only I could overlay the available listings which you can pull up in realtor.com or apartments.com using a zip code then I would be set.
In the course of looking for a tool that could tie zip codes to neighborhoods to school districts, I ran across this wonderful site by MIT Media Lab doctoral candidate, Ben Fry. His interactive Zip Code tool is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in awhile.
UPDATE: Now 10 years later Google Maps has started to layer this information as an extension of their Google Maps service. Check out the mash-up of greatschools.org ratings and Google Maps.
Check out more mashups at the Google Maps Gallery.
Boing Boing points to another mini-site put up by the Miami-based ad agency behind Subservient Chicken. These guys are re-writing the rules of Western advertising with their deconstructionalist, tongue-in-cheek dig at stereotypes and creative use of new and old media to position their clients’ products. I’ve been the bemused recipient of some of their other materials promoting the mini and Virgin Airlines.
Their New Employee Handbook which you can get to by clicking the “employment” link is both inspirational and a good read. It also is a shining example of how to set the right tone at a young, vibrant company looking to take on the world. From the guide:
We Ask that you Don’t
Throw sand.
Be selfish.
Disparage others.
Talk shit.
Duck responsibility.
Play the busy card.
Leave others hanging.
Make excuses.
Disappear.
Make promises you don’t keep.
Say it can’t be done.