I was going through my feeds today and came across a post on Scobleizer about a “New Virtual world coming from Australia“, which talks about another Secondlife like virtual world being developed. The virtual world is named Outback Online with the tag-line “User Generated Places”, and is being developed by Yoick. The basic aim of the project seems to be to provide a 3D social network. Right now, there is not much information available on the site or the blog, other than a beta sign-up form.
Author: Aditya
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Useless Account – just for laughs
Another site I came across through one of my Google Reader subscriptions – Useless Account. It basically satirizes the rate at which people (me included) are signing up for new services that are mushrooming on the net. The site allows you to create an account and tinker around with it – that’s about it. Read the faqs section for some more laughs. And no, I have not signed up for an account on the site….. yet :-).
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Software Wars
An interesting “graphic map depicting the epic struggle of FOSS against the Empire of Microsoft”.
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Make: iPod stethoscopes, chargers etc
I came across the Make: site through one of my RSS feeds, and it has quite a lot of interesting projects and podcasts on it. The site has quite a few projects for/using the iPod, including an iPod based stethoscope which can be used to record and playback heart sounds, a USB adapter and charger kit among many others. There are also many other projects like an open source mp3 player, an alarm clock that runs away and a wifi liberator.
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Social networking through Google Reader
I have been using Google Reader for a while now. It is quite handy when one wants to be in sync with different feeds across different machines. Also, now it is possible to add feeds directly to it through Firefox 2.0, which makes it quite convenient to use. The other useful feature is the ability to share interesting entries. It is also possible to subscribe to feeds of others’ shared items.
In some ways, it is similar to social bookmarking, but the difference lies in the ability to browse and share the items of interface through a single interface. There is also a clip available which can be inserted into sites, similar to the dogear bookmarks. The import/export feature is also useful, as you can use Google Reader to transfer feed subscriptions across machines. Basic organization features include tagging and starring items. There’s also a mobile version available for those looking to read feeds on the move.
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Overlawyered and Secondlife parodies
I was going through my Google Reader subscriptions when I came across this post on the American legal system, and through it the site Overlawyered. The site makes for quite a lot of interesting reading. It also had a reference to Secondlife, rather a reference to the Secondlife parodying site “Get A First Life“, which seems to have got
intotrouble withan interesting response from Linden labs. -
World Wide 3dWeb
I was checking out the Crystal Space 3D site (the engine behind Planeshift, an MMORPG) and projects using the Crystal Space engine. I came across a project named Festonia which aims at creating a world wide 3d web. The project has released the first 0.01 alpha version of the 3d browser, and as per the site is supposed to be in testing (didn’t find it for download though). The project seems to be aimed towards providing ways to setup 3D web servers for 3D websites. This probably makes it somewhat different from Secondlife, though a 3D web could very well take the form of Secondlife which has facility for content creation, ownership and its own economy.
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Information overload and Adhocracy
I was checking out the page on “information overload” on wikipedia, which is one of the major hindrances to quick decision making and quite common in the current information age. The term was apparently coined by Alvin Toffler in his book “Future Shock“. So, I also looked up the page on this book and found another interesting term “Adhocracy” which was also popularized by Alvin Toffler. As per the page, adhocracy is the opposite of bureaucracy and the seems to be quite relevant for innovative organizations. The basic idea is behind adhocracy is to have a dynamism and flexibility to tackling different situations which is absent from bureaucracy.
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The 7 habits and the 6 hats
I purchased the book “How to have a beautiful mind” by Edward de Bono last weekend. I have covered about half the book so far. It talks about the different angles to discussions in general and the thoughts behind them along with ways to make interactions more meaningful for all the parties concerned. It also had a chapter on de Bono’s six thinking hats (it is also supposed to be covered in the “Start Thinking” course on Learning@IBM). The concepts are quite interesting, and does give some tips to make make you think.
I also found many of the concepts discussed about the thinking hats in particular to be quite similar to the 7 habits discussed by Stephen Covey in his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” (I have not read this particular book, but the one by his son Sean Covey for teenagers about 6-7 years back). In particular, the concept of the six hats is quite similar to habits 4 (think win/win) and 5 (seek first to understand, then to be understood). So, in effect, both de Bono and Stephen Covey’s concepts aim at making interactions between people more productive and trying to look at things from different angles rather than just putting forward one’s thoughts and trying to get the better of an interaction.
I also think that these concepts are quite relevant in today’s world where social collaboration, networking (which would also be in some ways bring in “the wisdom of the crowds“) and innovation are the buzzwords. It is important to see things form various angles and seek different opinions, especially given the degree of connectivity available to us. So, although both the concepts are close to 2 decades old, they still retain their values in today’s environment.
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Pangrams & Golygons
I was browsing wikipedia where I came across self-enumerating pangrams which are sentences that describe exactly the number of letters in itself. As per the wikipedia page on pangrams, Lee Sallows came up with one of the first self-enumerating pangrams, in 1984. In fact, he constructed a machine for this task when solving the problem through software alone failed.
As for pangrams, they are sentences using every letter of the alphabet atleast once, with perfect pangrams being sentences in which each alphabet appears exactly once. A well known English pangram is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
I also found some information on another interesting piece – golygons – when I was looking for more information on Lee Sallows, who invented them. Golygons are polygons with side lengths as consecutive integers and all right angles.
