#19 – Award Winning

Well, here’s an entry that I can’t just completely decry the exercise, you guys are asking me to actually find something I like. Sigh

But seriously, I’ve been a user of Last.fm for a couple months now, and I’m a big fan of its properties and interface. For those of you unaware Last.fm is a site that records the titles and artists of the music you listen to on whatever media player you use.

It takes this data and creates charts to show your favorite artist, track, etc., and then takes this data to compare to other users. When the results get back, it also creates charts of recommendations for you, based on other people having similar music tastes. Not only all of this, but it also allows for the listening of thousands of music tracks, in case you want to try some of these recommendations out before you buy. They even go as far as spawning personalized radio stations that allow you to listen to collections of your favorite music, or that of your recommendations.

To retrieve the data, all you have to do is download a small utility that runs in your background. The only trick is if there’s any reason for you to turn this off, you just have to remember to turn it back on. I forgot for about two weeks, so the results I’ll show you aren’t as complete as I’d like. For those interested, my Last.fm page can be located here.

Content Aggregation and Management? C’mon people, you could’ve figured this out on your own. These are sites and tools that are focused on getting data and organizing it. Most of the featured sites’ main facets are spreadsheet programs. The first place Wufoo seems a lot more complete, allowing users to create whatever forms they want for collecting information.

If you will dare, I will dare

#18 – Decentralizing the Office(tm)

Collaborative work has long been a staple of good offices. Too many cooks might spoil the pot, but having more than one avoids oversights, errors, and greatly expands the pool of ideas. Google Docs and Zoho both facilitate this by providing office applications hosted on the internet, this way workers can use and edit the same document without having to pass around a physical copy or send edits via email – a time saver on both counts.

My only real criticisms for all of this are points that would not prevent me from utilizing them: it is perpetually in development software, which can lead to the public using buggy programs; and I’ve heard hearsay stories of documents simply getting lost and other horror stories, but these are few and far between.

She said, “My sails are flapping in the wind.”
I said, “Can I use that in a song?”
She said, “I mean the end begins.”
I said, “I know.
Can I use that too?”

#17 – Building sandcastles in spite of the waves

Altogether, contributing to the wiki was a pleasant experience.

Option-wise, you don’t have many customization choices for your own posts, but I really view this as a godsend. This way, people aren’t going too crazy with their fonts and images and ruining the simplicity of the wiki. There may not be many aesthetic options, but when looking at a wiki page, you’re looking for that familiar format so that you can parse through the page’s information as quickly as possible.

Walking through a paper town
Counting all the reasons to burn the others down