One day while I was scavenging through her pocketbook, I pulled out a gorgeous lace handkerchief, heavy enough that I knew something was in it. I carefully unfolded it and unwrapped what looked like diamonds and saffires.

If you have any interest in antiques and collectibles, click on over we are sure that you’ll enjoy it.

“I’m a big fan of the whole folksonomy thing,” said James Kendall, who writes the Online Music Blog. “But I do think this is innovative in that I don’t know of any other services where you can go and with a couple clicks build this and put it on your site.”

Not the most eloquent phrase I have ever uttered…

The map tool that is located on the home page of this site is a combination of technologies. The map and all of the images belong to Google and come from maps.google.com. The data is extracted from the 2000 United States Census and can be downloaded from www.census.gov.

JD recently completed his Masters program at The University of Mississippi where one of the projects was processing large quantities of data and Google had just released its map technology. The two were a perfect match and GCensus is the result.

A working product showing off the cool stuff that can happen when folks, in this case Yahoo! opens up content and services for a developer to use in his own applications. Folksonomies & Tagging are all the rage lately (See Flickr and del.icio.us for the most popular examples), so we thought it would be fun to see what happens when you automate the process.

Way to go John, too bad you weren’t given the time and resourses to do cool stuff like this while you were at D2, if so, maybe there would still be a D2… You can see an example of this in action here.

Update:

I asked John if he thought it would scale:

ok, let’s answer your questions. i think it’ll scale. Database is normalized. I don’t fetch anything I don’t need to. Yahoo API allows 5000 calls per IP per 24 hours, so I have a round robin system that uses a table of servers. It knows how many calls each server has made, and optimizes. I wrote the remote fetch script to take an interface parameter, so for instance, I installed it on one server with 23 IPs. I only had to install the script once.

Then I asked him what customization he was planning:

As far as customization, eventually I’ll do something like adsense ad customization, but for now, I think some well written css tutorials will suffice. I also want to add a parameter so that you can specify a number of results. So if you only want a tiny cloud, you could add /25 to the url and get only that number of tags.

Not only that, but it turns out that he has gotten a lot of free stuff:

• free iPod
• free iPod shuffle
• free samsung 15″ LCD Flatscreen Monitor/TV
• free Cyberpower Gaming Desktop PC
• free sony PSP
• $250 via PayPal

This impressive list combined with this being a guy that I trust and respect made me wonder if I had been to quick to dismiss these “free” offers programs. As it turns out they are not exactly free, you have to sign up for an “offer” and that usually involves a credit card. To be fair the charge on the card is negligible ( one offer is only $5 ) and that same offer is a breeze to cancel after you use up that first five bucks. Then you need to convince x number of other people to sign up for one of the offers.

These programs are through Gratis and OfferCentric, and they seem to be legit – I have since verified this with a few other colleagues who are now sporting their free iPods. When you go to sign up and complete your first offer it looks as if these programs have the best reviews: Tickle IQ Test, Zooba, Consumer Info, Blockbuster Online, and StarClub Rewards.

So if you are interested in working this MLM type deal and trying to get a “free” iBook or windows type laptop – sign up with this link so that I can get credit for the refferal. This is an experiment for me and will continue bloggin the progress, report any problems, and then follow up when it is all over.

John has created this here Yahoo! News Tag Soup dealio.

After discovering the Content Analysis web service I decided it would be fun to see what Yahoo! thought the important keywords would be from it’s own news feeds. I was also interested to see if I could use some simple analysis to see what the ‘hot’ keywords were.

By tapping into the Yahoo! web services, I have access to all kinds of content and search functionality. What used to be accomplished through dirty screen scraping hacks can now be done easier, quicker, and legitimately though a REST interface that can be implemented in most any programming language. The end effect is that people much smarter than me can mash web content into interesting ways that the original authors never intended.

John is up to interesting stuff these days, make sure to read his “How does this work?” page, and keep your eyes peeled for more new kung-fu from them ninja.

This issue was decided once upon a time back in the day with the “Betamax Decision” (Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios). In a nutshell since Sony sold the Betamax VCR Universal sued them on the grounds that since consumers could use the Betamax to record Universal’s copyrighted works Sony was liable.

Of course the court had the good sense to rule that just because some one could use the Betamax for nefarious purposes it didn’t mean that Sony was liable for that use.

All that may be changing with this here Grokster case and if so you should be prepared to lose quite a bit of your heretofore “fair use” rights. If Grokster is ruled illegal because it abets Contributory Infringement what’s next? The iPod? Windows? The Net?

The bigger picture in my mind is the need for a Reasonable Intellectual Property Policy.

Not much there yet except for the home page and the gallery itself, but she’ll flesh it out directly.