Monthly archive: November 2008

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• CSSKarma.com | Header and Footer in the Semantic Web
  Sensible argument to rename header, main, sidebar and footer divs to branding, content_main, content_sub and site_info respectively, to move away from positioning info.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the basics
  Very good article with the basics that anyone can understand and implement.
• Using Friendfeed as a Lifestream within WordPress
  Using the embed option in FriendFeed, with a tiny bit of hackery.
• The Map of Data – Sindice
  'Over 10 billion pieces of reusable information can already be found across 100 million web pages which embed RDF and Microformats.' – index grouped in categories.
• Website Optimizer
  Free tool from Google: 'Test [website] changes with your visitors – Website Optimizer will [...] show these content and design alternatives to your site visitors, all the while monitoring which combinations lead to the highest conversion rates.'
• Micro Persuasion: Making Gmail Your Gateway to the Web
  I use Gmail to do most of the things listed in this article, and I have recently changed my start page to Gmail too.

1. The tallest building in Europe (the 268-metre Naberezhnaya Tower) is in Moscow, where construction of an even taller building was stopped this week.
2. Ping.fm also lets you update your (Twitter, Facebook, etc) status via IM.
3. You can skip typing 'www.' and '.com' in the address bar if you press Ctrl and Enter together. Found out in Chrome but checked and it works in Firefox, IE7 and Safari.
4. Greasemonkey's founder, Aaron Boodman, works on the Google Chrome team.
5. Illy coffee and Coca-Cola announced a global joint venture to produce a premium ready-to-drink espresso in October 2007. My caffeine days are over, but I am curious to know if this is out yet, or if it has flopped before even being released.
6. Music producer and songwriter Felix Howard (who wrote, among other things, Stronger for the Sugababes) was the child dancer in Madonna's 'Open Your Heart' video.
7. If you copy some text and paste it into a folder, Windows will create a 'Scrap Object'. I accidentally found out at work using XP, then tried it at home but the paste option does not seem to be available on Vista Home Premium.

1. 'Mr Smith', the alien computer in The Sarah Jane Adventures, is voiced by comedian Alexander Armstrong.
2. You can easily get the higher quality version (if available) for any YouTube video by sticking &fmt=18 at the end of the URL (or &fmt=22 for highest quality).
3. Cyndi Lauper's mother, Catrine, played herself in the 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' video.
4. In Google Chrome you can right-click the top of the browser window, or right-click the taskbar tab to access Task Manager.
5. In Lichtenstein women were granted the vote in general elections in 1984.
6. The word galore, meaning in abundance, descends from the Gaelic (Irish 'go leor' and Scottish Gaelic 'gu leòr') expression meaning enough, plenty.
7. The largest fully functional WiMAX network in the world is in Pakistan.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Tarpipe: Simplify Your Social Media Workflow – ReadWriteWeb
  'Tarpipe allows you to develop complex workflows for publishing content to multiple social media sites through an intuitive, Yahoo Pipes-like interface.'
• How To: How to Burn Any Video File to a Playable Video DVD
  DVD Flick (free and open source), and Free DVD Creator (free, not open source).
• How to Organize Mental Clutter | ThinkSimpleNow.com
  Write all tasks down, divide them into life categories (work, household, wellbeing, personal projects…), then budget time for each category and stick to it, while dealing with the highest priority for each category.
• Linked Data Tutorial – SlideShare
  A slide show tutorial for absolute beginners on Linked Data
• London (harder, better, faster, stronger) on Vimeo
  Stop motion with more then 3000 pictures of London in less then 2 minutes to the sound of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" (live version).
• How to Write a Daily Express Front Page
  Handy flowchart for Daily Express journalists.
• HOW TO: Convert Videos for Your iPhone (or Any Mobile Device)
  'Here are the best solutions for converting videos online as well as off. Some will convert any video you have on your local computer while others will only convert videos that you find online. In any case, you will wind up with a video file in the correct format for your Apple or other mobile device.'
• Old-Fashioned Homemade Ice Cream … – Google Book Search
  'This informative, enthusiastic guide provides complete instructions and helpful advice for making delicious homemade ice cream, either in a hand-cranked or electric freezer. '
• How the Semantic Web Will Change Information Management: Three Predictions (by Silver Oliver)
  'A lot has been written about what the Semantic Web is, but little has been said about the impact it will have. After a brief recap on what the Semantic Web is all about, I will discuss three effects that it will have on the information management.'
• Lifestreaming 101: Put All Your Content in One Place with Google Reader
  I did this over the weekend, you can subscribe to my lifestream at http://feeds.feedburner.com/lucabelletti/lifestream

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• Half marathon training
  Thorough explanation of training practices and schedules.
• Juice – The intelligent discovery engine from Linkool Labs (Now available as Firefox plugin)
  'When dropping text into Juice, we'll try to understand its meaning and serve you with context-relevant information. In the case of images or videos, we'll let you store them for later viewing, while you keep browsing just the way you like!'
• Interesting Semantic Web links « Derivadow.com
  9 classic and useful semantic web links.
• BBC polygon of data on TwitPic
  The BBC polygon of data: Semantic web, visualisation by Michael Smethurst
• How To: Live the Cloud Life – PaulStamatiou.com
  Pretty much what I do. My setup: Gmail, Google Docs, JungleDisk with Amazon S3 (online backup), Simplify Media (music), Phoenix (photo editing, but more often Photoshop on desktop), Flickr, Foxmarks (Firefox bookmarks sync, but using Chrome because it's faster).
• BBC – Radio Labs – Automatically linking artists and news on the BBC Music Beta
  BBC news stories have editorially selected related links. MusicBrainz lists related links for each artist. bbc.co.uk/music cross-references the two and provides an RSS feed of news for each artist.
• Video of Nova Spivack's Semantic Web presentation
  'This is the full presentation of Nova Spivack at The Next Web Conference 2008 which took place on April 3 and 4, 2008 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.'
• [true knowledge]™ – home
  'True Knowledge's path-breaking Answer Engine automates the laborious, time-consuming work that users generally must do to get final answers to their questions. True Knowledge does this by structuring data in a way that enables computers to work and think like humans do, drawing inferences and conclusions when needed to find the information that's requested.'
• List of FriendFeed Over IM commands
  'Once you have enabled IM notifications, you can also post messages and comments to your FriendFeed by sending IM commands to the FriendFeed bot.'
• The Channel Five TV Documentary Title Generator
  I got 'The Girl Who Loved The Pencil Sharpener That Had No Stomach'.
• Official Google Reader Blog: Better Cooking Through Reader-ing
  Tag your recipes with ingredients and category to find them easily

1. Leonardo DiCaprio's mother is German.
2. The record for most voices recorded on an audiobook by a single person is held by Jim Dale for his 146 voices in Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows.
3. Apple released a games console (the Apple Bandai Pippin) in the mid-nineties.
4. The Google Reader shortcuts to add subscriptions and email items are respectively a and e.
5. Wile E. Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert.
6. Wile E. Coyote is a pun on the word 'wily' (shrewd, cunning) – a word I have learnt this week.
7. The origin of the name London might be traced to the pre-Celtic Old European 'Plowonida' meaning 'boat river or flooding river, river too wide to ford'.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• SemanticHacker
  The world's first open API for semantic discovery.
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.
• A list of very nice and free social buttons | Opensourcehunter
• Last.fm’s 'most removed from scrobbling' list
  Britney is in the top five tracks that last.fm users remove from the lists of what they listen to. Shame! Own up to it – I do.
• Featured Windows Download: Gmail Drive Config Mounts Multiple Gmail Accounts as Disks
  How to get a Gmail account set up as network storage in minutes. Still very experimental, works with Gmail Drive.
• Get Glue. Connect with friends around things you visit!
  Firefox add-on: 'The Glue bar appears right on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought!'

1. Benicio del Toro was an extra in Madonna's La Isla Bonita video (you can spot him sitting on the car at 3:14).
2. You can now link to a precise point in YouTube videos. If you have not done so already, click on the Madonna video link above to check it.
3. Rudyard Kipling had a swastika on the covers of his books until the ancient Indian symbol was appropriated by Nazism.
4. If you hit the Shift key five times you can turn on 'Sticky Keys', an accessibility feature that lets you type multi-key combinations with one finger.
5. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen prefer not to be interviewed together.
6. Gwyneth Paltrow has a website called Goop.
7. Davina McCall is Britain's favourite gym buddy.