Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Chinese wikipedia

As you may know on October 11th Wikipedia has been again unblocked in China. Andrew Lih presents us this chart showing the access to the site. Although noone can be sure that current situation will last for a long time, but we can already see the numbers of it's users growing very rapidly day by day according to Creative Class Blog. I definitely wish that this "unblocked period" would last as long as possible so that we all could receive more information from China and about China.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Google imagelabeler

Ok. The task is as follows. You have about a billion images that need to be labeled. And obviously you want to spend as little money, time and effort on this as possible.

Goooge deals with this in a great way, presenting us, casual users, with google imagelabeler. It simple, fun for us and really easy to use. And there you go. People just do the work for you.

Great management idea. I am truly amazed.

Dead man winning the elections

Really like such things. Isn't it amazing? Sam Duncan won the elections to the local county board in North Carolina already being dead for about a month. This totally shows the fact that people don't really care for local administration. Hope nothing like that will ever happen to a person running for President office in any country.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

The History of Windows

Recently found the page, showing the screenshots of Windows Operating System since version 1.0. I, personally, as well as the author of the page, have have been using each one of them since version 3.11. But I would really want to see 1.0 or at least 2.0 before I definitely decide to switch to Linux.

Technorati latest

So David Sifry has given his analysis of the situation in the Blogosphere telling us about how much has the Blogosphere grown lately, stating the fact that it still has a long way to go until blogs become a mainstream media and letting me know that my native language, which is Russian, is only about 2% of total posting volume.

Among the most media-blogs are Engadget, Boing Boing, chinese Xujingle, Gizmodo and surely TechCrunch. I am subscribed to four English blogs, but does anybody have any idea what the Chinese one focuses on?

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Discovering the flickr

I've had a talk with one of my colleagues yesterday. He has finally discovered flickr.com and was extremely excited with it's simplicity and usability. "Look," he told me, pointing on the menu buttons. "These are just simple boxes. And when you place our mouse cursor over one of them, it just shows a border around it. That should be about 5 lines of code." And later, "And their Yahoo maps with labels showing some images is just what I am currently doing for one of my projects!"

Yes, that is all correct - flickr, yahoo, google and all the other web 2.0 companies are not as much about technology itself as microsoft or apple used to be when they appeared. And it is not only the great idea - google was not the first search engine to appear. It is a little bit of both, plus great management, plus a business angel and/or VC fund to help you. And I am really excited, that people surrounding me start to understand this which becomes a first step to creating something worthy in the field of web-technologies and not just writing code.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The Domino Effect

Guys from eepybird.com have held a new experiment with Mentos and Diet Coke. The Domino Effect is really amazing.

Mentos & Diet Coke II - The Domino Effect