Can be fun. Unless they want you to help them to fix a borked system. That's not fun.
But doing charitable work is. I have had one or two chances to do nice things for other people thanks to my work at the station and it was good. It probably wasn't enough though. There must be a way to do more.
And there is. Even if you can't spare the time or the cash to help out your favorite cause, you can still help others find a way to help. The site emailcharity.com makes it easy for you. Just head on over to the site, choose a campaign, register, and get everything you need to include a custom signature in your mails that will link to the contributions page for that project.
It's quick and painless, and it might just do some good.
for those of you who are geeky enough to run your own blog, or website, but aren't geeky enough to actually go out and code their own software for it. People who hear cms, php, and sql and want to run screaming into the arms of the next lobotomist may want to look away. If that last sentence didn't already result in a full frontal lobotomy that is.
Simplepie is a nifty bit of software that makes it pretty easy for wannabe geeks like me to put together a personally version of something like friendfeed. Just without the social bit. It's basically an rss feed aggregator for your site, one that can be used to pull down content from all of those other sites you are so busy keeping full of pictures and reviews and things. With the simplepie plugin for your cms software of choice, you can turn all of that info into content on your own page.
Of course, really evil types could probably figure out somme ways to use this for making fake blogs and adfarms using other peoples labors, but being the optimistic person that I am, I can only assume you will all want to use it for the right reasons.
Just one tip. If you start playing with some of these things, and already have some kind of twitter interactions set up... disable it before you start playing around with this. Trust me. Your followers will love you for it.
can be an amazing source of inspiration. It's not just a global marketplace for useless gadgets and peoples used junk, it's also a brilliant look into the darker places of the human soul.
Take gift-giving for example. It's one of those things that should really bring out the best in human nature. Nothing like giving a gift to express gerneosity, love, and just general warm-fuzziness right?
All lovely things that some people would seem to be allergic to.
Like the ebay seller stuck in Poland who is willing to help you give the gift of insanity to that special someone in your life. How do they propose to do that? By sending that someone annoying postcards with mindbending texts and nuggets of personal information that a complete stranger couldn't possibly know.
Bidding is stil going on, but it better be for someone for whom you have a really really special place in your heart, because the price last I checked was $198.
have an interesting approach to gathering donations. They have a site up called Schnellehilfewirkt that is a perfect example of a web2.0 mashup. For those of you looking at ways of automatically generating content for your page it might have some nifty ideas.
It also has an easy way for you to help them. You can click on a banner and donate immediately if you want of course, but they also make it easy for you to collect donations from your own site. You can generate a badge to be placed on your page so your readers can donate, and you can then follow how much that button has generated.
You can do some good and get some ego stroking at the same time.
Someone was being pretty clever...
you are sharing your photos on flickr, displaying your indy cred on last.fm, leaving a crumb-trail in del.icio.us, and maybe letting people know what you think on your blog?
That's great.
But it can get a little hard to follow. Throw in myspace, facebook, and all the rest and it can get downright annoying. And don't even talk to me about trying to keep your contacts up do date with all of the things you might be trying out.
Online life aggregators have been popping up for a while no to try do deal with that problem. Facebook can help you round up a good portion of your online life into one place, but it's only good for other people who are there. The truly interesting ones are the ones that make it as easy as possible for you to maintain it while making it as easy as possible for readers to use it as they need.
FriendFeed does an okay job. It will put all of your fun stuff into one tidy feed that you can then present to your friend on your blog or in facebook, or you can just send the the feed link and let them do with it what they will.
It's not earth shattering, but it is clever, and it's made by the guy ho came up with gmail and some of that other google stuff.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do something like this on our VK's?
like to claim that gaming is actually good for you. That it can actually increase your motor skills, make you faster, more intelligent, and just generally a better person.
I don't know how true that is,(despite having used the argument against my mom many times) but now we can add something else to the list. It's important academic research.
Nero2.0 is a game that has been developed as a tool for research in intelligent agents. Research that looks like a tactical 3d war game.
So download it, play it and remember this: You're doing it for science.
Wien | 22.12.2007 | 12:00 
