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TripSay Brings Travel Recommendations From People Like You

Guy McDowell — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:01:38 +0000

Every travel destination has its fans – people that say, “You should go!” What if the person that says you should go just loves to sit in a pool and drink all day? (not that that’s a bad thing!)

But, let’s say it’s not your thing. Where can you find travel recommendations from people like you? Sure you could ask your friends, yet their travel experiences will be somewhat limited. What about having a site that matches your travel tastes with other people with similar interests?

That’s the niche the Finland-based TripSay is going after. I’d say they’re doing a pretty darn good job of it. I found this site using StumbleUpon, since I seldom travel or look at travel sites. The design intrigued me. It’s clean, kind of Web 2.0 with nice controls and a super intuitive interface. So, I started to play with it.

On the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll see the icons above. Pretty self-explanatory aren’t they? Although I don’t know why an orange heart is better than a pink one. Wouldn’t red be more obvious? At first I didn’t know what the Dislike button was supposed to be. Was it a blue boob or a blue bum? A blue bum made more sense, since one of the places I put the symbol on smells like bum. Yes, I just put that in an article. Journalism at its finest, folks.

In case you were wondering, it was Toronto. Let the flames begin! The cloud with the snore Z’ds are for the places you dream of going to.

TripSay wants you to tag at least 5 places before continuing. Now, keep in mind, you do this even before you sign up. That’s smart. It gets you to use the site completely risk free – you don’t even need to give them your e-mail address. That earned a degree of trust from me right away.

After that, you just click on the Proceed button to see your results:

I found what it returned to me to be a bit surprising! These weren’t places that I normally would have considered going, or even looked up. However, once I read the travel recommendations and reviews and the travel profiles of the people that TripSay said were similar to me, I started to really get into it all! Here’s the number one travel recommendation that it had for me:

I don’t know how to pronounce it, but it sounded cool. At first, when I saw a graveyard, I thought this must be some sort of morose joke. But the more I looked into Oaxaca, the more I realized how rich in culture and history it is. It’s not the super-resort of other Mexican places like Puerto Vallarta or the overcrowded metropolises that I despise like Mexico City.

At this point, I signed up for the free membership to the site. For the next few hours I played with it more and added more places I’ve liked, disliked or dreamed of going to. I found that there is a Groups section to the site. Within these groups, you’ll find people with similar life interests to you. From there, you can view their travel recommendations and get an idea of even more places to visit. I like the fact that there is a group for people that travel with children. That often makes things a bit more…interesting when travelling.

Once you set up a profile of yourself, you can add specific interests to your profile to get even more accurate results. For me it was things like relaxing, history, culture, arts, reading, etc. The auto-suggest feature does come up with some funny results as you start typing though. I started putting history in but I misspelled it as histr. Here’s what it suggested:

I really should have chosen histrionic personality disorder to see what would be recommended. Probably Bellevue Hospital. On second thought, it does look pretty cool.

The Me as a traveller control is a great idea too. Just a simple slider control to find where your balance is on some aspects of travelling. Even as someone who loves history and would love to travel Europe for 6 months or so, I do have a fairly tight budget. I’m also not multilingual. I’m more sesquilingual – one and half languages. French being the half. Oddly enough, I can pick out conversational themes in most Romantic languages as well as German. As long as they are speaking slow enough. Travel sports like waterskiing and such aren’t my thing either. I’m more of a museum guy.

You can always continue on adding places that you’ve been to and liked, or disliked. Since TripSay utilizes Google Maps, you can zoom right down to pretty much street level. At this point, you can even recommend a particular restaurant or attraction.

Here’s the zoom-in on Vancouver B.C., Canada with my favourited places. We weren’t there for more than a day, but I’d highly recommend it as a destination for anyone, not just museumnistas like me.

Add to this whole mix the fact that there is no advertising, or trying to get you to book trips through them, the experience is an excellent one. I guarantee that this site will go into heavy rotation on my bookmarks.

Do you have any expereinces with TripSay that you’d like to share? Just got some great travel recommendations? We’d love to read them in the comments below!

Image Credit: Kerry Vaughan

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The 3 Really Good Web Forums I Couldn’t Live Without

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:01:47 +0000

I spend so much time online nowadays with blogging, reading blogs, researching, writing and a little more reading. This is the information age and there is so much knowledge out there.

But when I suggest a forum to a non-technical friend I usually get that “deer trapped in headlights look” – you know exactly what I am talking about!

Blogs offer insight into one person’s head and in the case of MakeUseOf a lot of people’s heads. But a forum is a collection of peoples posts and comments as a way to share knowledge.

I use a lot of different forums for my Windows Mobile Phone addiction, my all things software and hardware site and a little Car fun with my automobile forum. I am going to show you these three really good forums I use daily and what they are all about. Hey I might even convince you to go check out some forums that are right up your alley!

First up is XDA Developers. XDA, as I affectionately call it, is my one stop shop for customizing, troubleshooting and modifying any HTC device. If you have not read my Windows Mobile Guide, you should check it out. I talk extensively about XDA in it.

This community is simply amazing and if you have a problem with your device simply scroll down, locate your device and enter the forum. My device is still the HTC Touch Pro (Raphael) you can do a Control F for find and type in the name or just look.

Here is what my selection looks like:

Now I like to “Flash” custom ROM’s on my phones so I normally stick to the Raphael ROM development forum. I download firmware from here and ask questions related to getting my device to do exactly what I want and how I want it – pretty anal huh? Still my phone behaves as I want it to thanks to this amazing forum.

Next up is another site I am on all day long. It is ITKE or the IT Knowledge Exchange for those of you that have never heard of it. You can see how much I love it from this past article on it.

ITKE simply rocks when you have an IT issue that you need help with. Feel free to post your questions or search through their extensive database of gagillions of questions and answers.

As you can see above there are loads of tags that can help you narrow down your search as well as the search bar at the top.

Let’s say today I am getting my ass kicked all over the place by our Windows 2003 DNS server… I can simply search for my issue and…

More than 1,500 records! If you cant find what you are looking for sign up for a free account and ask away like so:

This forum seriously keeps me busy all day long! I love participating and answering questions as much as I like having my problems solved for me by the community! They also give away prizes to participants in the community. Definitely a forum worth checking out.

And now finally on the leisure side (I guess some people think IT and Mobiles are leisure as well!) we have a little site called Forum Automotive and as you could probably discern from it’s title, it is all about cars.

By hitting that drop down menu at the top you can get a glimpse into the wide range of automotive topics check it out below:

Just like the other forums you can pick topics, search or simply browse around. I went ahead and picked the SUV forum to show you what the individual forums look like on here:

Feel free to click on a item or post a new topic just like the other forums. All forums allow you to browse but you cannot post or download attachments without registering and verifying an account.

Long story short, forums are a great source of information and knowledge! Where are you getting yours from? We would love to hear about it in the comments.

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Wikia – A Wiki Community Portal With Any Topic You Care To Know About

Saikat Basu — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:01:38 +0000

Wikia is a wiki farm. If you haven’t heard about a wiki farm before then it is nothing but a single webhost stringing together many other wikis under it.

Just like a farm, a wiki farm is a collective effort…grouping many smaller web communities into a larger whole. Another feature of a wiki farm is that a user can log-in to multiple wikis using the same account username. Thus, an enthusiast need not limit himself to one wiki community but can hop from one community to another.

As we get into Wikia, a major wiki community portal, we will learn about the power and potential of the crowd driving the knowledge mines through wikis.

Wikia is all about passionate fans. So passionate in fact that it’s a wiki community portal with at least 50,000 communities on various subjects pulling in 30 million eyeballs each month. That’s what makes it a Top 100 web property.

Wikia should not be confused with Wikipedia. Both are entirely different web and creative entities. They are not even sister projects. Both though share some content and are based on the same MediaWiki software.

To clear the air, this Wikia page marks out what Wikia is and what it’s not.

A 50,000 strong community should cover anything under the sun. Wikia does; with communities as diverse as steampunk to the more unvaried ones like politics and sports.

The communities are arranged around Hubs which are akin to categories. Hubs are the broader collections…the big topics covering the many smaller but related sub topics. For instance, entertainment has movies, TV shows, and books under it.

All Wikia sites can be edited by a visitor. Creating an account is not binding but it does make one feel part of the community that’s behind the wiki. A Wikia account can be easily created by clicking the green Create an Account button that’s on the top right of all pages. The green Log In button is right next to it.

Searching for your favorite wiki is easy using the search box on the homepage. All wikis also have a search bar on the left hand side of the page below the wiki logo. A Search link also takes you to the Special Page for more specific needle hunting.

Some pages come with an Edit link which allow visitors to edit or correct any detail. Edits can be done via a text editor and updated instantly. Pages where the Edit button is not available are locked for changes. Wikia editing is simple using the markup language common to all wikis.

Creating a wiki in the Wikia community portal is as easy as planning out a topic, logging in and filling out a creation form. The creation form lists the wiki’s name, URL and category to place under. From then on, you can add your content.

Ultimately, Wikia is about the content. Thousands and thousands of pages of it. Consider the World of Warcraft page…said to one of the largest in Wikia at 78,000 pages and is also one of the top 1,500 websites in the world according to Alexa. The Wikia gaming page in all has ended up with 500,000 pages of content and growing.

Did you know that the word ‘wiki’ comes from the Hawaiian word ‘wikiwiki’ which means ‘fast’? It’s fast to setup or edit but with the huge amount of information; it certainly will be slow going for the reader.

Have you visited Wikia? Let us know your favorite wiki amongst the heap.

Image Credit: Goran Zec

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Mindopia – Check out Occupation Descriptions for a List of Different Careers

Saikat Basu — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:01:10 +0000

Does your job fit you like a glove or is it a straitjacket? When I come across the current crop of job sites, I wish we had Web 2.0 in our career planning days; a search engine, a bit of social networking and a host of sites willing to flash your resume to prospective employers.

With the Web, information isn’t a problem…information overload is. A few clicks and you find yourself navigating away from the information you wanted. What we all want is a single window giving us career occupation descriptions on a list of different career choices.

Mindopia seeks to answer that call by cutting short the path from career research to job hunting. Mindopia calls itself a career discovery website. Positioning itself as a single point source for job seekers to get the ‘inside scoop on careers’.

Old fashioned career planning wasn’t bad, was it?

Not at all, but don’t you feel that it was a bit too toilsome? Starting with a gut feeling about what we wanted to do…getting influenced by our peers or parents…going after subjects of our interest…oops, only to find that the reality of 9 to 5 work life was a bit different from what we had conjured up. A generation back we leapt before we looked. Some of us landed on our feet and some didn’t. Those of us who didn’t, started wishing that we researched a bit more before the leap.

Is the web a better career hunting ground?

Mindopia (beta) is a new fangled Web 2.0 career discovery site to view career occupation descriptions and other details about a comprehensive list of different careers. So let me roll back my years and see how I would approach a writing career with journalism.

The homepage looks clean and uncluttered with a list of featured careers, a career search bar and six tiny video thumbnails which looks like video clips of old pros giving advice on their particular expertise.

A little My Page link on the top tells me that it would be better if I register and create a profile of my own. It’s easy because it’s free. Add and edit your profile with details to make it complete.

That done, let’s see what I can find for my interest in a journalism career. From My Page, I can click on the Explore careers dropdown which lists all careers currently covered by the site or I can use the top search bar.

My selection takes me to the career page with all of its laid out sections. The information covers the following areas –
- Career Advice from Those in the Field.
- Salary Potential.
- Find Schools.
- Top Job Skills Needed.
- Top Companies.
- Jobs in your area.
- Headline News.
- Top Websites.
- Top Books/DVDs.
- About (which covers the significant details about the field).
Three sections are of immediate interest to me as a first timer. Career Advice from Those in the Field is a bunch of video podcasts by veterans who answer the fundamentals a career seeker might ask.

The About section also delivers a lot of background info I need on my profession of choice.

The third area of immediate interest is of course the Salary Potential section. Clicking on the graph takes me into a page with a few wizards that let me assess the financial attributes of my job.

The other sections add to all the inputs I will need to make an informed decision. Each detail is also a link which serves to expand on the info given. For instance, clicking on one of the resources under Top Companies takes me to a more expanded list of companies in this profession. I can click on Add to Favorites to add the resource to my profile or I can click on Find Jobs to see the kind of opportunities available near my area. Clicking on the job listings takes me to the recruitment site page where I can apply for the job.

Similarly, I can expand Find Schools to use the search tool for locating a training resource.

Each section also has the social networking angle covered through a Contribute link. Members can recommend any career worthy info by clicking the link. The Discussions section is the message board where members can chit chat and add there two bits worth. Though, I couldn’t find any ongoing thread on Editor/Journalism careers.

Trawling through the Editor/Journalism info given on Mindopia, I have got a fair idea of how to approach my choice of vocation. Mindopia succeeds to an extent in bringing me closer to my career.

Is Mindopia a one stop solution?

It can be a stepping stone but being a beta site it still suffers a few drawbacks. The first noticeable one is the still limited selection of careers. New age careers like being a radio jockey or an instructional designer are absent. Topical careers like environmental sciences should have been a default addition.

The profile page also seems a bit threadbare. A more targeted bio would have served a candidate better than generic information. I found uploading a photo particularly hard with its limitation of 104×25 maximum sizes.

The absence of a Help section or a FAQ also sometimes made me feel lost.

But the cons apart, what I really liked about this work in progress site were its comprehensive sections on the careers. Expert-speak videos arranged around questions a beginner usually asks, makes taking the first step a lot easier. Job searching is generally a local activity so it will benefit US residents directly. Of course, international students can find it worthy of a visit too.

A beta site needs all the feedback it can get. Let us know if you like what Mindopia offers in theory and fact.

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Use Hunch to Answer Your Questions & Make Decisions

Stefan Neagu — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:01:32 +0000

There’s no shortage of web 2.0 services these days (and certainly no shortage of useless ones) but Hunch looks like a winner.

Decision-making is part of our daily lives, and with our increasingly faster lifestyles, there’s not enough time to carefully take into consideration every aspect of the problem.

You ask how can a website help you with making decisions? At first, I wasn’t at all convinced that it would manage to provide any sort of meaningful advice, but after reading up on the technology behind, I was impressed.

Created by very smart geeks from MIT, namely Matt Gattis, Weiyu Zhou, Peter Coles, Will Gaybrick and Tom Pinckney, Hunch uses the concept of ‘machine learning’, a process that analyses patterns in order to predict – in our case, decisions. The service leverages the so-called ‘wisdom of the crowds’ by aggregating answers and information from all the users that complete the various questionnaires available.

Based on the answers you provide, which can range from your computer type to your vacation destination, it matches your profile with other people that gave similar answers. What did these people that took similar decisions to you decide this time? Hunch provides that answer, in 10 questions or less.

Like any computer algorithm, Hunch’s artificial intelligence gets better by time. Each day, as more and more people answer existing questions and add new topics, the A.I. has more information to relate to your profile. The same goes for your own ‘decision profile’; the more questions you answer, the better Hunch will be at offering advice. Like any A.I. though, Hunch might make some people uneasy.

While the service is based on human input, should you ultimately trust a machine with your next travel destination or camera? The Hunch team have made it clear where the revenue comes from, which represents a plus for credibility, but you can never know for sure without seeing the backend code. Are the affiliate links to stores like Amazon enough to keep a company afloat, especially in this down market?

Hunch is very community oriented – providing users with the ability to comment on questions and advice, adding pros, cons and of course, your own questions on which the community can share its ‘wisdom’. You’re also able to follow questions and other users, in a similar fashion to Twitter or the Facebook newsfeed, directly from your profile page. Hunch also scores high points for the Settings panel which lets you easily delete your account, saved answers and profile privacy.

In tone with the summer beat (and heat for us poor guys in the northern hemisphere), you should definitely check out some of the summer related questions and answers as well as some of the great tech related topics.

Personally, I’ve found that the topics I went through all had relevant questions and perfectly reasonable suggestions. I especially enjoyed the ‘Should I buy a Mac?’ one, which takes you through all the important aspects of making the decision. Even by asking yourself the questions presented, you are able to make a more informed decision.

A site similar to Hunch is Aardvark which also leverages the power of user opinion to help you answer your questions. David wrote about it here.

Overall, Hunch gets my strong recommendation and a spot in my bookmarks bar. Visit Hunch and don’t forget to share your impressions and favorite topics in the comments.

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Ask & Answer the Web’s Questions with Aardvark [Free Invites!]

David Pierce — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:00:15 +0000

I’m a big fan of applications that tap into something I already use, and make it better, more useful, and more fun. In this case, I’ve discovered a new service that taps into your instant messenger, your social networks, and your areas of expertise all at once.

It’s called Aardvark, and is a brand-new application that just came out of the SXSW conference this year.

The site was in private beta for a while, then was invite-only. Recently, it’s become publicly available and is now open for questions. It’s available to anyone who logs in through Facebook Connect (If you have a Facebook account already, you’re all set. If not, Facebook accounts are free to everyone!). The Facebook implications of Aardvark are pretty impressive, but even logging in with Facebook is a great tool. If you haven’t had the privilege of owning a Facebook account, read on — we have exclusive invites and we’re giving them out to MakeUseOf readers!

Signing up for Aardvark is simple, as is getting it running – just add some information about where you are, the IM client and username of your choice (as long as it’s Google Talk, AIM, or Live Messenger – for now), and the types of questions you’d like to answer for other people. You can also use the service by email, but I’m going to focus on IM because it’s so much cooler.

Once you’re set up, Aardvark lives in your IM window, and anytime you want to ask a question, just IM Aardvark with your question. Aardvark parses the question to figure out what it’s about – which it does a remarkably good job with – and then sends it to someone who it thinks is able to answer your question. You’ll get an answer back quickly, and be able to have a brief chat with the person who answered your question.

From the other side (the answerer), Aardvark is even more ingenious. When you sign up, you choose how often you want Aardvark to ask you questions; I chose “a couple of times a day.” When that time comes up, Aardvark sends you an IM saying “So-and-so has a question about ‘Some Topic You Can Answer.’”

You can respond one of a few ways – “Sure” to see and answer the question, “face” to pass it on to a Facebook friend who might be able to answer, or “pass” to just make the question go away. If you pass, you can then mute a given topic to not get any more questions based on that topic.

The cool thing about Aardvark is that the questions are limitless. For instance, I’m listed as able to answer questions about New York City, where I live. I periodically get a question like, “Where should I go for dinner near Union Square?”, and I’m able to offer a recommendation. The questions I get rarely require factual answers, and that’s one of the fun things about Aardvark – it’s a great way to find out what other people are into that I might like as well.

One of Aardvark’s sample questions is, “Where’s the best place to buy running shoes in San Francisco?” It’s this kind of question, one that Google wouldn’t know but an actual local person might, that gives Aardvark awesome potential. Instead of services like ChaCha, which essentially just replaces a Google search when you can’t do one yourself, Aardvark goes beyond the capabilities, and sets you up with an expert in their field – even if that field is running shoes in San Francisco.

As you use Aardvark more, you get a sense of people who are able to answer certain questions for you – maybe you have a friend in Utah who you trust to answer such questions. You create these connections, and Aardvark uses them to narrow down your respondents even more, to try and get you the best possible answer. From the get-go though, Aardvark’s always done a good job of finding me the right person to answer my question.

Once you set it up, it’s incredibly simple to use. It’s unobtrusive, and lives right in your IM window; nothing to install or download, or remember to run. There was a lot of buzz around Aardvark as SXSW got underway, and a few minutes using the app makes it easy to see why.

As a MakeUseOf reader, you can now sign up to Aardark without using your Facebook account. Just hit this link and sign up! It’s now open for questions, but there are only 300 invites so grab one quickly!

Is there anything else like this out there? Can Twitter do this better? What do you think?

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See What Are Top Listened Songs Online with We Are Hunted

David Pierce — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:30:15 +0000

Finding and listening to new music is one of my favorite uses of the Web. There are a ton of music sites out there that are constantly finding, sharing, and promoting great new music. Countless new artists are being discovered thanks to the Web, and the music world is booming because of it. Well, the record industry might not be booming, but the number of good artists out there sure is.

I’ve shared a few ways to find great new music before here on MakeUseOf, and it’s time for another one! If anyone’s a music junkie like I am, each of these sites just gets more fun than the last.

This one’s called We Are Hunted, and is essentially a user-decided chart for all the best music of the Web. We Are Hunted doesn’t care whether a given song is being played on the radio, or getting tons of spins at clubs – if people on the Web are choosing to listen to it, We Are Hunted will let you know.

The great thing about We Are Hunted is that it doesn’t just get its information from its own users (which hugely limits the usefulness of some other, similar sites). Instead, it looks at blogs, social networks, forums, Twitter, P2P networks, Last.fm, iLike, MySpace Music, and elsewhere to find what people are actually listening to, and then creates a chart of the most popular songs and albums for your listening pleasure.

The popular songs come in the form of a square chart of songs or artists, nine at a time, that you can scroll through to find whatever tickles your fancy. The variety of music on the site is just ridiculous: from hip-hop to country to pop ballads, and everything in between. Some of the featured artists are reasonably well-known (Britney Spears, The Black Eyed Peas, and a couple other popular artists are on the list right now) to the totally-unheard of (Digitalism? Cool band name, never heard of them).

There are a number of different lists you can listen to – “Week,” the most-played songs from the last seven days, “Month” (three guesses what that one is), and “Emerging.” The first two tend to have more popular artists and better- known songs, and look a little more like the Billboard Charts. The Emerging list, my personal favorite, is the spot for the up-and-coming artists that aren’t on the Billboard Charts yet, but are blowing up on the Web.

In every list, all 100 songs can be played in their entirety, and are streamed to you from a few different sources – YouTube and artists’ sites, primarily. One thing to watch for – I found a couple instances of the wrong song being played (Right Round by Flo Rida, currently #1, actually played something else entirely). I only found it twice, though, out of about 100 songs I tried to play. Not a big deal, but something to be careful of.

If you find an artist you like, you can see more information about them (mostly links to reviews and whatnot on other sites) by clicking on the artist name. There’s also a list of Related Artists, to help you find even more good stuff. If you want to comment on an artist or song, it’s easy – either log in to the site, or through Facebook.

The Web is unique in that you’re able to listen to exactly what you want, when you want. By leveraging this, We Are Hunted knows and plays only what other people are actively trying to listen to, not just what’s playing on the radio to no one listening. Whether you want to know what’s hot now, or what’s poised to be hot, We Are Hunted is a perfect source.

Where do you find new music on the Web?

Photo: jmtimages

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Wakoopa – Find Out What Software You (And Others) Use Most

Jimmy Rogers — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:01:55 +0000

Do you try out just about every program with “freeware” slapped on it? Does your computer have seven programs that all do the same thing? Are you on a first name basis with many developers?

If any of these are true, you may be addicted to freeware. As a fellow sufferer (Hello, my name is Jimmy…), I have a suggestion for you. No, it’s not therapy. It’s a social network for software users. If your computer is going to be full of free software, why not share your experiences?

Wakoopa is a website connected to a small piece of tracking software. After you download Wakoopa Tracker (which sits conveniently in your taskbar), it simply reports the programs you’ve used every fifteen minutes. This data then goes back into the website and creates your profile. Instead of writing out a profile of your interests, or tracking which sites you visit most, Wakoopa essentially describes you by your usage habits.

The most prominent metric in your profile is an animation of all the software you’ve used in icon form. Note that if you use a lot of indie software, the icons may not be in the database and will show up as a generic icon. Below that are your top 10s. The top for the last week, last month, and the most new are fun lists to contrast with one another. You can see how your usage habits have changed over time.

Below that is a pie chart that displays how much of your time you spend with each program:

As you can see from my chart (note: I haven’t used it for a full month yet), I spend the most time using Flock. Beyond that I use Digsby the most, then Thunderbird. While those are fairly obvious metrics, it’s nice to see them laid out quantitatively. I wish they had more chart options, like “max time,” but hopefully the developers will see fit to add those at some point.

From this point you really start to move into the minutia of your usage. There are several tabs on the profile, including a breakdown of active and background programs. You can also pimp your fantastic user stats with badges, signature, and even a Facebook application (which was glitchy when I tried to use it).

Here an example of a badge you can create [see below]. This one in particular is of my most used applications (over all the time recorded by Wakoopa). The badges are fairly primitive and I can’t understand why they don’t offer the animation at the top of the profile as a badge. It’s definitely the most attractive thing on the site.

Once you’ve let the tracker build up some usage stats for you, or while you’re waiting for it to do so, you can explore the rest of the site.

Most Used Software

The software section is a giant database of all the software used by every user under the tracker’s observation. Users can write reviews for their software and the top apps have lots of tracking info to show their rise or fall in popularity. Maybe eventually this will become “the Alexa of software stats.” Most software metrics are based on surveys and downloads, but this tracks actual usage, a much more impressive figure.

Similarly you can explore most popular apps for a given task by category or using tags. That is to say if you go to MP3 section, you will see most popular programs that has to do with MP3s (i.e. media players, music organizers etc.)

Overall, Wakoopa is growing on me. At first I didn’t really get it and figured it would be a waste of time, but it’s nice to be able to visualize all the time one spends on a computer. Also, you can look through and figure out which programs you hardly use anymore. Right now, though, Wakoopa needs to be fleshed out a lot by its developer team. There aren’t very many options, it is a little cluttered (I’m not a huge fan of tag clouds), and the community isn’t really where it needs to be yet. Even so, I’d say Wakoopa is definitely worth a few weeks of running it in the background. The worst you’ll get out of it is a pretty pie chart.

[Rating=2]

If you’ve used this before or start using it, post a link to your profile in the comments. Let us know if any of your top ten surprised you!

(By) Jimmy Rogers is a biology major at George Mason University and an avid freelance tech blogger. Check out his blog, Mason Tech Beat.

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The simExchange – The Online Stock Exchange for Gamers

Abraham Kurp — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:44:25 +0000

If anyone ever asks me what I know about the stock market I’ll probably just blink a couple of times, smile wide, then walk away. If however, someone asks me about my opinion on video game sales I’m likely to talk their ears off until they smile wide and walk away.

Luckily for people like me, the internet has spawned yet another reason for us to avoid that crazy place we call the real world. It’s called the simExchange, an online prediction market that centers around the real world sales numbers of video games.

Unlike most other prediction markets the simExchange uses a stock market-like system in which you use virtual play money (called DKP) to buy stocks in games that are “under priced” then sell them at a higher price. The price in this case is the amount of copies a particular video game will sell in its lifetime as predicted by simExchange users (at a rate of one DKP per ten thousand units sold). Thus a game’s value increases when you buy into it and decreases if you sell. Every user starts out with one million DKP and it’s your job to turn it into an even bigger pile of cash. Don’t worry if you have absolutely no experience in this kind of thing as the mechanics are simplified enough for even someone as inept as me to manage. And if you do screw up royally you need not worry about losing your shirt –virtual or otherwise.

To aid you in your struggle to the top of the leaderboard the people behind the simExchange have built a rather impressive infrastructure. In many ways the simExchange epitomizes the Web 2.0 movement as nearly everything on the site is either user-submitted or rateable. To give you an incentive to submit news, videos, or thought-provoking comments additional DKP is awarded for submitted material that is well liked by the community. In this way, you can help yourself while at the same time helping the community; certainly a clever setup.

The simExchange is particularly enjoyable to gamers perhaps because it feels so much like a game. Of course another part of its appeal is that it’s all about video games, but at a deeper level the simExchange is a game in itself. It is a competitive journey to the top but without all the responsibilities and consequences that come with the same kind of journey in the real world. Traditional action gamers that crave a continuous stream of high intensity gaming may not enjoy the simExchange, but those people that enjoy games at a slightly slower pace are sure to find enjoyment. If nothing else it’s a great time sink for those boring days at work.

But does It work? Although there is a certain group of people who are content with just playing the simExchange “game” others –especially real world investors– want to know just how accurate it is. Does the data the simExchange gathers at all reflect real sales data or is it little more than a fun diversion? In a word, maybe. Both this article from TheStreet.com and the simExchange’s own blog are enthusiastic about the possibilities, but it’s important to realize the limitations of data obtained from the simExchange and thus maintain a level of caution.

The simExchange uses the “Wisdom of Crowds” to gather its data, but is a crowd of five thousand gamers, each with average knowledge of the games industry really any wiser than one well-informed professional analyst? I can not even begin to answer that question, although I can say that any prediction of the future is by default imperfect, so much so that market analysts are often jokingly referred to as soothsayers. From this perspective I can say that the simExchange’s predictions are no worse than anything any other group or person can form, but at the same time probably no better.

If you use the simExchange, let us know your thoughts on the site.

(By) Abraham Kurp was introduced to open source software a few years ago and it was love at first site. When not preaching the virtues of open source he enjoys reading classic science fiction, playing obscure video games, dabbling in programming, and of course writing.

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IT Knowledge Exchange – A free version of Experts Exchange !

Karl L. Gechlik — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:54:42 +0000

Hey MUO readers! For those of you that know me, you’ll also know how much I LOVE FREE stuff. I use lots of different methods to try and find answers. Search engines, asking my group of international admin’s and finally other web resources.

My company has had a subscription to Experts Exchange for a long while now. I guess I got spoiled because when the subscription ran out and the big wigs decided it was ~~a waste of money~~ expendable I started looking for a new solution with just as much information online. I searched for a while until I came upon IT Knowledge Exchange. It was just what I was looking for….a free version of Experts Exchange. A user-powered tech support community. I started by looking through their database of questions and found some interesting tid-bits.

I was really impressed, there were questions of all varieties. Easy, hard and those ever-so-special questions that make you go WHAT THE F*^&??!??

People get ratings and points, so you can tell who is serious and respectable. Obviously we wouldn’t want you taking server advice from a 8 year old looking to trip you up. Users were encouraged to discuss the answers/solutions and other problems. There were flocks of people asking and answering questions and amazingly there was NO FLAMING going on. Flaming is what 1337 users do to n00bs asking retarded questions….not here though. All questions seemed to be treated with the same respect and even after the question is answered people can edit it via a wiki-like interface or add a discussion point. All great collaborative options.

Then I dove right in with a current exchange problem we were having and came across a question, answer and a discussion that resembled my problem. I tried it out on my test platform and sure enough they fixed my problem! I booked-marked the site and kept it moving. A few weeks later in my daily web-shenanigans I came across a technology blog that seemed to be hosted by the same people from IT Knowledge Exchange. So not only do these guys do the free tech support thing they give you a free place to post your IT related blog and promote your content on their network. Check out their list of blogs here.

I really dug what these guys were trying to do and I decided to lend my AtA expertise to the mix and start answering questions… I blinked a few hours later and realized I WAS HOOKED! It also doesn’t help the addiction that you get points for answering AND asking questions. I was determined to see my name up on the list of VERY active users. I had answered 10 or so questions and felt like I had accomplished something…..

My work’s inbox might argue with you but to hell with it – it was a Friday afternoon.

So to this day I participate and try to give back a little more to the IT community but on the low I find some of my answers there as well. But after all isn’t that what a good system is based on giving and taking? No boys and girls, I am not preaching but, what have you done for the IT community lately? Go go go… donate a little of your time today for the greater good that is IT!

From their sites description:

Get answers to your toughest IT related questions and give back to the community by answering a question. IT Knowledge Exchange was created to allow members to ask, answer and share information to benefit the entire IT community. Read our site FAQ

(By) Karl L. Gechlik, a super hero of the IT industry with over a decade of technology expertise under his belt. When he is not busy with his loving family or working insane hours he can be found helping the technically inept via www.askTheAdmin.com. Check out his geeky humorous antics today!

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Using Last.fm to Improve your Audiovascular Fitness

Dave Drager — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:25:37 +0000

I once had a professor who openly admitted that his musical tastes were frozen in time when his first child was born. I swore from that day that I wouldn’t fall into that trap – and do all I could do to stay on top of new popular music. My favorite weapon to this end is Last.FM.

For the uninitiated, Last.FM is a website and service who’s tagline is “The Social Music Revolution”. Their acquisition by CBS brought out a lot of worries from within the Last.fm community, but so far it seems to have been a very positive development. With CBS came a lot of legitimacy and it even made it possible for Last.fm to sign deals with a lot of major record labels including Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner, EMI and over 150,000 independent labels and artists.

It seems that although CBS technically owns them, they have left Last.fm mainly alone, allowing them to operate more or less independently from them. The Last.fm service is constantly evolving; their exploits available on Last.HQ – the Last.fm blog.

Here are some great features of Last.fm that might not have heard before!

1. Track your music listening habits

Last.fm has an installable desktop program that works as a radio streamer and music tracker. This is called “Scrobbling”. It runs in the background and reports what you listen to back to the Last.fm servers. For those with large music collections, this might turn a lot of people off to Last.fm; but I’ll let them explain:

We do not display email addresses, so no-one can link your username to your email address or harvest your address for spamming.
Audioscrobbler Plugins only send the name of the artist/album/song – not the filename or filetype. This means we cannot tell whether your music is from an original CD or an MP3 file.
We rotate our webserver logs frequently and destroy them after extracting anonymous statistics.
Our protocol is documented, and client software is open source, so you’re more than welcome to investigate what the software does.

After you get over that bit – and you start tracking your music – you get to see the benefits of tracking your listening habits. For stats geeks like me, you can see who you really listen to – along with nice graphs and weekly, monthly, and year long charts.

You also get matched up with others in your “Neighborhood” that have similar music tastes. From there, you can see what they are listening to lately – thereby expanding your musical tastes.

Furthermore, you can ‘tag’ your music with keywords; this helps you and other Last.fm users fine music which might suit their tastes. Also you have the ability to Love or Hate a track.

2. Streaming Radio

There are two main ways to actually listen to music from Last.fm. The first is streaming a radio station in your browser or in the desktop client; the second is the recently added ability to listen to tracks on demand. Many artists/labels have signed up for this service.

The streaming radio works in a few ways. You can listen to music according to:

The music’s tag
A group’s related artists
A user’s radio station
A user’s neighborhood
A user’s loved tracks

These options give you a lot of choices; but there are a few ways to get some kick ass radio stations. Typical land or satellite radio stations are “Top 40″ type stations, meaning that they have a repertoire of only about 40 songs which they play through. While this is great for listening to popular music (and I recommend checking in every once in a while to see what is hot) it can get really repetitive. I find myself going in cycles where I will listen to land based radio stations for a few days, and then not again for a few weeks.

Some ideas for stations on Last.fm are:

70’s
80’s
90’s
Classical
Rock
Rap

Hopefully you get the idea. When you listen to a song or station that you like, think of a “tag” that would be assigned to that music and then try it out!

If you like a certain artist, you can play their station which will play similar music. This works great specially if an artist is a genre-defining one.

3. On Demand Listening

In January of 2008 Last.fm rolled out an awesome update – the ability to stream, on demand, many artists and titles. I once heard someone talking about a new artist that they liked; I hadn’t heard of them before – so I typed them into Last.fm and on-demand was available!

Last.fm will allow you to play a track 3 times before sending you to a link to purchase the album. In the future they are planning a subscription service which will allow you to listen to unlimited on demand music. Until then, I think this is a fair tradeoff – if you just want to hear an title it no longer means you have to purchase it. However, if you really like a title, you still have the ability to purchase it and listen to it as much as you want!

4. Comprehensive Artist and Album information at your fingertips

The Last.fm Wiki is a great resource for looking up information on Artists and other related information such as Similar Artists, Discography, Projects and more. Much like Wikipedia, it is editable by all, and this comes with both benefits and weaknesses. Images are also included, the community votes on which images best represent an artist.

5. ‘Social Network’ functionality

Last.fm has many other functions which connect you to other listeners. From your neighborhood and other sources; you add people to your friends list. You are updated as to what music your friends are listening to and what concerts they are planning on attending. You can also make recommendations to your friends if you think they will like a certain track.

Many groups are in existance on Last.FM. You can join one if you enjoy a particular kind of music; or use a certain media player – the options are endless. The members of groups are updated on what that
group is listening to lately and other musical recommendations. Groups range from the mundane to the eclectic – for example, maybe you are interested in joining the aptly named “This is a group with random and sometimes questionable musical taste for people who are weird or bored“.

Of course, as with all ‘Web 2.0′ sites – Last.fm offers its share of Widgets and Facebook plugins. These items will not help you find new music but they are pretty neat anyway.

6. Unique Last.fm Hacks

Since Last.fm is pretty open with their data, there is some really awesome stuff you can do with your data once you have a good bit saved over time. Here is a list of some cool hacks or unique uses of Last.fm services:

Use TwitterFeed plus your RSS Last.fm Feed to post listened tracks to Twitter.
LastGraph will create a colorful graph of your listening habits.
Use the Flash based Web player to play Last.fm streams on your Wii, PS3, or other web-enabled device.
Scrobble tracks from your iPod using AudioPod
Use the Last.fm Widget page to create a playlist, artist quit, charts, and more.
Find our how eclectic your musical tastes are or a tag cloud of your artists.

Let your music play!

After reading about the versatility of the Last.fm service – I hope you would agree with me that Last.fm is a worthwhile service to sign onto. Basic accounts are free – which include all of the streaming, tracking, and other services available to all. You are able to be a subscriber to Last.fm which basically gets all banner ads turned off. And a few other additional features. I personally can’t wait to see what Last.fm has in its sleeves for the future!

(By) Dave is an IT Manager by day and technology consultant by night. He is interested in all things internet but is specifically interested in system administration, network security, history, and backpacking. He lives near Philadelphia with his family. See his blog @ www.systembash.com.

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6 Amazing Web Communities for Exchanging Favors

Tina — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:14:37 +0000

A popular proverb states you don’t get anything for nothing in this world. This wise statement certainly holds true for the websites below. They are free in that you don’t have to pay money to take advantage of the service they offer. However, what they will cost you is some time and dedication.

(1) Couch Surfing / Hospitality Club – These two are completely independent communities, however the idea behind both projects is very similar, thus they share spot #1. Check out video below for a quick intro.

Couch Surfing

Sign up for Couch Surfing if you would like to meet and interact with people around the world. The motivation of this community is to share whatever you have with others – your expertise, a bit of company, dinner, a cup of tea or your couch or guest bed. As a member you can set up a profile in which you write about yourself and describe what you have to offer. People interested in meeting you or surfing your couch can contact you through your profile. Within the community you can join groups for special interests, for example to hear about meetings or get togethers in your area. Once you met someone through the site you can leave a reference on their profile and become their friend. I have been a member of Couch Surfing for almost two years, hosted several dozen people, gave them a tour through my city, had meals and went out with them. I was hosted by two people and I can tell you, it’s such an incredible feeling to be welcome and treated like family by a stranger far away from home. The only negative experiences I made were with people who didn’t show up or canceled last minute. Other than that everyone was at least nice, but most people I met were awesome.

Hospitality Club

Now that you know about Couch Surfing, there is not much left to say about Hospitality Club. It’s the same, but different. Many avid Couch Surfers are also members of Hospitality Club and vice versa. I like to keep it simple and decided for the site that looked cooler and seemed more easy to use. For example Hospitality Club urges guests to share their personal information including passport number with their hosts and encourages hosts to check the passport of arriving guests. While this is a good precaution, it somehow turned me off. I’m not a control freak, I like to be a bit naive and trust in common sense and humanity. Couch Surfing just seemed more like I would fit in there.

(2) FreeCycle

The Freecycle Network™ is a nonprofit movement, dedicated to the free exchange of anything people want to part with. Furniture, electronic devices, toys, clothes, anything. It’s subdivided into individual local groups, located across the globe. These groups are basically Yahoo Groups that are utilizing the eMail list feature. You may post OFFERED as well as WANTED items to the public list and anyone who is interested or can help out will contact you directly. The groups are moderated by local volunteers. To sign up search for your community or browse all existing groups. If you find that there is no group in your area, you can start one and add it to the Freecycle Network™. Currently the network consists of 4,233 groups with a total of 4,444,000 members.

(3) FON

FON is the world’s largest WiFi community. FON members, also known as Foneros, share their WiFi connection with others for free. In return, when they leave their home base, they can use the WiFi connection provided by other Foneros for free. If you do not wish to share your WiFi for free, you could even make a little money. However, this would exclude you from using FON Spots for free.

With FON Maps you can check whether or not a FON Spot is available in your area. The image below shows a random selection from a residential area in Germany’s capital Berlin. Every yellow face represents one available access point.

(4) GeoCaching

GeoCaching is the modern form of treasure hunting using the internet, geographical data and a GPS device (although you could manage to do it without the gadget). You can hide a treasure (cache) yourself, then log onto the site and share the location. Or you can look for caches hidden in your area and begin searching for them.

(5) BookCrossing

BookCrossing has been around for a long time. It’s an adventure for people who love to read and share. Share your favorite book with a lucky stranger. Sign up with BookCrossing, receive an ID and printout explaining what BookCrossing is, paste it in your book and then set it free – anywhere. You can leave the book on a bench in a park or lay it on someone’s care in the parking lot or drop it in a mailbox. If you’re lucky the recipient will log into the BookCrossing website, report the book with the ID they found inside and leave a comment about how they liked it.

(6) PostCrossing

PostCrossing may sound like BookCrossing, but the two have little more than a similar name in common. PostCrossing is about receiving postcards from around the world. Signing up requires sharing your postal address. The next step is to request an address and mail this person a postcard. To verify that your postcard was sent and received, the recipient will submit the ID you noted onto your card to the site. Next you’re in the queue to receiving a postcard from a random stranger somewhere on this planet. I’ve tried it, it really works!

Isn’t it amazing what possibilities the internet has opened up and how we can connect through it? What are your thoughts on these communities and which pages did I miss? Please share!

This post was written by one of our regular authors, Tina from Recommended.

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6 Unique Web Communities That You Won’t Forget

Aibek — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 03:35:15 +0000

You may be well familiar with biggies like Youtube, Digg, Wikipedia, and StumbleUpon. They are all big and 100% user-powered websites. However, what about the smaller ones, focused on a single aspect and still able to attract a huge user base. So here you go, six really cool and fast growing communy-powered websites that you should definitely see.

1. Instructables – Extremely useful, entertaining and rather addictive online community where people share what they do and how they do it. Here you can find hundreds of excellent home-made DIY (Do It Yourself) guides detailing how to turn some of the garage junk into cool stuf, like invisible book shelf, hairspray-powered potato cannon or even making a wallet (from an old keyboard). See pic below.

2. Scribd – The best way to define Scribd would be to call it a Youtube for documents. It is an online document library where users can search, browse, rate, upload, and share all kind of documents: jokes, facts, stories, document templates, presentations, and even amazon bestsellers.

3. UrbanDictionary – UrbanDictionary is basically a community-powered dictionary for slangs and all kinds of sayings and jargons that you won’t find in traditional dictionaries. Basically anything people use in daily talk.

Dude: A word that americans use to address each other. Particularly stoners, surfers and skaters.
Geek: The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.

4. eHow / wikiHow – HowTo manuals for the everyday life. Lots of useful stuff here, everything from computer fixes and tips to personal finance and health tips. You will also find some not so usual but still essential tips, like how to take a punch or ungoogle yourself. In case the stuff you’re looking for isn’t there and you’re too lazy to digg for it on the web than ask it on Yahoo Answers.:-)

5. Sidereel – The aim of Sidereel is to create an ultimate directory for Movies and TV shows. Here you can submit or edit episode reviews, follow-up on favorite TV shows release dates, get links to watch episodes online (both free and paid), get personalized ‘to watch’ recommendations and more.

6. 43things – Active web community where people can set, track, discuss and share their goals. It can be something as simple as ‘watch all Simpson episodes’ or more serious stuff like ‘pay off my credit card debts’ and ‘climb mount Everest’. It’s also a place to discover like-minded people and learn from the experience of others on how to achieve your goals.

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User Generated Content (Episode II)

Mark O'Neill — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:18:56 +0000

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from people regarding my post on helping to create user-generated content on the web. So since this seems to be something that people find interesting, I decided to “do a George Lucas” and write a sequel! A long time ago in an internet far far away…..

Thinking about this subject a little more, I started to define what “user-generated content” actually is. Then it struck me – user reviews. Everytime you write a review online, that’s user-generated content. Grading these Make Use Of articles using the five yellow stars at the bottom of the page counts as user-generated content – because you are grading the content. You are pointing people towards the good stuff and steering them away from the bad stuff. You are helping to improve what’s on the web and you are making the web a more useful reference resource for all. This is Web 2.0 in action – adding the human touch to the internet.

Here’s some places where you can leave user reviews.

1. Amazon : whenever you contemplate buying something on Amazon, I’m sure your eyes wander to the user reviews and the number of stars that product has garnered. Then as human nature dictates, you buy the one that is highest-rated. Next time you buy something on Amazon, spend 10 minutes or so grading the product and writing a review. It will help other shoppers later to see what you thought of the item. If the item sucks, tell others to warn them. If the item is great, support the company / author / artist by telling the world how wonderful it is.

Plus look at it another way – the top reviewer on Amazon was profiled in Time magazine last year in which it was revealed that she gets free books sent to her by publishers because she is such a prolific reviewer. So there are some side-perks to reviewing too.

2. Internet Movie Database : as I revealed in a previous article, I check the IMDB to see if a movie is good or bad before I decide whether to watch it or not. I read the user reviews which can be filtered into the good reviews, the bad reviews and whether you want to read plot spoilers or not. Next time you watch a movie, why not grade and review the movie for others? Thanks to IMDB reviewers, I have stayed away from a lot of stinkers and saved myself a lot of money in the process. But I still went to see Poseidon (eek!)

3. TV.com : as much as I try to deny it, I love my TV shows. While I am doing writing like this, I like to have the television on with my latest show. With show pilots starting all the time, some good, most bad, how do I find new shows to watch? TV.com! It’s well-known that the TV networks monitor the reviews and forums on TV.com to gauge viewer reactions. So next time a show plot sucks or you’re mad as hell that your favourite show has been cancelled (”West Wing” he mutters to himself), write a review on TV.com. You might just find that someone at NBC or ABC will read it and take your views into account when deciding whether or not to bring back McGyver.

4. eBay Reviews : similar to Amazon reviews, you can also review products on eBay.com. I can’t write much about this as I don’t participate in this one. Maybe an eBay reviewer reading this can fill us in on some details of how it all works?

Do you know any other good places to leave user reviews?

(By) Mark O’Neill

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Join The User-Generated Content Revolution

Mark O'Neill — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:13:02 +0000

To me, the internet is the best invention since someone slapped a piece of cheese on a slice of bread, stood too close to the fire and subsequently discovered grilled cheese sandwiches. But the World Wide Web has the potential to get MUCH better when the average internet user actively participates in adding content to the web and validating what’s already there. Now I’m not talking about revising your My Space profile or updating the viagra offers on your website but instead taking part in some of the voluntary online projects or web services that are trying to “evolve the web” and make sense of what’s already out there. You only need donate a couple of hours a week which in itself would make all the difference. Here’s a snapshot of what you can get started with :

1. Install the Stumbleupon toolbar and improve search engine results – I wrote about this in a piece for Google Tutor. Stumbleupon users now have the ability to have their search engine results rated, filtered and commented on by other Stumbleupon users. By switching on the relevant SU toolbar option, your search results in Google and Yahoo will now have SU rankings next to them. Non-SU users will not see this information so this is as good a reason as any to install the SU toolbar.

By having your search engine results filtered and rated, you’re immediately being directed to the quality content and the crud goes to the bottom. So instead of an anonymous Googlebot deciding what you should be looking at, let real living people with real interests help you to decide. User input may just be the next stage of search engine evolution and by ranking websites through Stumbleupon, you are helping to improve the search engine results for others – and they are doing the same for you. Nice eh?

2. Project Gutenberg – I am a voluntary proofreader for Project Gutenberg and I got started on it after reading Fahrenheit 451. It scares me that one day people perhaps won’t remember luminaries such as Shakespeare or Steinbeck. So I went to the Project Gutenberg site and signed up. PG basically scans all the public domain / copyright expired books and then turns them into text files / HTML files with the help of an army of part-time voluntary proofreaders. If you want to read one of the finished books, you can download it for free. The theory behind PG is that if there is at least one copy of every book ever written being stored on the PG server then that book and the author that wrote it will never be forgotten. Rest in peace Mr Shakespeare.

3. Librivox – I consider Librivox to be the audio equivalent of Project Gutenberg. They take all the public domain / copyright expired books but instead of scanning them into text, they read them as audio books instead. Then you just download the MP3 files if you want to listen. I took part in making the audio book of War and Peace which was a mammoth undertaking (never let anyone convince you that recording an audio book is easy). But the satisfaction at the end was well worth it. Just sign up, download Audacity, get a headset with a microphone and you’re good to go. The quality varies depending on which reader you listen to. Just don’t burp during a reading of Sense and Sensibility OK?

4. Wikipedia – I have never personally seen a voluntary online project cause so many sharply divided opinions as Wikipedia. You either love it or you hate it. There’s no middle ground in this never-ending argument. The supporters say it allows everyone to contribute their knowledge for the benefit of others. Its detractors say it is highly inaccurate and schools have even banned their students from using it. Where do you stand? I personally love the site and if you have any specialist knowledge, why not make an account and start writing / editing? Just be prepared to have your facts challenged by others. But isn’t having a debate half the fun?

5. Digg & Del.icio.us – I hesitated for quite some time before finally adding Digg to this list but in the end, I figured they warranted a mention. I debated because I am not sure how Digg really contributes to the overall improvement of the internet. However saying that, Digg does give users the chance to vote sites and stories up and down, along with commenting on them (even though some of the comments can be no better than immature bickering). So that definately counts as user generated web content. Del.icio.us counts in the end because it is rapidly becoming a search engine in its own right and instead of a bot deciding the entries, human users are deciding instead. I often find better results on Del.icio.us than I do on other search engines.

Do you know of any more examples of user-generated content on the web?

(By) Mark O’Neill

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Top 10: Free and Highly Trafficked Q&A Communities

Aibek — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 03:41:25 +0000

Just last week makeuseof covered ‘HowTo’ sources, extremely handy services listing thousands of all kinds of user-contributed ‘HowTo’ guides. While these services provide an excellent solution for all ‘HowTo’ type questions, they’re of little help when it comes to other range of questions, i.e. What … , Where… , When … , Why…. , etc.

And that’s what this post is about: popular and totally free Question and Answers (Q&A) communities where users can

easily post whatever questions they have and wait for community to answer, rate and comment on them
browse and search through thousands of already answered questions.

*** TOP 3 (Fast Answers, Guaranteed) ***

Yahoo!Answers – biggest, well-designed, highly-trafficked, feature-rich, multi-lingual (over 20 languages), community-powered Q&A service. More on Yahoo Answers

AnswerBag – yet another cool, well-trafficked Q&A community. Additionally to standard feature set provides an option to quickly rate (+/-) questions in order to make interesting ones standout. Higher rated questions, receive more attention and tend to get multiple replies in extremely short period of time, sometimes within the first 5-10 minutes after it has been posted.

QnA.Live - based on the user-activity it seems to be less popular than the above two, although as it originates from Live.com, the network still ensures decent amount of daily users. Doesn’t provide that many features but incorporates couple of most needed ones, i.e., RSS support for each question to easily follow-up on replies via feedreader AND an option to tag questions and browse them by tags (by category or popularity).

*** OTHER (7 more) ***

*** BONUS ***

Find ‘Answers’ – google-powered, custom search engine letting you instantly search for ‘Answers’ on all of the above mentioned websites simultaneously.

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Massive List of ‘HowTo’ Sites + ‘HowTo’ Search Engine

Kaly — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:49:25 +0000

‘HowTo’s (HowTos, HowTo’s, or whatever you prefer to call them) are excellent problems solvers: they provide quick, easy-to-follow and non-overwhelming solutions to one or another problem that pop-up during daily routines. People love them, especially when they’re free, regardless whether it’s a step-by-step guide or a couple of minutes long video.

Good news, the amount of freely available, user-contributed HowTo’s out there is staggering. There is something for everyone: ranging from fun stuff i.e. how to make invisible book shelf, imitate gunshot wounds and even open up a Coke machine to more practical stuff i.e. how to negotiate a raise or tie a Tie. All categorized, commented and rated by users like you and me. Below you’ll find all ‘HowTo’ services we could find, as always all free, well-categorized and hopefully objectively ranked. Plus a bonus ‘HowTo’ search engine at the end. Enjoy!

*** HOWTO GUIDES ***

eHow (over 35.000 HowTo artciles)

WikiHow (over 20.000 articles)

Instructables (approx. 4.500 articles)

HowToDoThings (~~???~~ 2500 HowTo artciles)

Koonji (??? HowTo artciles )

*** VIDEO HOWTO GUIDES ***

VideoJug (approx. 2.500 video HowTo’s). Lets you downloaded videos directly to your iPod. More iPod Tools

ExpertVillage (approx. 28.000 videos, and growing by 4000 every month)

SuTree (approx. 5.500 videos)

Sclipo (approx. 1000 videos)

TrickLife (approx. 600 videos)

5min (approx. 500 videos)

ViewDo (approx. 350 videos)

HelpfulVideo (approx. 150 videos). Note: some videos require payment

YouTube (category ‘Howto & DIY’)

Metacafe (category ‘Video tips and Guides’)

*** TOPIC SPECIFIC ***

NewBaby [Parenting / Newborn / Breastfeeding / .... and everything related to babies]

TeacherTube [guides for education courses for Math, Literature and etc.]

Helpero [Computers / Networking / Mobile / Games / Internet]

Work [everything related to Entrepreneurs and Small-Business owners]

ShowMeDo [Computing / Internet / Python / java /Linux/ Ruby /Blender / Graphics / Screencasting]

Video-Tabs [Guitar] – over 200 video HowTo’s

*** BONUS ***

Google Coop – ‘HowTo & DIY’ Search: Here is something worth a bookmark, to make things easier I created all-in-one ‘HowTo and DIY (Do It Yourself)’ search engine, using Google Co-op. This custom Google-powered search engine will search on all of the above mentioned ‘HowTo’ sites, simultaneously. Works great,… TESTed.

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Yahoo Answers – Get Fast Answers

Aibek — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 08:55:13 +0000

We have already reviewed bunch of google services but only 2 services from Yahoo, so it is a right time for Yahoo Answers, one more application with 100% user generated content.

Yahoo Answers is a place where you can ask and answer questions. And unlike many other similar services and forums, things happen extremely fast here. Most of the questions receive multiple replies within a one day of posting. It is like free consulting service.

Question posting process is quite simple, you only need is to select right category and specify how long it will stay open. Once this period is over best answer is choosen. Each posted question goes through 3 stages; open(still needs an answer), undecided(multiple answers are given and users are asked to vote for the best one) and resolved(best answer has been choosen).

Features:

1. Apart from asking and answering questions, you can also browse through 40 million already answered questions. There is a high chance that the answer you are looking for is among these 40 million answers, just search or browse by category to locate it.
2. For each question following options available

vote on it
report abuse
emait to friend
add it to your watch list (this is very handy for tracking several questions)
add it to del.icio.us
track answers through RSS using your feedreader
Add it to “My Yahoo!”

3. If you like answers given by one user you can monitor this person’s questions and answers through rss

4. User account interface provides detailed statistics about your questions, answers and points

5. Display your questions and answers on your blog or myspace profile.

To measure each user’s activity Yahoo answers introduced point based system. Each user receives some points for different type of actions like asking(-5 p) and answering(+2 p) questions. Initially every user starts with 100 points. This point system requires user to contribute in order to continue receive benefits of using the system. More on point system here. You can see highest perfroming users and their scores on the leaderboard seciton.

Need more information? Check out Yahoo Answers tour here. There is also Google Answers, which comes with a twist, it deserves a review of it’s own which will be coming soon.

Note: Yahoo does not guarantee the accuracy of the answers provided by users. So, people giving an answer may actually have no or little knowledge on the subject. Thus, I would not to rely on users when problem needs a professional assistance (ex;health issues).

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43Things – Share Experience of Achieving Goals

Kaly — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 01:53:57 +0000

43 Things is a handy website created by the guys from The Robot Co-op. 43 Things i an online community where peopla can create and track lists of the goals they want to achieve or have already achieved and share their progress with others. This service is designed to help people to achieve their goals by bringing them together with people who have same or similar goals.

How does it work?

It is really simple, but before you can start you are required to sign up with the service (email only). Once you have registerd you can start creating you goals (cut my hair, get a dog, tarvel to space, buy Porsche, graduate from Harvard, learn photography etc).

You can either enter your goals directly or discover other goals you may be interested in from other people’s lists. Add goals to your list by clicking ‘I Want To Do This’ button. After goals have been created you will be able to see other people who want same things at the moment or wanted them before.

Next thing is to actually start working on achieving your goals and a good idea would be to start looking at what the people who achieved these goals have done to do so. This is quite useful as it lets you obtain advice from the person who had actually done it.

When the goal is achieved you can mark it as ‘I Have Done This’ and share your expereience with others. Some more features from the service include:

Ask other members for an advice regarding certain goals.
Get reported about the people with the same goals.
Subscribe to goals/comments/entries of any member through your favourite RSS reader (FeedReaders profile)

I think this is really cool service in terms of sharing useful experience with other people. Plus it’s fun and extremely addictive, so you won’t gt bored even for a second. Additionally, it’s very simple to use and and has a large user base. Check it out!

Other products from The Robot Co-op include 43 Places (43 places I want to visit), 43 People (43 people I want to meet), All Consuming and (advice on books, movies, music, meals etc.) and lists of bests. Same username and password can be used for all of them.

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UrbanDictionary – Words Defined by Average People

Aibek — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:27:29 +0000

UrbanDictionary is another web service which truly illustrates the power behind user generated content. By giving power to users this website managed to build a practical words reference and entertainment platform, as Digg (profile) did with news, del.icio.us (profile) with bookmarks and Wikipedia (profile) with content. This website can actually be thought as a little funny sibling of wikipedia.

UrbanDictionary is quite popular website where users are able to to provide their own definitions for words. Terms are not limited to standard english language words but also any kind of sayings, comments, slangs and jargons that are used by people. After being online for a while it produced huge database with original, unique and in some cases funny and yet practical definitions. For instance, term porsche has several definitions 3 of which are:

A sports car company created in 1948 by Ferdinand Porsche.
the car that nobody needs, but everybody wants
“Porsche…. It’s a little too small to get laid IN…. But you get laid, the minute you get OUT.”

Below I have included some links to some user defined terms:

Anyone can a define word on UrbanDictionary, in addition to definitions users can also submit pictures and sounds. Users may also vote on the existing definitions giving them thumbs up (+1) or down (-1). These points determine the way multiple definitions for a partcular term are ranked. Each definition can be easily emailed to friends. Also when presented with a particular term users can see other terms that were indicated as relevant by other users.

To sum up this is a nice webiste with a user generated content. People with slight sense of humor will love it.

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YouTube.com – Online Video Sharing Site

Aibek — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 11:34:09 +0000

Youtube is another web application that has stormed the web and created a whole new global community. Youtube.com is the biggest online video sharing site, serving more then 100 million videos views daily. Around 65.000 videos added to the database daily.

So what can you do with it?

Mainly Youtube is there to let users easily find and watch videos of their choice. Youtube provides search option which in most cases delivers quite relavant videos. In particular, you get only those videos that were tagged (by person who uploaded it) with a similar term(s) as your search term. Presented search results are sorted by ratings, top rated appearing on the top. There is also an option to narrow down results even further by selecting the appropriate category (ex; Art, Entertainment). After watching some video, you can rate it, comment on it, save it to favourites, add it to playlist or recommend it to friends. In addition if user really liked the video s/he can also check whether there are more videos from the person who uploaded it. This way person can monitor favourite broadcasters.

Users can also upload and host their own videos and get feedback on their videos from people. This is a great opportunity to test his/her skills for anyone who is planning to go into broadcasting. Some private videos on youtube are watched more then 500.000 times and some people get quite famous. For instance, link below leads to a video that has been viewed almost 800.000 times. Check it out here.

Youtube became a number one chill out site for many people around the world, regardless whether people are there for watching or producing their own videos. Some people upload their videos on a daily basis and have their own viewer base. For instance, there are two chineese guys known as ‘Back Dormitory Boys’ that started to upload their own funny versions of songs by ‘backestreet boys’ band.

Most of their videos are here

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Wikipedia – Biggest Online Encyclopedia

Aibek — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 11:29:46 +0000

wikipedia.org

If you are not using it yet, then you are missing something…Wikipedia is the biggest online encyclopedia, which is 100% edited by users. Nowadays, wikipedia has articles in almost any language you can think of. Below You can see number of articles wikipedia had in different languages at the time this post was published.

1. English: 1.354.000 + articles
2. German: 457.000 +
3. French: 352.000 +
4. Polish: 287.000 +
?5. Chineese: 250.000 +
6. Dutch: 223.000 +
7. Italian: 191.000 +
?8. Sweedish: 180.000 +
9. Portuguese: 175.000 +
10. Ispanyol: 147.000 +
…
As I have mentioned, Wikipedia is 100% maintained web users, meaning that anyone including me and you can go to wikipedia, select/search for an article of your choice and edit any information you would like on that artcile. While this may raise some questions regarding the credibility of several articles, it seems that this process works quite well. That is because several hundreds or even millions of people visit wikipedia daily and many of these people act as editors, and some of these people are experts in one or another subject. If someone publishes a misleading information(or change correct information about something to something false) it is usually corrected within minutes.

Wikipedia is extermely useful when you need to quickly access to information about a particular term or concept.

Ex; ajax,debt consolidation,data mining, Mozart, web2.0 and etc…

The terms that may encounter some terms while browsing web, talking to people or watching TV. Usually wikipedia will have a detailed description to whatever you are looking for, however sometimtes it may not very simple to comprehend. In many cases, you will also be provided with not only description but several online resources/websites related to this term.

Some example Pages Examples:

1. Article about eminem: (Wikipedia-Eminem)
2. Article about blogging: (Wikipedia-Blogging)

To make best use of wikipeadia I highly recommend to use it as a toolbar for your browser. I use Mozilla firefox. Whenever
there is term or a concept I need to check I just enter the term into the search field on my browser and select wikipedia as a search engine. This is extremely handy and very fast way to get information on allmost anything instantly.

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Del.icio.us – Save/Share/Search/Discover Favorite Links

Aibek — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 22:51:58 +0000

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website belonging to Yahoo that let’s you store, share and organize yours and discover others favorite links. While this may not sound very enticing as many people can simply store their favourites on their computers, there are two main things del.icio.us gives that your locally stored bookmarks don’t. Firstly, by storing your favourites on del.icio.us server you can access them anytime from anywhere as long as you are connected to the internet. Secondly, and most importantly it provides you an access to favourites of other del.icio.us users, and there are millions of them.

What these millions of users provide to you?

When users want to store a particular URL on del.icio.us they are asked to provide tags (aka keywords) that identify this link. For instance, if you would want to save on del.icio.us the URL address of this page, you could have provided following tags: makeusof, del.icio.us, blog, reviewes or if would want to bookmark an ebay.com you could use following tags: ‘online auctions,ebay,bargain’. In addition you would have the option, to make this stored favourite either public or private. If it is private it is available only to you and no one esle, if it is stored as public on the other hand then any del.icio.us user will be able to see it.

So coolest feature of del.icio.us:
In 3 years of its existence due to huge user base on del.icio.us number of stored links in their database grew enormously. Any link/favourite in this database has tags that were assigned to it by user who has submitted it. When you use search on del.icio.us to look for something as a results you get links that were tagged with same term as a search term you have used. I will try to illustrate this below with an example;

I have searched for ‘photos’ on delicious(let me call it that way from now on), and below you can see a partial screenshot of the result I got.

By looking at the results above, you can see that the link that appears first links to yotophoto.com was tagged by the term ‘photos’ by 5129 different users and the the one that appears second linking to famous photo sharing website flickr.com was tagged with ‘photos’ by 18255 people. To put it simply, results you get are far more relavant that you would get any other search engine be it a Google or any other. However, I also observed that while delicious may produce very relavant results for popular terms it may be not so good for specialised terms(ex; nuclear physics). As delicious will grow further even very topic specific terms will become more an more relavant due to user contributions.

Some other nice features:

Delicious Hotlist: This feature displayed on the homepage updated every 30 minutes and shows you what is currently bookmarked most by people. This can be an idealway to find out about some website that BUZZ about at the moment.
Tag Watch: This tool let’s you select a particular term of your choice , and whenever someone would bookmark something using this tag you can see it in your account.
By going to http://del.icio.us/tag/ you can also get a visual presentation of most popualr tags currently used to bookmark links, the text size and thickness represents the relative popularity of one tag to another. Also maybe an interesting tool to play with.
User watch: Let’s say you had discovered one user on del.icio.us who seem to have bookmarked items that indicate that user has similar interests as yours. Then through rss(explanation below) you can track all the public submissions made by this user. You can also add this user to your network thorugh your account interface.
RSS enabled: Allmost everypage on the delicious can be syndicated. That is to say, you can get information you are interested in from delicious website without visiting it. For that you will need to obtain any RSS reader(if you are not familiar with the concept, just search for RSS reader on google or delicious and I am sure you will find your way out.).Afterwards you simpy click on the RSS icons on the delicious and save the URL address of the target page then pass this address to the reader and you get whatever the content on the page(from which you pressed RSS) on your reader.
Firefox plugin: There is a plugin for mozilla firefox browsers that can be used to easily store pages you are browsing to your delicious account without leaving the page. PLugin can be obtained from here

There are some more interesting stuff out there…To summarize, delicious is not only a place where you can discover cool links but also can serve a very good research tool, as a tool to find people with similar interest and discover their favorurites, and as a tool that shows you what are internet users currently BUZZ about. That is mainly it for delicious, looking forward for your comments

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StumbleUpon-Discover Websites that People Like

Aibek — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:52:01 +0000

StumbleUpon

This is really interesting, widely popular and one of my favorite websites. It’s more like a social network of web enthusiasts where you can discover various websites that were recommended by members with similar interests as yours. The best part of it, is that you can use this service right from the browser toolbar which comes with it(pic below) .

After installing this toolbar (both Firefox and Internet Explorer are supported) you need to signup with stumbleupon and select website categories you interested in. Once you are done with that, get back to your browser and click Stumble! and service will deliver you a website/webpage that was recently recommended by other members with matching interests. Each time you “stumble” into a website you have an opportunity to give it “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, websites that get thumbs down from several users are dropped from the stumble list and not shown anymore. It’s an easy way to find popularly loved websites, all you do is keep pressing stumble until you get somewhere you would want to stick around.

And that’s just things you can do from browser, with sign-up you also get your place at stumbleupon.com, which is mainly a summary of whatever you have reviewed and rated up or down. Additionally it’s a place where you can post more information about yourself and let system find people and communities that match your interests most. For instance when you enter your favourite movie or shows it can tell you other people that also included them as their favorite and so on, it’s pretty cool.

As you keep on recommending cool pages and writing reviews you may accumulate fans, which will continuously monitor your stumbling activity. Hmmmm, that’s all I guess. Overall it’s cool application to use when you dont know where to go or just too lazy to do anyting else apart from clicking mouse button. Take a look at it here, big chance you’ll like it. If you like this blog, add me to your friends list as well.

Technorati Tags: stumbleupon, social networking, discover, cool websites

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Digg.com – Brings your Favourite News Stories to You

Aibek — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:47:04 +0000

Digg.com is one of my favorite sites and so is for 800.000 (and growing) people that visit it on a daily basis. So, what is all the fuss about it?

If you visit traditional news sites regularly, you probably have experienced that a big portion of news you get either about something you have no interest in or just boring. Digg.com solves this problem by providing you only with news which were recommended by other readers. And it turns out to be just the right way

Digg.com is a news website but unlike popular news sites like New York Times, news stories that appear on digg.com are those that were found interesting by several people within short period of time. It is a loaded web 2.0 social news site where only users decide what will and won’t appear as news.

How does it work?

Someone(can be you) discovered a news piece or an article which may be interesting to many other people. -> To spread the word about it, person goes to Digg and submits that article. -> Other digg visitors can see and read it and finally digg it if they like it -> When submitted story receives sufficient number of diggs it is moved to the main page. -> Once it is on the main page all digg visitors(which is a lot) can see and read the story.

So, as a result stories on the home page of the site are the ones that receive most number of diggs within specified period of time. These are also the stories that were found interesting by most number readers. On the otherhand, if the story fails to receive diggs it is completely removed.

Digg started as technology oriented news site, and until late June 2006, stories on Digg were only technology related. At the end of june Digg went through some redesign and expanded its coverage by adding several news cateogries covering allmost all major industries. In addition, each major category has several subcategories. So now there is something for everyone. You can filter news according to your preferences to view those are not only interesting but relevant to what you do or like.

Below you may see a snapshot of main categories and subcategories for technology available on digg.com at the moment

Digg can be easily configured such that it shows news only from one particular subcategory or more subcategories while each belonging to different category. Simply, you can choose whatever categories and subcategories you want. You will require to register so that digg knows who you are and what to display whenver you visit it. And in addition to daily news, you can also see most prominent news stories stories of all times, of the last month or week.

Digg is young and its popularity is skyrocketing, challenging major news portals like newyork times. Almost 800.000 people visit digg.com on a daily basis. These users read and digg stories they like. While individual contribution may seem trivial, combined it creates highly interesting social news portal.

There are many more cool features available for Digg users, definitely check it out.

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