Week 4: Mashups

Okay, this trading card generator is one of the coolest mashups ever. Enough said.

Week 4: Flickr

Artoo Mailbox
Originally uploaded by StartedByAMouse

I know some of you have wondered what happened to my career after the last Star Wars movie. I've found working as a mailbox to be a rewarding experience.

Week 3: Rollyo

I made a rollyo search engine for New Zealand news websites.

http://rollyo.com/natz2d2/new_zealand_news_sources/

So you can search all the major national news sources in one go. Cool, huh?

Check out this piece of information in their privacy policy:

"We may use information about you for our own internal purposes, such as to estimate our audience size, measure aggregate traffic patterns as well as to understand demographic, customer interest, and other trends among our users. We may outsource these tasks and disclose personal information about you to third parties, provided the use and disclosure of your personal information by these third parties is restricted to performance of such tasks."

So Rollyo is basically a front for collecting marketing information about its users and passing it on to advertising companies. I wonder how much money they're making off this venture?

Week 3: Library Thing

Library Thing. Wouldn't it be scary if you loaded on a hundred books and found someone on the other side of the world owned the exact same hundred books?

I was curious about what library thing did with this knowledge of my book collection. This is what they say in their privacy terms.

"LibraryThing will not sell any personally-identifiable information to any third party. This would be evil, and we are not evil."

The Empire used to say the same thing. Although it was ruled by Sith Lords ...
I guess if Library Thing was evil it wouldn't have a name like Library Thing. It would be called 'The Death Star Library Eliminator'.

"LibraryThing allows "private" libraries—libraries that others can't see. We promise to try hard to maintain this privacy. As a beta application and a wiggly one, we cannot give an absolute 100% guarantee of privacy. After all, even Amazon had a day when all their "anonymous" reviewers were exposed. (Many turned out to be the authors themselves, of course.)"

Really?! Authors review their own books on amazon.com? I never knew this. Wouldn't it be really messed up if you reviewed your own book and gave it a terrible review?

"LibraryThing will not cooperate with US law enforcement unless compelled to do so. If you are using LibraryThing from a foreign country with an oppressive government, LibraryThing urges you not to put yourself at risk. We certainly promise never to open up an office in China and actively filter sensitive political information and rat out dissidents, such as Yahoo does. Shame on them."

Good to know. Thank you, Library Thing.

Week 3: Image Generators

Why don't we put signs like this all over Manukau City?

http://www.addletters.com/road-highway-blue-generator.htm

Here's a fun image generator link. The lightsaber simulator:

http://www.guerrestellari.it/slas.html

Week 2: RSS

Kelly wanted to know where Threepio was. Unfortunately, all this Web 2.0 stuff caused his processor to overload, and he self-destructed. I am working on welding him back together, but between blogging and RSSing, a droid doesn't have much time left over. I have to say that finding feeds was a time consuming task because I kept stopping to read them.

What surprised me about this week's task was how many websites actually had RSS feeds. If your website doesn't have one, you're obviously completely out of the loop. I must create an RSS feed for the Manukau Libraries new books pages as soon as possible!

Here is a link to my bloglines blog:

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/natz2d2