Category: Resources

Tags are the warp (or is it the woof?) of the Web 2.0 fabric, but until now, they’ve only threaded together the content of individuals sites. That’s changed with TagFetch, a tag-aware search engine that returns results from Flickr, YouTube, Newsvine, del.icio.us, Feedster, and other sites that incorporate tagging.

[Via Lifehacker]

Who doesn’t need a free 1 gig of offline storage (or 2 or 3)? TUAW has a link to a piece on getting a Box.net Internet drive to mount on your Mac (these accounts are officially PC-only), No extra software required. The 1GB accounts are free. More space can be purchased.

Street Tech Co-Founding Father Sean Carton is back in Baltimore, now working at idfive, a Baltimore design and communications firm. He and idfive have created a group blog called AttentionScan. It’s filled with rebel advertising and marketing ideas, high weirdness, cool tool discoveries, and Russian drinking games — basically Sean’s usual interests. Here’s a Top Ten List (of corp creativity tips) that he posted (via Stefan Engeseth):

1. Hire people who have different talents than you.
2. Install a random control in the elevator so that everyone ends up on the wrong floor. Get a head start by pressing the wrong button today.
3. Exchange Filofaxes with each other.
4. Bring your children to work.
5. Invite your customers to participate in projects at an early stage.
6. Invite someone from the street to attend your next meeting.
7. Mix people in meetings: for example sales people and marketing people.
8. Change the setting of the meeting. Why not hold your next meeting at a kindergarten?
9. Create imbalance. Stand on one leg during a meeting and seek imbalance. Seek imbalance in the marketplace.
10. Use simple language. A good idea thrives on simplicity.
11. Always go the extra mile and do a little more than what’s on the list.

TechCrunch offered their take on the newly released Google Notebook yesterday. Their verdict? Ho-hum. One of the things they missed was tags. We agree. An unfortunate omission.

Another, competing notebooking service is Jeteye (ah… Obi-Wan, I think I get it: “THOSE aren’t the Notebook tools you’re looking for… Move along.”). It offers much of the same capabilities as Notebook, though Google has a “Note This” link on all search results that’ll send a listed item directly to your Notebook list. Jeteye DOES offer tagging.

TechCrunch wonders whether Google Notebooks could possibly survive if it wasn’t Google behind it. We wonder what this means for Jedi… er Jeteye. We do like the look and feel of their product better. Problem is, there are suddenly so many of these Net-based, Web 2.0 organizing tools available, at some point, you just have to pick one (or two) and stick with it, or you’d spend all of your time setting up new services and porting your e-life over to them.

I love some of the stuff that people are doing with processing of Flickr files. Colr Flickr groups pictures based on colorfields (pics that have one predominant color/pattern) and slaves them to a color wheel/slider. Click on the wheel or move the slider and pictures are grabbed with that color value. Click on the pics to go to that Flickr file. Nifty.

Thanks, Alberto!

Amazon’s “Digital Locker” — providing you with PDFs of the manuals for the gear you buy — is nice, but has obvious drawbacks (like storing only docs for the booty you bought from them). UserManualGuide.com is set up as a central repository for PDF editions of manuals for dozens of popular models of mobile phones, cameras, TVs, DVD players, even household appliances like fridges and washing machines. The site is far from comprehensive, but if they continue to add content (and don’t run afoul of over-reaching IP police), the site should continue to get even more useful. I don’t know about you, but I for one, can be bothered to put dead tree manuals in a place when I can find them when I need them. This sounds like a job for cyberspace, don’t you think?

If youve been using Google Calendar, or thinking about it, you might be interested to know that Gmail now offers integration with the calendar. Ryan at CyberNet Tech News explains how it works:

When you begin to compose a message you will see a link on the right side of the screen that says “Add Event Info”. This link will allow you to enter in the details of the event that you are inviting the recipient to. When the recipient receives the email it will appear as an invitation that they can decide whether they will attend, might attend, or will not attend the event. If they decide that they will or might attend the event then it will be added to their calendar.

There are a few other calendar/mail features, too. Check it out.

Thanks, Craniac!

Many years ago (we’re old), Street Tech did a piece called “What to Do with an Old CPU” with ideas on how to recycle your passed over PCs. It was one of the articles that we got the most interest in, along with many emails asking us to update it. We didn’t (we’re old AND lazy).

But the fine crunchy ones over at Treehugger have posted a more contemporary list of similar ideas and orgs in their piece How to: Recycle Your Old Computer.

Also: Be sure to check out Xeni’s Boing Boing post and link to sobering Salon article on our exporting of toxic computer waste to the developing world.

Cybernet Technology News offers a quick fix that can help with Firefox’s annoying memory leakage. This fix will bump memory usage down to under 10MB every time you minimize Firefox (Windows OS, only). When minimized, it writes Firefox to the hard drive and fetches it from there when you maximize. Memory obviously increases again, but the process will release some of the “excess” memory Firefox is holding onto. In the test the author did, the browser started off using 180MB of memory. After minimizing, then maximizing, it only inflated back to 60MB.

Allegedly, IE and Opera already do this memory management. Hopefully, Firefox will implement it in a future release. Until they do, there’s a simple change to perform in the Firefox config file.

See the steps after the jump…

As you may know, Street Tech is now part of the Federated Media network. Each day, Federated puts together a page of “best of” excerpts from sites on the network. It’s a great bookmark, a way of keeping abreast of the latest developments in tech, the business of tech, Web 2.0, etc. As the network grows, and other sites of record are added, this “metablog” should become even more useful.