Google Wave – Now I Get It

If you have worked in corporate America long enough to see an email chain that threads on forever, with random people copied in and out of the communication and a variety of different topics covered and it’s all gotten very, very messy.

Google Wave has been the hype of the web the last few weeks, people selling limited edition invites to the new service on eBay.  I have read about how great it is going to be, how it will change all of our lives, but this video will explain it in two minutes and make us all as excited as the rest of the world seems to be.

This is the funniest non-blog ever!

My wife was way ahead of the curve on this blog.  This is the simplest blog ever, and it is hilarious.  The premise works like this, Mike responds to classified ads posted by morons and tries to drag out their responses to his ever-increasingly ridiculous replies.  A couple of personal favorites are Brokeback Beach and Ride to Bonnaroo.  The only drawback is no RSS feed yet, though it has been requested.  Check the right side column for the classics.

DontEvenReply.com

Finally Push Gmail – What is that anyway?

The long wait is over, I know how many countless lonely nights you lay awake – hoping, waiting, for push Google Mail.  don’t ask me how I know that, I just do.

But what is push Google Mail?  I will leave this article to explain better than I can.  Simply put, if you have an iPhone, and you have had a Blackberry, there is one key element that makes the iPhone imperfect (until today).  The tremendous lag time in reception of emails.  The iPhone can take up to 15 minutes to check back and then update with new emails whereas the Blackberry practically invented push, quite literally making it faster than my PC.  Follow the link to install the new Google Mail push application and step back from the ledge a bit.

Step-by Step Guide

Listia – eBay for free stuff

This is kind of an interesting social experiment: Would people trade real possessions for virtual currency?  People list things on Craigslist and Gumtree for free all the time, there are plenty of bulletin boards with free couches, or nicknacks, the same things can be found garage sales as well – now someone has taken that online.

There’s not a lot of stuff there, but soon there will be for people just like me, who moved house and could not justify throwing perfectly good possessions away but also had no purpose for them and needed to expunge them from my life.  It’s also a much greener way of doing things, as opposed to stacking landfills ever higher.  So here is the deal, you get 50 points for signing up and 50 more for everyone else you sign up, and some more points when you list your first item.  Then you collect the points from whoever “buys” your stuff, and “spend” those points on whatever you find.  If you get really addicted you can even buy more points.  It’s worth a look.

ebay... but free

Wow, Seriously Crazy People!

Dan C at work showed me this website. These effing crazy people registered on our website for some free information which caused us to examine who they were before we gave them any info.

Don’t spend too much time on this site, it will only do one of two things, neither of them good. You will either be dumber for spending any time looking at it, or worse it will start to make sense. When it starts to make sense… RUN!!! By the way, how crazy is it that the Doc is the spitting image of Christian Bale in American Psycho?

Not Christian Bale, but still an American Psycho!

American Psycho

Projector/Camera – Strange Combo but I want one!

Engadget has posted pictures of the highly anticipated Nikon 1000pj, it’s a brand new digital camera (12mp) with a built-in projector on the front. Strange combo at first glance, but possibly revolutionary when you consider what you could do with this. Presumably, you could toss in a flash card and take a movie to friend’s house, just find a white wall and pitch up. Great for reviewing footage that would be too small to see the detail on a 2″ screen as well.

I think the key factor here will be performance and capability. The size of the screen they demo it on looks pretty small (follow link to site for video) and doesn’t make a lot of sense for any practical use – though it may have been a simple lack of exhibition space, I think it would also be a question of how accessible this device is to other similar inputs. Could you use a USB to plug in your iPod video, what about for giving a presentation at a meeting where the most application would be?  <<FOLLOW AFTER THE BREAK>>

Odd Combo

The answer is in another device that was also recently posted from China. Solving the age-old problem of not having a pocket-sized projector, this device has some of these features of the Coolpix but some more practical options too. The DP2000 features a projector, about the size of two decks of cards.  With a touch screen on top and two USB ports, this is a much more useful piece of technology.  It also has a built-in SD slot which would make it much more useful than its’ counterpart.

The best part about the Darling DP 2000 I nearly missed altogether.  Follow the link (embedded in the image) to see a video demo of why this product is so great. For those who don’t want to watch it in action I will tell you exactly what I missed.  It’s a pocket laptop.  Genius really!  It’s got the USB for a keyboard, the touch screen top is instead of a mouse, no need for a screen, you can project it anywhere, the disk space is on the SD card.  You know what makes it even sweeter?  $180 Price tag (that’s £110 for our British friends).  That means that the technology is probably not the best at that price tag but upon further research I found that just about everyone has one of these about to come out, Samsung, Sony; the only difference is that these don’t utilize the ability to put a laptop in your pocket literally.

The future

Oversharers – For those who love public humiliation

A colleague of mine, Dan C sent me an email with some humiliating Fbook stat(i) and comments just last week.  Apparently there is a whole site out there dedicated to this called Oversharers.com

This site is hilarious!  It takes people’s tweets and Facebook “stat(i)” and reposts them for all to see and enjoy.  The best part is, the site posts them with their picture in most cases and their name – not so you could torment them for leaving a sesame seed in their teeth for a week or liking the smell of their own armpit, but it adds some authenticity to it, and makes it real for those of us who just can’t believe these people exist.  It’s the same phenomenon with People of Wal-Mart, and shows you that quality, self-esteem boosting humor is around you everyday, you just have to open your eyes and look for it sometimes.

That's soooo hot!

Hilarious (Hawkeye) Blog – Even if you’re not an Iowa fan

Cynical and sarcastic, Black Heart Gold Pants is hilarious not only to an Iowa fan like myself but to others who appreciate how ridiculous sports can be and those who take them seriously.  You have to check out his latest post, Iowa Crushes Northern Iowa – it helps wipe some of the tears of pain from the dismal performance on Saturday.

To make things even better, BHGP posted this image after it was announced that Jewel Hampton, starting running back and the second stringer (Brinson) out left the immensely talented Paki O’Meara taking hand-offs on Saturday.  He had a phenomenal 16 yards on 9 carries.  This image is nearly prophetic.

As in Paki O'Meara and bomb like what he is doing to our chances of a Big Ten title.

Seth Godin

This is a great blog for business.  Sometimes it’s just a few lines of ranting about customer service centers, or media trends, at other times it’s something really insightful you can take and apply to your workday.  A great example is his post on the “Modern Talking Pad” which is really just a better use of a powerpoint presentation, or his complaints about being distracted by “Apostrophes and quotations”.  It was the guys at AI Digital and the Internet Marketing podcast that recommended him as do I.

Click Seth's head to see his empire.

User Generated Sports Reports

My wife and I have kicked around the idea of a blog we would call, “Good Choice/Bad Choice” where we highlight the decisions that make or break someone’s day.  The idea came after we faced a choice of two side-by-side Chinese restaurants away from China Town, in Manchester, England.  The “Blue” choice always seemed to be full but looked expensive and had a mix of both caucasian and oriental (or asian – whichever is least offensive according to your region) which as you will find in Stuff White People Like this is a less appealing choice.  We chose the basement Chinese buffet instead, which prompted the blog following our dismal experience.

That to one side, a website of fan/user-written sports stories should be a catastrophe, and in many places it is, but oddly, these fanatics tend to also have the inside scoop on their teams.  As an Iowa fan, I can speak from experience as Bleacher Report delivered the news that Jewel Hampton, our first string running back would be out for the year.  ESPN picked up the story several hours later.  the biggest drawback, oddly is not the fanboys discussing the miniscule details of the field conditions for next week’s away game, but rather the inefficiency of the RSS feed for just NCAA football alone.  Or perhaps this is just my inability to tag the right feed.