iconolith

Using Atlas to Scout Ahead

This morning I received an email from FreshLogic Studios, and with all the online services and accounts I have I couldn’t quite remember why they were emailing me, so I went to their site to refresh my memory. A few months back I had come across their Atlas application that had a cool tie-in to Twitter so I created an account, voila… question answered.

It turns out Atlas has some other handy features that I hadn’t played with before. I’ll be traveling the next couple of weeks and took the opportunity to map some driving directions. Normally I would use Google Maps, am glad I tried this instead. (Attention terrorists) Below is the route I’ll be driving from Anchorage to Seward. It is a very scenic drive as you can probably guess from the map.

Next I grabbed the directions from PDX to a conference near Portland I’ll be at next week. This map isn’t quite as pretty as the first one.

… So I zoomed out to see what was nearby …

Still, I wondered what the area was like on the ground. Having never been to Portland yet I don’t know what quite to expect, so I see there are other features Atlas has that can help me discover more about the area such as “Bird’s Eye View”. Now I can see what areas of Portland really look like …at the University of Portland for instance…

… and the conference location …

Now how handy is that? How many times have I wished I knew where I was going before I got there? Atlas also shows images of the local area that other people have shared on Flickr. My next question is where all the hotspots are. Atlas can map those too courtesy of hotspothaven.com. Hey Look! There is that cool bookstore that Chris told me about that I will definitely stop at.

xFruits - Doing More With Feeds

From the web site xFruits is described as:

“…a free online service offering to every user the possibility of:

• Enriching your home
• Enlarging your blog’s functionalities
• Creating, generally, your information system from the RSS feed

XFruits makes possible the Mashup RSS creation in a very simple way thanks to the Composer. You can assemble the bricks together so as to build your own feed-based service. “xFruiter” service’s users are referenced.

xFruits has been thought of as from its origin to be upgradeable and modular, and thus, to allow a developer’s community to take part in the project. Our ambition is to create dozens of new bricks!”

It can aggregate many feeds into a single feed, convert RSS to email for an email alert of new posts (and vice versa - a feed for unread email in your inbox), RSS to voice to turn blog posts into podcasts (some restrictions here - more at vocalfruits.com), create an OPML list of your RSS feeds that can be converted to web for mobile, convert RSS to PDF, convert RSS to a web page, and combinations thereof.

[Spotted on the SL Educators List]

Where’s Web2.0?

There are probably a whole lot of Web2.0 collections out there but go2web20.net is certainly the most Web2.0 of them that I have come across. There’s a whole lot of time-killin’ potential if you’re planning on visiting.

A Series of Pipes

Over the past week or so I have been getting re-acquainted with my Yahoo account ever since Flickr decided I needed to tie my two accounts together. Lo and behold I discovered their mashup service Pipes. I can’t help but think that the name is a wink to Ted Stevens’ tubes - which still makes me turn my head in shame each time I hear it (full context here).

Despite my novice programming skills and lack of desire to read the directions, I was able to cobble together a local search for coffee within 10 miles of a user-provided location - all within about 3 minutes.

More interesting than what individual users can do is that Pipes lets you view the inner workings of Pipes created by others and clone them into other modified mashups.

So maybe there are some tubes in there somewhere. See also: Dapper - the data mapper

Making Harry Potter Much Better

Wizard People, Dear Reader - a parody on the first Harry Potter Movie - is a wonderful piece of derivative art work that tickles the funny bone. Thanks to coudal.com for the lead.