Alex Dunne

Stacy, my boss, just told me about Animoto. You can upload photos, select a soundtrack, and it generates a nice slideshow that’s sync’d to the music. Here’s an example using Interop Las Vegas pics:

I heard a great snippet on NPR this morning on the way to work.  Every Friday, NPR broadcasts “StoryCorps”, which is usually a semi-schmaltzy piece where someone tells a relative how much they love them.  Today’s was different though, and made me laugh out loud.  It’s about Mexican immigrants who had their name American-ified…at least some of them.  On some names, it just doesn’t work.  Take a listen… (Don’t read the transcript, you have to hear the guy -click “Listen Now” at top of the NPR page.)

So sad to hear that Harvey Korman died today. In tribute, here’s a most excellent scene of him from Blazing Saddles, one of the funniest movies of all time.

I just discovered an interesting new application for Facebook called Nexus, which analyzes your Facebook relationships and then graphs them out. It also sees what you have in common with your friends, and then tells you who is most similar to you, based on those commonalities. But the interactive graph is just really beautiful, and cool. If you have a Facebook account, check it out.

Here’s a great scene from “The Office” a couple of weeks ago — it made me laugh so hard. This is how to close the weak minded.

Today I installed Xobni, an add-on for Outlook that helps you manage your email. (Xobni backwards is “inbox”.) Xobni has been talked up quite a bit, and I was curious to see if the reality matched the hype. I’m still too new to it to say whether it’s everything it’s cracked up to be, but after my first day, here’s my reaction.

It’s cool to see who ranks as your top email contacts. Everyone in your inbox is automatically ranked based on how many emails sent and received from that person. Linda was #6. Marco was #10. Stacy, my boss, was #4. Strangely, it ranked me as #1 - I don’t send myself emails very often from other email accounts, so that was odd. I still haven’t figured out who ranks as #2 and #3.

Each time you click on an email in your inbox, you get instant access to any files that were sent or received from that person via email. That’s great for me, since sometimes I lose file attachments.

You also see email stats about your contacts, like how many emails sent to/received from that person, what time of day you most often get email from them, and it even tries to assemble contact info (address, phone) for people based on data contained in their emails. (It wasn’t so successful with that - it assigned Linda a cell phone number for a contractor who’s phone number she was emailing me.) Possibly the best thing about Xobni is its interface, which is contained a vertical pane added to the right side of Outlook’s interface. It’s attractive and functional.

Good stuff overall, though. Check it out if you use Outlook.

After returning from Interop Las Vegas last week and doing my customary mega-load of laundry, I discovered that my 2GB Memorex Traveldrive flash memory stick went through the washer and dryer — it was hidden in the pocket of some pants. I thought for sure the thing was going to be useless after being submerged in water and tossed around in high heat for 60 minutes, but lo and behold, it still works!  Granted, it had a little protective plastic cap over the part that inserts into the computer, but I didn’t think the thing had a prayer.  Way to go, Memorex.

Here’s a great article by Clay Shirky about how much time society spends “consuming” content (in this case, watching trillions of hours of television each year), in lieu of producing content — from creating a lolcat to editing a Wikipedia entry. I wonder where he would draw the line, however, in what constitutes a waste of social surplus. Is watching the news on TV still a waste, or is it just a waste if it’s mindless entertainment like sitcoms? What about reading a book, or playing a videogame? Or reading a web site, as opposed to contributing to a web site (in the form of comments, editing content, etc.)? I see where he’s going with his thesis, but it seems like a slippery slope.

I was working over at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, and one of the guys I work with at Techweb, Fritz Nelson, came into the show office with an awesome balloon logo for the event. He said that the guy who does balloon animals for kids over at the Chevy’s restaurant on 3rd & Howard was bugging him to make an animal (not sure why, he was with a group of adults), and after initially blowing him off, Fritz thought better of it and commissioned the guy to make this:

Pretty cool. Fritz said he’s going to use it somehow in his video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo on Techweb.com.

I just discovered a great new (still in beta) search engine, Searchme, that uses a coverflow-like results page. If someone had described this to me, I probably would have rolled my eyes. It sounds a little gimmicky, but it works really well. You can flip through web pages really rapidly, see the context for the search term within the page, and hone in on what you’re looking for quickly. One gripe is that the results themselves aren’t as accurate as good ol’ Google.

Update: Hmmm, each page I flip through in the coverflow is added to Firefox’s web history. A single seach should add one page to the browser history, not umpteen-thousand.