Syndication 2.0: Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes makes it possible to apply a host of filtering and sorting functions to a variety of information souces. If for example, you want to receive news about Science from multiple RSS feeds, you can create a simple “pipe” to aggregate your news items into one individual feed. If you only want news tagged with “Europe” or “media” or a combination of both, you can determine this as part of the feed as well. In fact, the pipes can become almost as compley and specific as you like, ensuring you only get content you really want. Aggregating feeds into pipes is an awesome next step in the world of syndicated, dynamic content. Check out the Website under http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/.

Crowdsourcing: Predictify.com

Whilst attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was quite astounded to see how effective a service like Twitter could be for getting answers to random questions fast. Of course, a certain critical mass of followers is required for it to work, but it actually works quite well. Taking this basic idea of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, Predictify.com is a site dedicated to “crowdsourcing”, or asking the many to predict answers to particular questions. You can even earn a little money by participating, and you can include witty comments on why you predicted a certain result, all displayed in a nice scatter-graph at the end. I personally think this is a “wicked cool” idea as they say, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of this approach in future in our private lives and in the enterprise.

“The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch

I woke up early to watch an inspiring video suggested as a breakfast session by a good colleague this morning, and was not disappointed. “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, a pioneer in the area of virtual reality, follows a tradition at some American universities to offer leading professors the opportunity to give an hour speech as if it was going to be their last lecture. An incredible Tigger-like individual, the twist with Randy’s speech is that it will be his last lecture.

Also, if you would like to learn programming in a fun, intuitive way, take a look at the Alice environment Randy talks about at www.alice.org.

Composition: Hyperscore (MIT)

I first encountered Hyperscore on one of the many fascinating TED.com video podcasts. It is a product of the MIT Media Lab and enables anyone irrespective of age, physical conditions or training to compose music in an intuitive and fun way. The software costs US$79 to download, but whether you actually buy it or not, it’s well worth simply checking the Website: http://www.hyperscore.com/. Alternately, you can take a quick look at the TED.com video: Releasing the music in your head (Tod Machover & Dan Ellsey)