MIT has an excellent collection of videos on various discussions and lectures that take place on campus. The site can be used as a good reference by all those who dreamt of MIT but could not make it there. MIT also has an exhaustive collection of its lecture notes and study material posted online at its OpenCourseWare site. These are some very niche and socially exciting initiatives by one of the top institutions in the world.
There is a lot of interesting stuff happening with respect to technology and innovations online. I have listed down some of the new launches that sound both innovative and promising. I am following the progress of these right now.
Gritwire presents an easy way to customize real-time text and multimedia ‘SpeedFeeds’ by providing updates on the things you want to see and hear. It does so by leveraging the latest in internet content syndication technologies (RSS, OPML) and the explosive power of social networking (such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook). The site acts as a central place for aggregating and customizing the content according to your needs, and then have it delivered to your desktop through a Gritwire Deskbar. The site itself has a very neat and ajax-based interface.
Gollum is a demonstration of what all can be done with AJAX. Gollum is an open-source, web app built in AJAX that minimizes Wikipedia to the simplest interface: a toolbar, a search bar, and the article. The presentation of the articles is also enhanced, with bigger headings and shifting the category list to the top of the page. Features include a bookmarking facility, ability to send e-mail links of the article as recommendations, and the Print button. However, I agree with other users about the lack of tabs as a big drawback for this interface.
Songbird is the latest innovation from the developers of Winamp and Yahoo Music Engine. According to the site, ‘Songbird is built atop the Mozilla Foundation’s XULRunner platform also used by the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client and other desktop applications. Songbird runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux personal computers with few OS-specific tweakages.’ The project is still in alpha, and looks like a promising digital media player. Songbird Public Preview v0.1 codename Hilda, will be released mid-December 2005.
QuickMath Automatic Math Solutions is a very useful site for students of mathematics, engineering and physics. The tools on the site can perform quick calculations for integration and differentiation. A very handy site for all your Calculus needs.
OneLook Dictionary Search is a reverse lookup engine for doing word searches. Enter any phrase you want a word for, and the search results give a list of possible words that match your phrase. An interesting idea.
Also came across AJAX IM platform, which can run within the browser. I liked this new idea, which obviates the need to download and run any IM application outside of the browser. However, compatibility with other IM platforms and applications would be a strongly desired feature for future releases.
Another interesting addition to this week’s website discoveries is smugmug, a photosharing website. The unique feature of this service is that it allows you to geocode your photos, thus making it easy to map them. smugmug uses Google Maps API as the underlying engine to power this interesting feature. Check out the smugmug maps.
Came across a very nice site for finding research papers and other scientific information. The site is called Scirus. The papers are more or less the same as those found on ScienceDirect, but extended search functions in this case might be of immense help.
I was surfing on the web for the blogs and sites that are making news, and came across the Bloggies awards. Listed here in the best meme section was the blog, Is my Blog Burning?. Its a food recipes site based on the same model as some of the photography sites like Photofriday, which call for theme-based postings. In the case of this blog, a weekly/monthly theme is announced and people post their recipes based on that theme and also post their comments. After going through the whole site, I found it much better than those dead monologues on other recipe sites. Finally, the cooking brethren puts on their creative hats to get in the league of the elite recipe makers. Go check it out.
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