I can't believe some of creativity I have seen online lately,
and the speed at which ideas have been spreading and morphing
into others.
A couple weeks ago I saw this lj post:
totally just invented the best format for music EVER
http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/28155.html
and I thought "haha, that's cute", and kept surfing.
Then, within hours/days, I started to see variations spring up, e.g.
Since U Been Gone Annual Report 2005
http://junk.haughey.com/sinceubeengone/
(pop song reformatted as a slideshow presentation)
and a few others I can't remember. Hmm, that's kind of a lame
example, but I can't think of others right now.
About a month ago Google introduced Google Maps, which of course
blows everything else away, and since then people have been
coming up with all kinds of ways of reusing their map data.
Just a few that I remember:
memory maps
http://flickr.com/photos/mathowie/8496262/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/memorymap/
google sightseeing
http://www.shreddies.org/gmaps/
(links to famous places in google maps' satellite view)
and finally the coolest one,
Craigslist for-rent ads scraped and placed on Google Maps
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/09/craigslist_forrent_a.html
http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/
This is awesome considering it's based on two unrelated data
sources, nobody had to coordinate anything with anyone else,
and the final product is so usable and useful.
I happen to be looking for an apartment right now, and this blows
away all the cruddy systems I have been using. Too bad it doesn't
cover Ottawa.
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/