not only did i get surprisingly informed about pandora.com (which unfortunately only works for US residents due to some legal issues), but also figured that there are more social radio stations like that: last.fm. business 2.0 magazine writes: “Last.fm, for instance, monitors all the tunes you listen to on your computer and adds a social-networking twist by sharing your playlist with other Last.fm users with similar tastes and vice versa”.

read the “social media” article and find out who and what the “next net 25” are.

It’s sometimes recommended to read about the “what’s new”.

Manage user-based content display and user data persistence

faz article here

but now, google announces to use these gadgets also for your own website, using a simple <script/> tag.

That’s so much fun, so you can include now all kinds of funny gadgets into your page: calculators, world clocks, games, web cams, searches and so forth: check out the gadget collection

• did you know that you can use google as a calculator? well, try it out: type into the searchbox: 12+12, as a result, it will suggest the mathematical solution as a sum of 12 and 12.

• did you know that you can search for a fedex package by typing in the fedex number: it will give you as the first result, it will give you a shortcut to the tracking information for your package.

• do you need a correct and fast definition of a word: well, then type it: define: [word] and it will give you all the definitions it finds on the web.

• and the the one that most of us have seen already before: when typing in an address, it normally shows as a first result the map of a city the address is related to.

more google shortcuts are here

and this google cheat sheet is worth to be printed out and put next to your computer desk, it has the most useful search terms included.

google can recognize certain codes typed in or numbers into the search box and eases your way to your result.
try it out…it’s fun.

incident 1: don’t think you can register for online billing if they say you can: i have a rogers account: now, i wanted to link my billing to my online account. i typed in my account number + postal code, then a screen appears: you have 2 more chances to try it? what? why? i try it again and same problem again: you have 1 more time to try it. believe me, i checked the account number and my postal code. they are correct.
incident 2: bell didn’t tell me when i ordered basic lite internet that this only allows 1GB of down/up load bandwith. ok, i exceeded it already once, now i wanted to upgrade (ding ding: more money for them), so i followed the nice provided link “you can upgrade here” and after typing in and collecting all the information needed, they say: due to technical difficulties it’s not possible to upgrade. well i have tried it now every single day for the past 3 days. what kind of service is that? i sent an email to them, also no response …
well, at least my online billing with bell works

i guess bell or rogers can for sure compete with german’s “deutsche telekom” customer (online) service.

please dear bell and rogers: if you can’t offer online services then don’t promote them on your website.

Tim Berners-Lee describes the idea in his semantic web road map article and says clearly that the problem is still that “the web is designed for human cunsumption” but “the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web“. So the idea of the semantic web clearly tries to “solve this problem by developing languages for expressing information in a machine processable form“.

if you need examples and maybe a bit “easier” article to read, the bbc article “Smart sites to power semantic web” might belp you.

check out their website if you are sick of using a myspace profile if you want your “own myspace”

is there anybody who has a good resource for coldfusion 4.5?

moving forward to more futuristic methods/technologies:
i found a nice one-chapter example of the new series by o’reilly: head rush AJAX.
I really like the style how this serie of books presents its content to the readers: easy, funny and nice to read and understand. I am really thinking of buying it.
Another one I am reading/using is this one:  head first design patterns.

my favourite ones are still the: google code search, google mars or google answers

always fun and interesting for me to browse through