Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category

All Your Data Connected Virtually Thanks to PogoPlug

How many of you have thumb drives lying around with little use for them? Perhaps you’ve got several external drives that you have to keep plugging in and unplugging when you are not using them. This frustrating experience cycles because there’s never been a suitable solution for all this.

#pogo

If you’ve not checked out PogoPlug, then this little device could be a life saver for all of you. PogoPlug is a device that allows you to plug all of your USB devices to it and via a portal, you have access to all of your data from any computer/laptop in the world.

Before you throw them away, take a look at PogoPlug and keep all your data accessible. The PogoPlug comes in at a reasonable $99 offering easy setup, easy sharing, and the kicker…iPhone access for those needed to access their PogoPlug on the go.

#pogo2

Clipta Video Search Offers More Results

For a long time YouTube has been the king of the video search. There have been numerous other video sites, and like the rest, they all fall short in their ability to really attract a wide audience onto their site. Recently I was made aware of Clipta Video Search, in what appears to offer a better interface than YouTube and offering more diverse results.

clipta

Clipta also offers distinct categories to make it easier to find videos with less of a chance that a mislabeled video would be placed under any given category. The community on here appears to be active and there is definitely some control behind the scenes to offer the users a better experience. While it may not rank as high as YouTube for your video searches, give it a try!

Get That Missing Album Art For Your Music List

It never fails that sometimes when I try to import my music CD’s that I don’t have the right album art to show in my music player.  When it comes to music I’m picky, and I like my music to be labeled correctly, ratings, rankings, album names, and definitely album art.

If you’re like me, then All CD Covers might be the place to stop in order to fill the missing void of album art you might have in your playlist. With over 100,000 album art and growing, there is a good chance you’ll find what you need.

As an added bonus they also offer movie and game cover art for all of your media. It’s a nice one stop shop to get yourself caught up and make your file listings attractive and cataloged just right.

MySpace An Endangered Species?

Image representing MySpace as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

There is no doubt that the market is becoming overrun with social networks. While there is value in a great number of them, after awhile they all starte to look the same. With only slight variations it makes a person wonder why one would be different from the rest if they are all so similar. That being said, the grand-daddy of the social network medium, MySpace, might be on the endangered species list.

It’s no surprise that during an economic crunch that “re-structuring” is inevitable, but recently we’ve seen a large number of the  U.S. staff released from the company, and now the wave appears to be hitting Europe. After reading an article on TechCruch it got me thinking if MySpace is even relevant anymore.

It’s become a marketing ground for new bands, comedians, and other entertainers. The playground to the 15 and below crowd, it fails to reach the depth that other social networks like Facebook have reached in recent years. Much like AOL was a pioneer and has slowly been phased out of importance, is the same happening to the social networking pioneer MySpace?

Do you still use MySpace? If so for what? Do you find it relevant in  your life, why or why not? I’d love to gauge the readership of Crenk and find out if MySpace is even a blip on the radar in terms of connecting with people.

Wikipedia Printed Book! Im Not Sure If I Would Want to Carry It

I have seen some strange things in my time but this has to be one of the geekiest ones. A student in the UK has converted 0.01% of the English edition of Wikipedia Encyclopedia into a printed book. If you were to actually print all 3 million articles on Wikipedia then it would be roughly equivalent to 952 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

wikipedia-book

This Wikipedia book has some 5,000 pages and it’s a compilation of 400+ featured articles all picked from Wikipedia. And, as you can easily make out from the photographs, the book is huge – it’s about 1ft 7in. high or just as tall as a 30″ widescreen monitor.

wikipedia-print

40 years of Unix

linuxlogoYes, the operating system that you’ve never wanted to use is celebrating 40 years of life. As you may know, Unix represents the basis for all Linux distributions; but did you know that also Mac OS X based their operating system versions in Unix? Well, what this operating system represents it’s a lot more that you may think.

Born in 1969 as “Unics” from two guys named Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, has a long way and a lot of history. Written originally in Assembler programming language, quickly changed the code since one of the founders also developed the “C” language. Bill Joy, in 1978 created 1BSD, operating system also based in Unix, that will later represent in other important developments like BSD, FreeBSD, SunOS and Mac OS X.

Other ramifications of this development, produced Minix OS for academic proposals, that later Linus Trovalds will use to build the first Linux distribution in 1991. Here’s a very nice picture that will help you understand a lot more of these ramifications:

Unix_history-simple

Closing the article, here’s a quote from Joel Spolsky that talks about Windows and Linux:

“What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.”

Building your Own Arcade Cabinet (shared)

I wanted to share with you a very, very cool set of posts from Scott Hanselman: Building your own arcade cabinet. This I’m sure fulfills almost every man’s dream, that spent a lot of time with these magnificent toys.

Within the articles Scott will guide you to the entire process about how to build this machine. Including all the tips regarding to the materials used, where to buy them, etc:

The Complete Series

  1. Cabinet and Power
  2. Monitor and Mounting
  3. Control Panel
  4. Sound and Lights
  5. Paint and Art
  6. Computer Hardware and Software
  7. Success and Conclusion

Here’s a video that gives you a tour to the entire process:

Here are some of amazing facts about it:

  • Cost = $441. Yep, only 441 dollars. But there are some disclaimers about it, for example, the monitor was recycled from an old one. But still, sounds like a great number to me.
  • The work hours took him around 24 hours total, divided in six weeks. I know what you are thinking, if you start building it right now, by this time tomorrow you’ll have it all set :)

Don’t tell me that you are not considering the idea!

Twitter Stats: Tweet once and never again

twitter_logoRecently I’ve posted about an interesting stat of the blogsphere: Over 95% of current blogs in Internet are abandoned, and one of the reasons that I’ve mentioned is the existence of Twitter. Well, I guess similar stats always comes in two. A study made from the Harvard Business revealed a lot of stats regarding to Twitter users, including one related to their users and how they abandon twitter.

10% of the Twitter accounts hold the 90% of the tweets available every day, and most of the users that register themselves usually uses one or two tweets and leave the account completely. Here are some other stats from the report:

twitter_stat

So, what we can say about this inconsistency in blogs and twitter? People that start a blog and/or a twitter account but they never update it again… well I’m sure that the answer is one thing, perseverance it’s not a quality for most of us. Specially when we have some expectations and we don’t see a quick result, like I mentioned about blogs and how people relate to that as a “financial independance” and rapidly get disappointed.

Do you persevere with your blogs and twitter?

Blellow, Social Network for Freelancers

blellow_color_nooutline

Blellow burst onto the scene a few months ago, and after winning a few awards paired with an explosive launch at SXSW, the social networking site is experiencing explosive growth. For any self starters, entrepreneur, freelancer, or contract worker, this network has been the hub for meeting new people, finding job leads, and joining project teams seeking specific talents. Companies are welcome to also post their job listings for a reduced nominal fee to attract some highly talented professionals.

The unique name is an extension of its unique community. Putting together some of the best aspects of popular social networking sites, it fosters creativity, innovation, and looks to be the dominant force in finding work for the self starters around the world. While Elance and Odesk serve as bidding job boards, Blellow looks to use its extensive network to rely on recommendations and friendly introductions to new people to pair people with the right project.

If you’re looking to expand your contacts, find unique job postings, and converse with people in a specific industry or topic, then Blellow is the place to network!

Ask Cant Even Get The Basic Twitter Reply Right!

I find it funny how multinational companies still get the littlest things wrong. Ask is really trying to find it legs in the search engine market, but they obviously have a huge amount of competition to stand out. Today I followed Ask on twitter with my own personal twitter account.

Now I hate automatic direct messages on twitter at the best of times, but this is what Ask sent me.

askjeeves

Now if ask can get something as basic as a reply message wrong the why the hell do they think they can get me to use their search engine! Jeeves its “look forward to answering your questions!” Sort it out.

95 percent of Blogs are Abandoned

bloggingThe NY Times published an interesting article about a very surprising (at least for me) statement: Around 95% of existing blogs are abandoned completely. According to a study made by Technorati, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs that the company tracks down had been updated in the past 120 days. Meaning that 95% of blogs existing on Internet are abandoned and never updated again.

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.

But why is this happening? Why people just suddenly looses motivation to write or share experiences, information, articles, etc? The article also remarks that people usually confuse the idea of blogging as a fast way to financial independence and rapidly find themselves discouraged.

But, besides the possible financial disappointment, is it twitter related to this? In a small way, I think.

Over an year ago (maybe more) when I started to hear about Twitter I found this short comic (from Gapingvoid), metioned also on an old post of mine about Twitter:

twitter

For some cases, I’m sure this is a very realistic comic. After all, Twitter it is a way of micro blogging, share information and (current) experiences. And it is easier and simpler to keep updated your Twitter account instead of your blog. It is the same? Absolutely not.

Blogging is so much richer, states as a permanent document (Twitter also does, but not so friendly to review them), or even as your historical experience in a given subject. It’s all about sharing: information, opinions, expertiece, experiences, etc etc.

My take? Never stop blogging.

Watch The Apple WWDC 2009 Keynote Video

Apple WWDC 2009 conference has finished, but if you didnt get a chance to attend like me, then you can still watch the keynote over at the Apple site.

apple-wwdc-2009