Archive for July 2007
Jeremy’s getting married! It couldn’t happen to a nicer young man. Congratulations.
Andrew Goodman’s thinkin’ a little bit more about LookSmart.
National Archives teaming up with CustomFlix.
WW II letters turning into online archive.
Cockroach catalogue. Icky!
Search engine for eBay misspellings.
Mashable does it again: Tagging Tools.
Branding matters, even when searching the Web. Pfugh.
Sometimes I like to bring things to your attention because they represent parts of the Web that I’d never really thought about. I had no idea what a non-bird crow is. It’s an alternative commentary audio track for a DVD. I would have mentally filed this under “oh how interesting” except that the Sharecrow Web site, at http://www.sharecrow.com/ , links to over 500 of the blamed things.
You can do a keyword search for available crows, or browse them alphabetically. The movies and TV episodes which have been commentated tend to definitely be on the geeky side — I see several episodes of Buffy, Firefly, Lord of the Rings, etc. On the other hand, there are also commentaries for Caddyshack, Scrubs, etc.
The commentary comes from a variety of groups, from the Mike Nelson’s Rifftrax to Sofa Dogs to Mockworthy. Click on the name of the crow and you’ll go directly to the Web site for the crow. Some of them are free, while some of them (like Rifftrax) cost money.
So what does Sharecrow.com have to do with this, and how do you sync up these alternative commentaries to your DVDs? Sharecrow is actually a free DVD player that lets you play audio tracks in conjunction with the DVD. Looks like at the moment it’s available for Windows only…
Tech Event Guide has announced a new searchable online database of tech events in North America and Europe. Tech Event Guide lists over 1600 events and is available at http://www.techeventguide.com/ .
You can search events by keyword, or browse by country or category. Note on the browsing page there’s a list of “Featured Events” and then a list of “Events”. The advanced search page allows you to search by keyword or location. You can also search past events (nice!) You can also choose to search for seminars or webinars (in other words, online events.)
I did a search for event and got five results, with the soonest ones listed first. The events are spaced very far apart so you have to scroll down to see them — an odd Firefox thing? To get more information than you get on the search result (name of event, date, location), you’ll need to really go around your elbow — click the “Send Me Info” link with the event, and then click on the “Event Details” link on the left of that page.
That will give you a few more details, like a brief description and sometimes a Web site, but a lot of the events I looked at were very light on details. The date search was useful, but I found the site was best for finding event names. After I found ‘em I did a full-text search engine lookup to get more details.
