Here is a fun way to visualize your Facebook activity (optimize your time wasting ; ) )
and an innovative way to selling Dashboard Solutions by SAP Crystal Reports
Category: Internet
How to read blogs in Indonesian and Chinese!
I just discovered the magic of Google Chrome’s Translate tool- it is a one click operation. So if you want to read blogs in any other language, install Google chrome and tweak the settings accordingly- see below the top of the screenshot ( from the excellent Indonesian R Blog http://enciety.com/community/R/ also available on Twitter at @rcommunity )
Or else if you prefer you old browser you can go to http://translate.google.com/ and copy and paste. Good thing about the Chrome is – even if you dont have admin rights on the machine, it STill installs just fine- and it works faster!
Also see http://mp3.baidu.com/
Creating a Blog Aggregator for free
I discovered an increasing trend of Blog Aggregators ( Blog Lists have been around for a long time). Several sites come in this category- http://bigdatanews.com/ (which is a GreenPlum /AsterData sponsored site on Big Data) , http://mapreduce.org/ (which is a site on MapReduce that has an inbuilt blog aggregator but is more of a community website – I will explain the difference below) , http://www.r-bloggers.com/ (which is an excellent aggregation of 69 R Bloggers sites that is built by Tal and is currently not sponsored/independent) and http://smartdatacollective.com/ which is sponsored by Teradata and uses http://wordframe.com which is a paid software) and some others like http://www.biblogs.com/ (which is Adsense supported 🙂 ) and http://javablogs.com/Welcome.jspa (an aggregator on Java) (or even http://feministblogs.org/).
CMS Based Blog Aggregator
CMS Based Blog Aggregator/ Community Site
CMS Based Community Site with an inbuilt Blog Aggregator feed
I am noting blog aggregator as a distinct website that pulls in automated content from RSS feeds , may or maynot be moderated, and usually revolves around a certain domain or topic. It is slightly different from community websites which have Lists of Blogs as part of many other features, and boutique collection of blogs like http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/index.php
and Intelligent Enterprise ( http://intelligent-enterprise.informationweek.com/blog/index.jhtml) as they have selected authors and have more than Blogs as their featured content including News etc. Since community is a buzz word- many websites claim to be community websites while retaining the look and feel of a CMS- Blog Aggregator.
WordPress Enabled Blog Aggregator
Anyways, if you have a WordPress Installation- you can create a Blog Aggregator for free. Basically there is a wordpress-plugin called FeedWordPress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/
Doing so you can simply addin as many RSS feeds as you like –
(see a screenshot below).
Of course – you can use Twitterfeed to create a Twitter Aggregator/ Fire Hose that simply pulls in Post Titles, and can link them using Facebook-LinkedIn-Twitter apps to your RSS feed of the aggregated website. 🙂
Building a website /content aggregator is just a few clicks away and free for anyone with a website and some passion for a topic. It is really free and painless 🙂
Software- Appls and Bugs
Some time ago I had written on a Twitter application bubble (actually it was a year ago here at https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/tweets-viruses-and-bubbles/)
The automatic Twitter follow /unfollow (or atleast the automated unfollow ) was used by Twitter App Refollow.com (which is quite old- so it was a surprise when Twitter blamed the recent 0 followers 0 floowing on a bug which allows automated following)
and the RSS automated reader is used by Twitterfeed.com (among others). I accidently created/revealed a bug in 2009 with the hash command #rstats which is used as a search index in twitter’s search engine) when I basically married a lot of RSS feeds pertaining to R and added the #rstats with them to the alternative twitter handle (Rarchive) . I did the same with the #sas with Sascommunity (which I later donated on request back to that community sascommunity.org). Basically this had the temporary effect of skewing search results for these search terms for a day (till Twitter fixed it).
As Twitter evolves from a well funded startup to a business- and tries to become more structured from chaotic flux, such bugs will continue to evolve. Bugs and especially software bugs are meant to be fixed (or squashed). This by no means should be a relection on the health of the software service (here- Twitter). Indeed the biggest worry is a mainstream software that has no flexibility for creative third party applications and thinks that it is bug-free. Perfect software exists in a perfect world- and delusional perfection can be dangerous thinking especially for software with clients (even more for statistical software).
Which stats softwares are you using and how confident you are that the bugs are being resolved openly?
Interesting Data Visualization:Friendwheels
Here is an interesting Facebook Application that I used to generate clusters among my 900( or 400 top) Facebook Connections. What is interesting is the way it drew lines in a circle showing which friends I am most connected with – a bit like analysis of my own social network. It could be interesting if we could apply this to business cases like organizational resource planning or even client relationship management ( or quite traditionally even credit card fraud or risk /marketing analysis)
Thats my network
and this is the main clusters I could draw ( note the number represents the number of common friends/connections)
The FB app was at http://apps.facebook.com/friendwheel/
Creating Video: What are you doing right now and 12 Poems
Camtasia is the best Mac or Windows based desktop capturing video editor and here is a video I created using it a well as using software from Prezi and http://www.Wordle.net
And here is a fun new way to create Videos for yourself from Google and Youtube.
It can almost be a theme song for your Online self:
What are you doing right now?
Top 5 Free Music Websites
1) Youtube.com
Try the autoplay feature to listen to a playlist for hours of viewing or hearing.
2) Vevo.com
This website has all the top artists or most of them listed. You login using your Gmail, Twitter or Facebook login and simply
listen to any playlist you want or create your own. Also has a recommended playlist option.
3) Yahoo Music
I like this for the extensive information on the artists available and also many videos here are allowed to be embeded which sometimes is not the case for the same video /artist on other websites.
4) Playlist.com
Good Features-
Custom URL for your personal playlist.
Tremendous variety of music artists and songs.
You can also embed the playlist on your blog/ website allowing it to autoplay- a really neat feature.
Bad Features-
Lack of Customization as regards to recommended songs and incomplete integration with Facebook /Social Logins
5) Pandora.com
Nice features- ability to share what you are listening on social media
Custom algol that is very good in creating an automatic playlist based on music you are listening. ( I hole Youtube and Yahoo music have this feature soon)
Some additional features like extensive information on song/artist/album playing.
DECISION STATS 