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Imaginary Landscape Buzz Blog

Harvard's Media Cloud an innovative media analysis tool

May 06, 2011 1:20 p.m.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has just released its Media Cloud Dashboard for public use. 

The Media Cloud, located at http://www.mediacloud.org is a media aggregation and analysis tool that provides visual snapshot of what words and topics are being written about on the Internet.  It allows users to select specific datasets, such as "top 25 mainstream media" or "political blogs - right" as well as specific timeframes to see what words were most often mentioned.  Clicking on the word shows each sentence it appeared in within all the individual publications in the dataset.

Even ...

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Updated 05/06/11 @ 01:20PM CDT by brian

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Categories: Cool Web Stuff Politics Research Web News


Digital estate planning: what happens to your social media accounts when you die?

January 24, 2011 10:56 a.m.

With the proliferation of social media sites, multiple email accounts, logins at various financial institution websites, multiple computers and smart phones, the amount of personal information stored in the “cloud” continues to grow.

So, what happens when you die?  How can you protect your digital footprint and make it easy for someone to manage, transfer, download and/or close these various accounts?

These questions are what John Romano and Evan Carroll attempt to answer with their website The Digital Beyond and their newly released book Your Digital Afterlife.  They were recently interviewed on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and ...

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Updated 01/24/11 @ 10:56AM CST by brian

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Categories: Cool Web Stuff Web News


A case study in the value of Twitter

April 23, 2009 10:52 a.m.

I get asked a lot about this Twitter thing. What is it, they ask. I say it is a microblogging platform, which mostly elicits blank stares. I go on to describe it in more detail, how people "Tweet" about what they're doing in short bursts. Most look quizzically, wondering why anyone would be interested in knowing when someone is blow drying their hair or eating a burrito the size of their forearm (no, really. I saw the Twitpic).

Mostly I agree that the content on Twitter is drivel. But not today.

I started today by taking the Metra commuter ...

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Updated 07/14/10 @ 10:52AM CDT by brian

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Categories: Chicagoland Cool Web Stuff Technology


New government transparency in action

January 23, 2009 11:03 a.m.

The moment Barack Obama took the oath of office (the first time), the new whitehouse.gov was launched, promising a new era of government transparency.

Much as I'd like to take credit for discovering the wonderful intersection between politics, government and hard-core Web geekiness, the kudos go to Jason Kottke for his blog post The country's new robots.txt file.

For the non-geeks, robots.txt is a file that is expected and read by search engines to identify directories that you don't want added to their databases. Every site should have one, and it is located in ...

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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:03AM CDT by brian

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Categories: Cool Web Stuff Politics Web News


Beer goggles? Gmail to the rescue

October 09, 2008 11:10 a.m.

Google Labs just released Mail Goggles, a special feature to give you pause before you drunkenly send a late night email you'll undoubtedly regret in the morning.

According to the Official Gmail Blog post:

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?

The feature is only active during late nights and weekends.

Brilliant.

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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:10AM CDT by brian

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Categories: Cool Web Stuff Fun Technology


It's new, it's shiny and it's Chrome

September 02, 2008 11:13 a.m.

Just when we thought upstart Firefox would (and has to a certain degree) knock Internet Explorer off it's throne, here comes Chrome.

Today is the launch of Google's shiny new browser. And it is a big deal.

Microsoft still holds 73 percent of the browser market, according to Net Applications, a research firm. The market share for Firefox has climbed to 19 percent, while Apple’s Safari has 6 percent, according to the NY Times.

Prompting the company to launch early was the leak of an online comic book. It seems that Google created a comic book to ...

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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:13AM CDT by brian

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Categories: Cool Web Stuff Technology User Interface Web News


The Way Back Machine, great service - loads of fun

January 29, 2008 11:48 a.m.

It's been around forever (in Internet years), but I am continually surprised at the number of people that are not yet aware of the Way Back Machine.

The Way Back Machine is a searchable archive of all Web pages from 1996 to today. Want to see what your company Web site looked like in 1996? The Way Back Machine will show you. Currently the archive contains 85 billion Web pages totalling more than 2 petabytes of data (2 million gigabytes).

But the Way Back Machine is only part of the story.

The Way Back Machine is provided by the ...

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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:48AM CDT by brian

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Categories: Cool Web Stuff


Make sure you always have the current copyright

October 09, 2007 11:54 a.m.

As Web developers we are sticklers for website details. That's why I always look at the copyright year, often found in the footer of a page. Ours reads:

Copyright © 1995 - 2010 Imaginary Landscape, LLC. All rights reserved.

Whenever I go to a website, my eyes go immediately to the year. You'd be surprised how many websites say 2006 or 2002 or even 1999. At best, is demonstrates no attention to details and at worst it proclaims the site as abandoned.

At Imaginary, we have our site and our client sites set up so their copyright date updates at ...

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Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:54AM CDT by brian

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Categories: Cool Web Stuff User Interface