Author: Jeff Hester

I am a champion for knowledge management and social media, avid hiker, backpacker, husband, father, grandfather, author, speaker, dog walker, web developer and a damn good listener.
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It’s Gada.be another Chris Pirillo project

Visit gada.beGada.be is a new meta-search project from Lockergnome’s Chris Pirillo. Gada.be (pronounced “gotta be”) is a very clever tool. It’s not quite a search engine, yet it as elements of that.

What does Gada.be do? Well, you give a keyword or two and it returns results in neatly formatted XML. It pulls those results only from sites that provide XML data. I categorized the results by the source; a kind of search aggregator, and gives you the option of viewing different flavors of search results.

When you search, it actually crafts a URL using your keywords. For example, searching for ‘bigblueball’ gives you this:

http://bigblueball.gada.be/ — a very simple URL format. Short and sweet is Gada.be’s credo, because Pirillo wanted to make sure it worked on his PSP as well as other mobile devices. In fact, the name ‘Gada.be’ was chosen specifically because of how simple it is to type in on a mobile phone — 4232.2233 (smart move).

So our search for bigblueball finds results from a wide range of sources, including Digg, Flickr, MSN, SeekItAll, Plazoo, Ice Rocket and others. Not a comprehensive result set like you’d expect from a full-fledged search engine like Google (where the same search returns about 139,000 hits).

If you scroll to the bottom of the gada.be search results, you can perform the same search on different sets of sites, including blogs, entertainment, geeky, health (“Doctor, I’ve got big, blue…”), jobs, multimedia, news, photos, random, research, shopping and social. One of the more amusing searches was using ‘bigblueball’ on the photos category: http://bigblueball.gada.be/p

One other interesting thing about Gada.be is that it allows you to output results to OPML. This is interesting because it allows you to roll your own search aggregator for use in a portal like Yahoo 360 or Microsoft’s not-so-secret start.com. So you get new stuff from a wide range of sources without having to ferret them out yourself. As convicted felon Martha Stewart would say, “It’s a good thing.”

Gada.be is in beta right now, so you expect changes and occasional glitches in the service.

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Yahoo & Microsoft Uncover the Holy Grail

Interoperability is the holy grail of instant messaging. It’s been long promised, and long sought after by consumers. The fact that instant messengers don’t interoperate is absurd, really. Just imagine if I couldn’t call you because you used a different mobile phone network. Hard to imagine, right? Incredibly, instant messaging fans have suffered incompatible IM networks for years.

Now BigBlueBall reports that Yahoo and Microsoft have decided to make their instant messengers work together, allowing users on MSN Messenger will be able to exchange messages with users on Yahoo Messenger (and vice versus). The deal is supposed to be announced Wednesday and reportedly includes voice as well as text messages.

All I have to say is… IT’S ABOUT TIME!

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Food for Thought

I have a nephew who is the most serious kid I’ve met. He is planning to attend a culinary school and training to become a chef. So in honor of his 14th birthday, I’ve put together a “music to cook by” playlist.

  1. Matchbox 20 – Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  2. Dean Martin – How Do You Like Your Eggs In The Morning
  3. Supertramp – Breakfast in America
  4. Spike Jones – Yes, We Have No Bananas
  5. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Aeroplane
  6. Bread – Guitar Man
  7. REO Speedwagon – The Unidentified Flying Tuna
  8. Jimmy Buffet – Cheeseburger in Paradise
  9. Meatloaf – Bat Out Of Hell
  10. Don McLean – American Pie
  11. Cake – Love You Madly
  12. Reverend Horton Heat – Eat Steak
  13. Weird Al Yankovic – Girls Just Wanna Eat Lunch
  14. Blind Melon – Soup
  15. The Wiseguys – Root Beer Rag
  16. Snow Patrol – Chocolate
  17. THX – Jurassic Lunch (not really a song, but fun nonetheless)

There were a few songs that didn’t make the cut due to lyrical “issues” (he has four younger, impressionable siblings). What favorite food-related band or song did I miss?

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ClustrMaps: Site Traffic with a Geo-Twist

Most blogs and websites employ some method to track how many visitors they get. Usually those stats include information like where they came from (the referring link), if they used search terms via Google or another search engine, and their approximate geographic location. I recently ran across a new service being called ClustrMaps that adds a neat visual twist to that data.

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ClustrMaps creates a little thumbnail image that shows the relative geographic position of each visitor to your site. You’ll find the thumbnail in the column next to this article. Larger red dots indicate a greater number of unique visitors from that location.

In my own case, I found it interesting that my blog apparently has no interest to anyone on the African continent. Maybe it’s time to add a post about the South African jazz scene?

ClustrMaps provides a slick way of seeing where your readers are coming from, and the basic service is free. Check it out.

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Wikipedia’s Evil Twin

Wikipedia is a tremendous resource and a pretty cool way for people to collaborate on documentation. In just a couple years, it’s grown to become one of the largest encyclopedias available, with over 30 million entries and arguable the most up-to-date information of any encyclopedic resource.

One of the attractions of Wikipedia is that it’s built on a free, open-source solution: Wikimedia. It makes it easy for any group to create their own repository of knowledge and information — even mis-information.

Let me introduce you to Wikipedia’s evil twin: The Uncyclopedia. Think of it as The Onion meets a Wiki. Rather than informing, the Uncyclopedia’s goal is to amuse and annoy. Consider a few Uncyclopedia entries, such as France (“The French are also known to run in terror at the slightest hint of danger and surrender instantly to any threat…”); New Orleans (“Although the American Emperor has told everyone that New New Orleans will be even better and bigger than it was before, there are serious doubts as the Americans have proven they are pretty terrible at rebuilding cities that rely on oil…”); or knowledge (“A rare and tragic disease, not recognized as such by the many trash collectors claiming to be professors. Knowledge is 100% fatal, with recent studies showing 4 1/2 out of 7 people died when they were imbued with it…”).

Now you know why I’m in a handbasket.

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Looters don’t like Country-Western

As reported by the Associated Press –

“They took everything — all the electronics, the food, the bikes,” said John Stonaker, a Wal-Mart security officer. “People left their old clothes on the floor when they took new ones. The only thing left are the country-and-western CDs. You can still get a Shania Twain album.”

At least looters had the good taste to avoid crappy music.

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Telephone Pictionary

I subscribe to probably too many things. On the upside, I’ve gotten very good at scanning for juicy morsels. Today’s morsel comes from Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter, and it looks like fun. It’s called Telephone Pictionary — a cross between Pictionary and the old school-room game “telephone.” A very simple concept that works well with 5-7 people. There is no winner or loser — it’s just for laughs.

Read the instructions (be sure to check out the examples), then give it a try and let me know how it goes!

And cheers to co-worker Tara for tipping me off to Good Experience (quite some time ago).