Useful Links: Up to Date, Responsive Radio, Syfy app

How to Keep Up To Date on Front End Technologies is a new site with suggestions for Twitter lists and websites that can help keep you up to date.

Web pages that respond to the device is now a mantra in the web dev world. How about radio broadcasts that respond to the user’s situation and location? Check out The BBC shows off “perceptive radio” that can alter scripts. Here’s a working demo, which they suggest works best in Chrome from locations inside the UK.

Defiance
Defiance Image from syfy.com

In a similar vein to the BBC experiments, I am here to sing the praises of the Syfy app. I’m a fan of several shows on the Syfy channel, including the currently running Defiance and Warehouse 13. With a sync feature, the app pings you periodically with information about what’s happening on the screen – simple things like the name of a song in the background or something about the scene or actors. Here’s the really cool part. If you record the show to watch at a different time from the original air time, the app still knows where you are in the story and the information it feeds to you matches your personal viewing schedule.

Google I/O Developers Conference on YouTube

The Google Developers conference has been underway the last few days. There’s a lot of video from the event on the Google channel on YouTube. There have been announcements about Google Glass, search, music, maps and much more. Here’s an example.

If you weren’t able to attend, you can learn a lot about what the future has in store for the technology users of the world in these videos. And, I think we should face the fact that Google is now officially Big Brother.

Useful Links: Style Tiles, Posing, Video Slides

In a comment yesterday, Terry Morris mentioned Style Tiles. I was so impressed with this website that I wanted to add it here as a useful link, mostly so I wouldn’t lose track of it and because it is worth sharing. Thanks, Terry.

Stand up straight! Put your shoulders back! Yeah, I hear my mom, too. Whitney Hess reports that How We Pose Shapes How We Feel. She says, “It turns out that the way we sit and stand, the poses and postures we position ourselves in, have an enormous biological and emotional impact on us.” Or as Sheryl Sandberg might say, sit at the table and lean in.

This is a new idea. Video Slides that can create a presentation from a series of videos.

A Quieter Internet

Did you read In Defense of Filters and a Quieter Internet by Brad McCarty at TNW? The author talked about how he filters out noise from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. He uses a system of groups, lists, blockers, and keyword blocks.

In addition to those sources of noise, I am required to read a lot of email pitches and dozens of RSS feeds every day.

Years ago I took a speed reading class, and I still read fast. Plus, I’m a good skimmer. Those two skills help me with the daily onslaught.

I don’t block much of anything on Twitter. Instead, I skim through my main feed every once in a while looking for gems. I do have Twitter lists that help me track the voices I really want to hear. I’ve talked before about how much I like seeing everything collected for me from my Women in Web Education list into a paper.li format. Paper.li is a great way to deal with lists.

In Facebook, I have a very limited set of friends, and only occasionally do I have to block some type of post there.

In email, I can hit the Delete button faster than you can blink. In my RSS feeds, I click that Read All button after a fast skim through the new post titles for the day. I may actually read 20% of what comes in each day as new in my RSS feeds.

Sometimes I just step away for a period of time. After the bombing in Boston, it was clear that no one really knew what was going on the the immediate aftermath – a good time to step away and let the information gel. I avoided Twitter, the TV, and the radio for a while.

I don’t let things go or avoid looking through all the information that we get fed each day. I just deal with it a way that is efficient for me. How are you dealing with the information overload we have in our connected lives these days?

Interesting new apps and tools (and a wish list)

Yahoo! Weather is the weather on Flickr. It’s beautiful as well as useful. Here’s my weather from yesterday. Lovely, right? The photo used is matched to the current weather and location.

Yahoo weather

You can also see hourly forecasts and weekly forecasts. There’s a group on Flickr called Project Weather you can join if you’d like for your photos to be considered for appropriate locations.

Churnalism.com is a tool for detecting real journalism as distinguished from, well, churnalism. It’s the work of the Sunlight Foundation. Here’s their description of what they do:

Churnalism is a tool that matches fragments of text between two documents online by comparing it to our database of press releases and Wikipedia entries. You can either install an extension to your Internet browser to run Churnalism automatically, or you can manually paste in the URL or text of an article on the main site. In order to run the comparison, we built up a cache of documents that includes all of Wikipedia and press releases from PR Newswire, PR News Web, EurekaAlert!, congressional leadership offices, the White House, a sampling of Fortune 500 companies, prominent philanthropic foundations and many more. Churnalism searches for matching fragments across all of these sources and shows you a side-by-side result right on your computer screen.

Okay, app developers. Here’s a request for you. After a frustrating day trying to find a list of writers in my local library and going through the process of ordering books from interlibrary loan, I realized it would be very nice if an app like OverDrive (or some other app not yet developed) could be used to borrow electronic copies of books via interlibrary loan. Are you the one who could make that happen?

Useful Links: Gender equity, flippa a site, Vine

The brilliant Lauren Bacon wrote a list of fantastic resources to explain What Men (and Everyone, Really) Can Do To Support Gender Equity in Tech. This includes help for conference organizers, employers, managers, team leaders, investors and just about anyone. I support what Sheryl Sandberg said to women in Lean In, but it has to be a systemic effort for things to change.

Want to buy or sell a web site? Look at Flippa.com. I learned about this site from my buddy in New Zealand, Miraz Jordan, who is selling her awesome site Mac Tips. So much good content on Mac Tips, and now someone can buy the whole site.

Vine Is the Show, and Vine Records the Show. I wrote about Vine yesterday on BlogHer and explained how disruptive I think this new six-second video app that works through Twitter has been in just 4 months. What are your thoughts on Vine?

Give the Earth a Hug Today

Energy saving tech tips for Earth Day.

It’s Earth Day. How about some technological energy saving ideas to help you celebrate the event?

  • Turn off your electronics when not in use. Save over 1,000 lbs of carbon dioxide and $256 per year.
  • Snakes at SXSW
    Unplug anything with a transformer. Even when the device is turned off, the transformer keeps using energy.
  • Instead of using a screensaver, use your computer’s sleep mode.
  • Install a programmable thermostat. There are some now that you can control with your phone.
  • If you travel frequently, there are apps to help make your travel greener.
  • Find a place in your city where you can recycle electronics instead of throwing them in a landfill where they leach dangerous chemicals.

You can find many more energy saving action items at StopGlobalWarming.org. You might want to send your photo in support of the Earth Day Network. The photo should show yourself with a sign that says “The Face of Climate Change.”