Ben Shoemate's Notebook

swissmiss via swissmiss shared by 4 people

‘Mauritian Sunset’ by Sandy Smith.

Leslie Poston via Mashable! shared by 4 people

When Mashable first covered SlideRocket, it was in private testing. Finally in open beta, SlideRocket is proving to be a beautiful and easy to use tool for creating full featured presentations.

SlideRocket offers you the ability to create presentations online using its full featured Web application. You can add charts, graphs, images, animations, special effects, lighting effects and more to the slides. You can also play around with the text, and it offers a downloadable desktop application for viewing the slides offline. SlideRocket also works with a variety of platforms.

When the private testing phase started I’d gotten an invite, but declined. At the time I was too busy to really play around with it and give good testing feedback. Boy do I wish I’d started playing with it way back then! They have had a few glitches today since opening their doors to the public, but overall it has gone off without a hitch. I’d say this application beats the pants off PowerPoint and is really going to give KeyNote a run for its money as well.

The main issue I’ve had today is a number of freezes while trying to use the service.  I’m going to assume this is being caused by the number of people trying out this new shiny object. I have a number of presentations to create in the coming weeks, and I plan to try using SlideRocket for them, so I’ll know soon enough if the freezes are a strictly opening day issue.

If you haven’t checked out SlideRocket yet, you should. It gives you a fully featured place to create presentations online, right down to importing of Google Docs spreadsheets and including special effects in your slides. I’m quite impressed with how easy it is to use and how elegant the presentation is. You have to love a beta that launches that is both useful and has a great user interface. SlideRocket seems to have accomplished both goals, giving us an application that matters in a pretty package.

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

SlideRocket is a Slick Slideshow Creator for Presentations
Alpha: When Beta Is Not Good Enough
Forget PowerPoint: 13 Online Presentation Apps
Stitcher Prepares To Go Public With Its Beta
Web 2.0 Invites for August 22nd, 2007
Google’s Urchin Software Released As Public Beta
Flock Public Beta Now Live

Ionut Alex Chitu via Google Operating System shared by 5 people

iGoogle has a very cool feature that populates tabs with gadgets and feeds just by entering a title. When you create a tab, there's an option called "I'm feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name".

To make things even easier, iGoogle started to suggest popular names sorted by the number of users. There are 227,300 users that have tab named "Lifestyle", 3,725,200 users that named a tab "Music" and 21,070,090 users that couldn't find a better name than "Home".


Here's the top 10 for English:

1. Home - 21,070,090 users
2. News - 6,755,900
3. Games - 4,103,500
4. Entertainment - 4,002,300
5. Music - 3,725,200
6. Humor - 3,712,500
7. Sports - 3,667,300
8. Technology - 3,016,700
9. Cooking - 2,203,700
10. Politics - 2,170,700
.....
?. Name this tab - 490,000

and the top 10 for French:

1. Accueil - 1,757,000 (Home)
2. Actualités - 590,100 (News)
3. Dictionnaire - 375,100 (Dictionary)
4. Google - 371,300
5. Musique - 346,100 (Music)
6. Jeux - 297,800 (Games)
7. Informatique - 291,600 (IT)
8. Photos - 282,700
9. Culture - 242,600
10. Radio - 237,700

For other languages, use this URL:
http://www.google.com/ig/mtjson?hl=LANG_CODE&q=
and replace LANG_CODE with a language code supported by iGoogle.

Scientific American

Private Ownership of Fisheries May Shore Up Stocks New York Times - 5 hours ago By CORNELIA DEAN Giving people ownership rights in marine fisheries - in a way, privatizing the fish - can halt or even reverse catastrophic declines in commercial stocks, researchers in California and Hawaii are reporting. New system could help avert collapse of fisheries Reuters Study: Catch share system may prevent overfishing The Associated Press Scientific American - Los Angeles Times - New York Times Blogs - Independent all 137 news articles

via http://www.qbn.com/topics/566198/

via http://wellmedicated.com/inspiration/50-amazing-gig-posters-sure-to-inspire/

(author unknown) via Joho the Blog shared by 4 people

Shared by Robert Scoble
Awesome ad. Sounds a lot like what I asked for on my blog, too.

This ad presses all my buttons — the right buttons! He’s calm, clear, offers a plan, offers hope beyond a plan, embodies the change he’s promising, and makes McCain look confused and self-serving in silent contrast.

via http://www.contemporist.com/2008/04/18/church-of-santa-monica-in-madrid-spain/

via http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2008/sep/08/beyond.limits.chatsworth?picture=337400743

NEW YORK--In an announcement sure to raise eyebrows among the companies gathered at the Web 2.0 Expo here, IBM said Wednesday it is opening the IBM Center for Social Software.

So is IBM intent on becoming another social media company? Hardly. Most likely Big Blue intends the new center to be a focal point for developing software tailored to help companies build social networking tools onto the sites. More importantly, the center could help IBM tailor consulting packages from IBM Global Services.

With that in mind, IBM's decision to open the center in Cambridge, Mass., (where the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University are based) rather than in Silicon Valley (where most social media companies are based ) makes more sense. In a press release, IBM describes the facility as an incubation center where it can collaborate with both customers and people in academia.

So why's this interesting? Many companies here on the exhibit floor at the Jacob Javits Center aren't social media companies. Instead, they're trying to sell software, hosting, and consulting services to social media companies and to traditional technology buyers like auto makers that are trying to add communities and other "social" tools to their Web sites.

IBM became a dominant supplier of software for Web 1.0 sites (both e-commerce and publishing) by following a similar model: It started into the market with rudimentary e-commerce and application server software packaged with IBM Global Services consulting contracts.

Smaller competitors such as the long-since-departed software maker Open Market scoffed at the IBM offering, noting that is was little more than a developer's tool kit that IBM used as a come-on to sell its consulting. They had a point, but IBM won that competition anyway.

Can IBM do the same to the nascent market for social-networking software? Few of the companies here at the Web 2.0 can afford to ignore that possibility.