Ben Shoemate's Notebook

Frederic Lardinois via ReadWriteWeb shared by 5 people

Google's 10th anniversary seems to be driving the company towards more introspection and philanthropy. Today, Google announced Project 10^100, through which the company is soliciting ideas for projects that have the potential to change the world and help as many people as possible. Google will select the 100 best ideas submitted to the project and then ask users to vote on which ones to fund. These votes will determine the 20 finalists and a group of judges will then choose the five best ideas from this pool. Google has committed $10 million to fund these ideas.

Google uses the Hippo Water Roller and First Mile Solutions as examples for projects it would be interested in funding. These projects provide innovative solutions to large problems - bringing water to rural communities in Africa and providing Internet access to remote, unconnected areas. Google is deliberately not setting any strict rules for submissions to Project 10^100, but the company does explain its selection criteria: reach, depth, attainability, efficiency, and longevity.

Google is definitely using its 10th anniversary to enhance the visibility of its philanthropic efforts. Google has lately been using its official blog to talk about its energy and health initiatives. Just yesterday, Google.org announced its Predict and Prevent initiative, a project that is looking at novel ways to detect the threat of a pandemic before it can turn into a crisis.

Submission for Project 10^100 are due by October 20.

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via http://features-temp.cgsociety.org/gallerycrits/36092/36092_1095187361.jpg

(author unknown) via PHD Comics shared by 5 people

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "What your vote helps determine" - originally published 9/22/2008 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

(author unknown) via Wooster Collective shared by 4 people

Photo nicked from Jamie O'Shea's always excellent Supertouch blog.

Gina Trapani via Lifehacker shared by 14 people

When you think up that perfect new handle for storming social networks and other registration-only sites across the web, run it through UserNameCheck.com first. This webapp's purpose is simple: to tell you whether or not that name is already in use at a pretty impressive list of sites, from Delicious and Digg to eBay and Xbox Live. The developer explains:

This site is a quick and dirty solution to a question that I often lay awake at night worrying about. Do I have my username registered across every site that I should? What if the next internet humiliation meme just happens to share the username I've been using for years, and suddenly people are emailing me asking "hey, is this you ???". The site is simple. I have a stack of web app urls, the application pings the site using the username you want to check, if it returns a "no user name" error we return that.

The list of checks can take some time, so grab a cup of coffee or browse the news in another tab while UserNameCheck does its thing.

Ionut Alex Chitu via Google Operating System shared by 4 people

Google Labs added a new experimental service: In Quotes, which compares what different politicians say about popular issues like health care, taxes, environment. The service uses a feature from Google News that detects quotes in news articles and a public API that offers programmatic access to the quotes.

"These quotations are a valuable resource for understanding where people in the news stand on various issues. Much of the published reporting about people is based on the interpretation of a journalist. Direct quotes, on the other hand, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted," informs the FAQ.

Automatically detecting quotes is not an easy task, so not all the quotes are correctly attributed. Google truncates long quotes because they're treated the same as search results snippets.

For now, Google selected a small number of political figures from the US, Canada, India and the UK, but it would be interesting to create a service that allows users to enter two or more names and then save the interesting quotes.

via http://www.planetaki.com/javiercanada

Jesse Stay via Stay N' Alive shared by 7 people

As many are aware, it’s hard to avoid personalities like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble on the internet these days. Chances are that if you belong to a social network, and have friended them, they have interacted with your updates on the particular networks you belong to in one way or another. Louis and Robert seem to have a particular “omnipresence” to them, and both have an amazing knack for tracking the latest news and updates, and most importantly staying up with the actual people they follow. If you mention one of their names anywhere on the internet, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll know and respond in some fashion or another.

Louis Gray is relatively new to this however. Scoble has touted him as being “the next Scoble“, but in reality he has only become popular in just the last year or so. Scoble has been pretty popular for several years now, and a lot of his ability to be in so many networks at a time comes from experience. I’ve witnessed both of their abilities to multi-task and share and follow activities of others they follow first-hand, and it’s quite amazing to watch! Both are just as good at actually listening to most of the people they follow on each network they belong to.

A great example of this is in a panel at BlogWorld Expo last week, Stowe Boyd (aka StoBo) said something which Drew Olanoff re-tweeted. Scoble just so happened to be driving back home, but next thing we know, Robert was joining the conversation through FriendFeed and Twitter, all from the wheel of his car! We hope that Maryame was the one driving. Both of their abilities to know what is being said that is important at any given time is amazing.

In doing some research today though, it appears that Louis Gray may have surpassed Robert Scoble in the number of networks he belongs to. Doing some research on the recently announced usernamecheck.com, the username, “scobleizer” is on 26 of the listed networks. I am unaware of any other username that Robert Scoble uses around the internet, so we have to assume this is all for him. “louisgray”, the main username for Louis Gray, is on 18 networks. However, if we take the username, “louismg”, another username he uses (taken from his FriendFeed shares), we get 15 more networks he belongs to. Add to that the username, “asypta”, which Louis uses on stumbleupon and delicious, we get 5 more. That would, assuming these are all his usernames, make Louis Gray involved in a total of 38 networks. This is why Louis Gray has been so successful over the last year. I believe Louis Gray has just become “omnipresent”.

Any other names you can think of that rival Louis Gray or Robert Scoble in network involvement? I believe these two are tops in my book.

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