centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Posts Aboutmisc
More Cool Finds on the Interwebz
Here are some of the cool things we’ve found online recently:
- Contxts.com
Business cards are so 2007. What with the environment in shambles do you really want to be that guy who is handing out chopped up pieces of bleached trees? Contxts.com lets you share your information via SMS! - Mozy.com
An online backup service for consumers and small businesses. Back up all of your personal files, photos, music, etc. automatically online. Worry free! - SnapaBug.com
Help widget for customer service chat on web sites. - RealTime Inline Validation article on GetElastic
Realtime in-line form validation to improve conversions and avoid shopping cart abandonment.
centre{source} Makes a BANG with the Monthly Interactive Mixer
In the fall of 2008, the Strategy team at centre{source} set out to create a plan for expanding the firm’s reach and involvement in the local Nashville Interactive Community. Over the course of a few months, a strategy was formed that involved looking inwardly for personal development opportunities and looking outwardly for ways to become more active and connected with community members. The cornerstone and most valuable component of this strategy has quickly become our practice of hosting a monthly mixer at the c{s} North Fourth office on the last Thursday of each month.
As the “hostess” and organizer of these events, I was initially unsure of what to expect as far as turnout and reception. As we geared up for the first mixer, held in January of 2009, I must have refreshed our Pingg invite list at least 50 times a day. As we got closer to D-Day and RSVPs began rolling in, I quickly realized that what we initially expected to be an event with attendance of around 30-40 was going to become much more!
Keeping your eye on the puck
Our National Hockey League Nashville Predators drops the puck for its 10th anniversary season Thursday as the Colorado Avalanche visits the Sommet Center.
All eyes are on starting goaltender Chris Mason. It’s a tough job:
How would you like a job where, if you made a mistake, a big red light goes on and 18,000 people boo?
JACQUES PLANTE
former National Hockey League goalie
Odd Things
My personal webserver has been getting slammed with requests for “/robots.txt”, by what appears to be a botnet — over 234 unique IP addresses so far, over the last week. But appearances can be deceiving. Here’s where things get weird: All of the IP addresses have reverse DNS that has “planetlab” in it, which even resolves backwards to the correct IP. A smattering of examples:
14.1.31.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab4.csail.mit.edu.
15.1.31.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab5.csail.mit.edu.
16.1.31.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab6.csail.mit.edu.
17.1.31.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab7.csail.mit.edu.
12.36.4.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab2.pc.cis.udel.edu.
143.6.42.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ricepl-1.cs.rice.edu.
145.6.42.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ricepl-3.cs.rice.edu.
200.67.59.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab1.comet.columbia.edu.
201.67.59.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab2.comet.columbia.edu.
202.67.59.128.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer planetlab3.comet.columbia.edu.
Google Mars
On the day of Percival Lowell’s birthday, Google has announced the launch of Google Mars (think Google Maps but for Mars, get it?). Noel Gorelick (a friend of mine) and Michael Weiss-Malik from Arizona State University worked with Google to combine google maps technology with the data from THEMIS, the most detailed imagery of Mars to date.
Full press release below the jump:
Tagging Aggregators
And while I’m on the topic of tags, I am increasingly frustrated with the categorization of most RSS aggregators. This is rather ironic considering RSS aggregators are the swiss-army knife utility for the “Web 2.0″ devotee. And yet, every RSS aggregator I have tried still constrains your feed organization to groups/categories.
Aggregators should start implementing tagging for your feeds. I realized this today when I found myself longing for the ability to lump some feeds into a “daily read” section — without breaking up the content-based categorization: technology, news, politics, etc. It occurred to me that this is precisely what tagging excels at.
Search Engine Loop
My previous post on tags reminded me that I wanted to mention something amusing I ran into when I first installed Ultimate Tag Warrior on my personal blog.
This plugin gives you the natural ability to limit posts by multiple tags, for example, http://blog.centresource.com/tag/linux+software gives you all the posts tagged with “linux” and “software”. Conversely, you can also do http://blog.centresource.com/tag/linux|software to get all posts tagged with “linux” OR “software”.
On Tagging
I was slow to climb onto the bandwagon of tagging. Like all things that I truly learn to appreciate and enjoy, I thought it was silly at first. But oh was I wrong. I’ve installed and configured Ultimate Tag Warrior on this blog, but more on that later.
First, what is tagging, and why is it worthwhile? Well, for those of you too lazy to read the wikipedia article, briefly: Tagging is the simple process of associating “tags” — word or phrases designed to qualify some sort of content. Think of it as an alternative to the constraint of categories.
Most amazing game concept I’ve ever seen
Will Wright presented Spore at a game developer’s conference recently. A video clip of this has been posted for our viewing pleasure. Will navigates through the game and takes you from the beginning where life begins as a spore in world of one celled organisms and demonstrates how evolution can occur. Gamers can evolve into a more complex species onto land, create tribes, cities, and conquer the planet. All the while editing each piece as you see fit. Once the planet is conquered the game does not stop. You can zoom out further and go from planet to planet in your solar system. It goes as far as being able to go to different star systems and invading other planets with intelligent life. What is most unique about this game is that it is extremely open ended. There are countless possibilities for animations that might take place and whereas in Will’s other games like the Sims and Sims 2, all of the animations were generated by pre-designed animations. Spore utilizes ‘procedural programming’ to create the animations that depend on mathematics and algorithms rather than using something like 3D Studio Max, the game will determine the mobility of a character based on the bone structure that the user creates and some simple in-game laws of physics. This is along the same lines of how vector imaging in Flash works. Rather than having bit-by-bit information on what color each pixel should be, there are equations that determine what color an entire area should be. In short, Spore should prove to allow endless possibilities limited not by how much money and time was spent on creating different actions that can be preformed, but by the gamer’s imagination.
Another Happy Client
As always at CentreSource, customer service is our top priority. Today we launched the new Martin Methodist College website. The client had some very nice things to say about their new site and our company.
CentreSource is the web design company that customized SiteMason’s tools into an extremely functional, easy to use, and stylish website.
