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November 21 2008

November 20 2008

November 19 2008

stormgrass
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Reposted fromnitram nitram
stormgrass

Glue - for when you want stuff to automagically stick together

It’s been a mere five months since my last update on here, which means that for five months, there’s basically nothing that tickled my fancy. But, this changed a few weeks ago, when I started testing Glue.

Developed by Adaptive Blue, this Firefox plugin is what you want when you’re interested in movies, books, music, restaurants and a few other things Glue can work with. Adaptive Blue is also the creator of the BlueOrganizer, which worked similarly, but is being discontinued in favour of Glue.

After signing up and installing Glue, whenever you are browsing sites Glue can work with, a little toolbar automagically appears at the top of your screen. Like this:

You’re then presented with all the other people who’ve recently looked at what you’re looking at. It may not sound too exciting, but surfing Amazon, Librarything or IMDB (which are among the rather extensive number of supported sites) is a whole lot more fun with Glue.

And it’s of actual use too. You may see that someone who is interested in Palahniuk’s “Choke” is also interested in a book called “Zombie” by one Joyce Carol Oates. And incidentally, “Zombie” is just as sick and twisted as “Choke”, so you’ve just been alerted to yet another sick and twisted book you can add to your reading list.

Glue does not have, what some people in the know call a “destination site”, meaning there’s no website where your and all the others’ activities are displayed. Which isn’t necessarily a downside, since it removes the need to keep going back to a site to see what all the others are doing (like, say, Facebook). It’s all there, right inside the plugin, baby.

The plugin also adds something to your browser that looks like a bookmarklet. It contains the most important links, not least the one to the things you’ve saved, or liked, as they call it:

The plugin of course integrates with, among others, Twitter and Facebook, lets you perform searches on the items saved and, since Monday, also has a sleek little iPhone app.

And apart from other similar tools that let you save and comment on various items, Glue is actually really smart. Even though it supports a plethora of websites for every sub-section, like Amazon and LibraryThing for books, or IMDB and Wikipedia for movies, the item you save is always recognized as a single one. Meaning that when you save “Choke” from Amazon and someone else from LibraryThing, you’ve still saved the same thing and Glue displays it as such. This, Ladies and Gentleman, is how semantic shit is supposed to work! And if you don’t know what I mean, just try it out already, will you?

Glue’s installation website contains a little FAQ and a Quick Start guide, which holds a bit of information on the sites supported by Glue. Check it out!

Oh, and since I just can’t shut up, here’s what I would like to see in Glue in the future: The ability to not only “like” stuff in order to save it, but also to just mark stuff and put it into certain categories, like “I wanna” or “I hate” or “I don’t know why I’m saving this, but it looks like sometime maybe I want to get back to it”.

stormgrass

Globalization, bad practices and all that

Ever since seeing Jean Ziegler in “We feed the world”, I’ve been something of an admirer. Tonight he’ll be appearing on Austrian TV in a discussion on globalization, corporate practices and of course the financial crisis. (#)

Another one of the participants will be one Klaus Werner-Lobo, who’s recently written a book about above mentioned corporate practices called “Uns gehört die Welt” (The world belongs to us). Now, I’ve read Naomi Klein’s “No Logo”, so I’m not sure whether there’s a whole lot left that could surprise me regarding that topic, but I’d be interested to find out.

And as Helge writes in his entry on the subject, there’s a chance I’ll get a volume directly from the publisher, if I’m quick enough, that is.

See, that’s how conscious I am of the topic, I won’t even BUY a book that deals with buying.

November 18 2008

stormgrass
“ Die Tatsache, dass die SPÖ-Regierungsmitglieder die Resolution nicht mittragen wollten, bewertete der neu gewählte BZÖ-Obmann Uwe Scheuch in einer Aussendung als "skandalöse Entgleisung". SPÖ-Chef Rohr stelle die Parteipolitik vor die Interessen des Landes, entrüstete sich Scheuch. # ”
— Geht's noch, Scheuch?
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