Month: March 2006

Riya

Published by chris

“Riya”:http://www.riya.com promises big, and seems to have the technology to back it up. Photo sharing service with face recognition seems like a good idea, if you take a lot of party pictures.

Riya Training

But I don’t take many peoples’ picture, and hardly put them online because people can and does get offended for it. So, the novelty faded pretty quick for me.

Without the facial recognition, the rest of the package is pretty weak. It does offer tagging, with a special treatment given to location tagging. But the UI is slow, and it does a poor job at resampling large images. Flickr was much smoother in beta.

Web 2.0 or Star Wars

Published by chris

Everyday, new so-called _web 2.0_ services emerge with names silly beyond believe. “fyuze,”:http://fyuze.com/ “oyogi,”:http://www.oyogi.com and “gumshoo,”:http://www.gumshoo.com/ to name a few. Test your breadth of knowledge on the latest web service wave at “cerado.com”:http://www.cerado.com/web20quiz.htm My score is 31. A star war freak will ace this test as well. Not much separates them from frontier web developers.

co.mments

Published by chris

I “jot”:http://ichris.ws/2006/02/05/30-boxes-cocomment about “coComment”:http://www.cocomment.com/ in early February and had been using it on and off. Aside from the annoying fact that you need to change your commenting habit to make it work (click a bookmarklet before hitting submit), its biggest flaw was not being able to track comments made by non-user of their service. They also require blog engines to modify their code & template to work with their service.

The application idea was great, but that last 2 facts ruined any chance of it really becoming useful. The creator had of course had more than earfull of this feedback, and said to be “working on it”:http://www.cocomment.com/teamblog/?p=49 since early March.

co.comments logo Then “co.mments”:http://co.mments.com arrived on the scene. It doesn’t require blog engines tweaks, tracks all comments, and even work without you needing an account.

I don’t know if co.mments _borrowed_ the idea as well as the service name idea, but it’s not something someone whipped up on a free weekend. The post crawler is intelligent enough to understand most engines I tried it on. And the “no-account mode”:http://wiki.co.mments.com/Registration works well.

Right now, my 2 peeves about co.mments are

* It sometimes get the post title & content wrong. When this happens, it either use the first sentence of a post content as title, or display no titles whatsoever. Having said that, being able to do this much without any change on author’s side is an amazing feat already.
* I have to scroll a lot on the _Track_ page to find new comments. A collapsible interface ala coComment will be very welcomed. (Assaf “said”:http://blog.co.mments.com/2006/03/18/site-redesign/ he’s working on it.)

P.S. A few days after I started using co.mments, coComment’s host was down for a long period with DDoS attack. Not a good week for the coComment folks.

Death and Taxes

Published by chris

Deviant “mibi”:http://mibi.deviantart.com/ created this in 2004. (link to original work) It depicts how the 2004 US federal budget was distributed, with pictures and node size giving visual cues to the size of the pie. This’s a brilliant piece of communication. I wish someone would do the same for this country’s budget, however distorted the data […]

St. Patrick’s Day

Published by chris

Wearing green, studying, and looking forward to “Pat Metheny”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Metheny Trio this evening. *Update* Pat Metheny is like, part Steve Vai, part Santana, part Kitaro, and part 6 year old boy. The “Pikasso guitar”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pikasso_I.jpg really blew me away. (Though not the only “harp guitar”:http://www.harpguitars.net/luthiers/luthiers.htm around, it must be one of the most extensive)