I just came across this on the WPLINFOSTUFF blog, and I wasn't (and am still not) sure if this is for real or not. The NOSO project encourages people to get together and NOT connect with each other. It's for those people that are so engrossed in online interaction (E-mail, Facebook, podcasts, IM) that they need a scheduled break to be with other people being by themselves.

http://www.nosoproject.com/

I would like to announce the start of a new website called "One Key Press". I have set up this website to encourage people who live in the Region of Waterloo and surrounding areas to discover, inform and participate in their communities. It will feature news and views on local happenings from myself and other local authors.

If you're interested in helping out, let me know at michael@onekeypress.ca.

I will also chronicle my efforts on the Editor's Blog hosted on the One Key Press site, so check it out if you're interested in the trials and tribulations of setting up a site like this.

Mark Evans over at the Maple Leaf 2.0 blog points out that a web site offering a free service can indeed make money. PlentyofFish.com, and on-line dating service apparently makes $10,000 a day through Adsense. Incredible! The owner reports that he has the largest website run by one person.

I recently revisited a post regarding Squidoo, noting that I had just received another pay out for my efforts building "lenses" there (a lens is a Squidoo page on a given topic). I had made mention of a TechCrunch post that doubted whether there would ever be any authority assigned to Squidoo lenses compared to articles on Wikipedia. Interestingly, days later Tim Bray points out some worries about Wikipedia becoming too much of an authority, at least as far as authority equates with high search engine rankings. I've noticed that Wikipedia has been creeping onto the first page of many search engine's search results, and I too have worried a bit about the factual accuracy of Wikipedia pages. Tim tries an experiment where he attempts to find the population of each of Canada's provinces. On noting that Wikipedia is seen as the easiest destination for factual information, he comments:

"... some joker might have gone in and changed the number by couple hundred thousand up or down, just for fun. Wouldn’t you be better off going to a source with some real authority? I think you would."

The moral of the story here? Don't take anything you read on the Internet as fact. Go to trusted sources. Will Squidoo become any better garnering authoritative authors than Wikipedia? There is the motivation to consider as well. "Wikipedians" don't get paid for their contributions, "Squidooians" (Squidooers?) can get a share of the ad revenue generated on the site. Does that motivate the authors to contribute more, or does it motive to contribute better quality information? I should also mention that you can assign any monies generated to one of a number of charities... maybe Squidoo should flag lenses that authors have chosen to have proceeds go to charity. It might lessen suspicions that the lensmaster is just out for cash, and might increase the authority.

Over on the Maple Leaf 2.0 blog, Mark Evans has a post listing several Canadian-specific Internet search engines. Of course, there's always Google.ca which has the "pages from Canada" filter (a radio button under the seach term field) and the Canadian Yahoo! which also has a "Canada" button for filtering. It likely won't be long before Microsoft's Live site features area geographic searching like this as well.

Christine at the WPLINFOSTUFF blog (a fine blog for the Waterloo Public Library) recently posted about a pilot project to promote the the new Government of Ontario website called ServiceOntario. On the (English) homepage of the ServiceOntario site, you find:

The Ontario government is now making it easy for you to access the information, services and resources you need, when and how you need them. Whether you’re getting married, starting a business or want to learn more about your workplace or industry, it’s all here.

Part of the WPL promotion is a scavenger hunt to see who can find certain details on the ServiceOntario site. Check it out... you could win one of three iPod nanos! The scavenger hunt deadline is Saturday, October 7, 2006.

I loved Tim Bray's reaction to the recent launch of Yahoo!'s "The 9", the recently launched 5-day-a-week video run down of "interesting" things on the Internet hosted by a bouncy Maria Sansone. He likened it to the Apocalypse and asked, "Surely the Internet must have an "Off" switch somewhere?" If "The 9", then what should we call the "Amazon Fishbowl"? The worlds first Internet infomercial? Bill Maher returns to some witty banter, interviewing celebrities and plugging products for purchase on Amazon. From a techie side of things, I like how they have put this one together. You can skip ahead to the part of the 30 minute show that you want to see... complete with shrinking/growing video as it is playing and a scene list that looks pretty slick.

Here's a note that I sent to Google through their support request page. I'm suggesting a new feature, which I'm surprised they haven't implemented yet.

Google Alerts are great.

Your link for reporting spam search results at:

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

... is great.

Now... put them together. Add a link for each search result in the Google Alert e-mail messages that would prepopulate a web page for submitting a spam report. It would be a quick, efficient way to get spam blogs and other spam sites out of the search index almost as soon as they are added.

Spam blogs are most likely set up using automated tools, all in a name of getting ad revenue or for spreading malicious software to unsuspecting computer users (who could have their computers taken over to be used again to create more spam blogs). They can also boost a web site's search ranking to have it appear higher in the search results list. Since many people only look at the first few pages of an Internet search, this can make a big difference, especially if you're selling something.

Google Alerts can be setup by anyone, for free. Google will send you an e-mail when content based on your search terms is added to the Google search index. Letting people report spam directly from the alert e-mail messages would be a quick solution to reducing some of the spam blogs. I'm starting to get occassional alerts regarding sites that seem to be copying content from my own website.

I'll report back if anything comes out of my suggestion.

Today Google announced a new service called Google Notebook, which they're touting as a research tool. It allows easy clipping of web page content onto a virtual notepad, and then adds the ability for the notepad to be published. Add RSS feeds and run Google ads on the side, and you almost have the entire feature set of Squidoo. Well, maybe not the entire set, but it's interesting to see Google make these small moves into other people's turf. Google co-op for example is running in competition with many vertical (topic-specific) search engines, and Google pages is running against Yahoo! Geocities and to a lesser extent MSN pages.

Back in December 2005 I posted about creating my first "lens" on the Squidoo site. Some time between then and now, they have turned on the money tap (i.e. stopped funnelling all of the ad revenue to charities). To continue my experiment, I chose to have all of the ad revenue for my lenses be transferred to my Paypal account. If you can see the image in my post here, you'll see that the money came through in a big way... all $0.18 worth :)

Update (later that same day): There's an interesting post on TechCrunch about the future of Squidoo and how it's downfall might tarnish Seth Godin's reputation as a marketting guru. I'm tending to agree with Michael Arrington's assessment. When comparing Squidoo to Wikipedia he states:

"It’s unlikely that a Squidoo lens on a given topic (when there are a potentially infinite number of other lenses on the same topic) will ever gain that kind of authority."

Update 2006-09-12: Payday number two gave me a cool $1.21 USD this time around. That's a grand total of $1.39 USD for my efforts... which isn't really all that bad. At least I can set my pay threshold, unlike a certain ad network. By the way, you can see my Squidoo profile and list of lenses here:

http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/onecog2many 

I saw this posted on the Flickr Blog. The AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) will be "... launching an exhibition created entirely by the public." It looks like they will be using Flickr for the photo submissions. From the AGO blog post, "Portraits submitted to this Flickr group may be included in a computer kiosk slideshow presentation coinciding with the In Your Face exhibit at the AGO this summer starting July 1."

It sounds like a great idea. The AGO post mentions that submissions may be shown on a kiosk. I think they should put them on a wall with a projector or maybe a few dozen flat panels arranged on a wall.

I'm checking out Odeo again after not having used the site for months. From their FAQ page, "Odeo is a creative way to record and share audio—and it’s free. You can record audio and then share it with your Odeo contacts, by email, or by placing it in a Channel for all the world to hear. Audio from Odeo can be downloaded to desktops, iPods, and mp3 players."

I've subscribed to a few interesting channels and am going to fire up iTunes to download them for me... although my audio inbox is a bit big after not listening to my subscriptions for so long. One feature I'll try out for a bit is Odeo's voice message system. Click the "Send me an Odeo" button on my site if you have a microphone on your system. It's like voice mail for the Internet.

I usually let blog posts from Microsoft's Robert Scoble pile up before skimming through them, but kudos to him for pointing out cool things that people do with competitor's stuff. For instance, he likes to keep on top of and point out Google Maps mashups.

Awhile back, Robert pointed out that a new site called Flagr has been launched.

Flagr allows mobile phone users to e-mail their location to the server and have it plotted on a Google Map for others to see. With the address as a starting point, you can include comments and even a picture. Site users can even subscribe to an RSS feed that will allow them to follow your flags with ease. I can see this as a useful tool for sharing your finds with others that you know... like restaurants and book stores. It would be good for arranging meet-ups with friends or keeping your family or co-workers informed of your whereabouts.

The site was setup by three young entrepreneurs from San Francisco. Nice work guys!

Yesterday I got an invite from James Bow to check out and become part of the The Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association. With any luck, this will be the first post that appears on their site. If you have a blog of your own and live in the Waterloo or Wellington regions of Ontario, visit the site and sign up!

I took James up on his offer and you should now see a new BlogRoll on my site's blog-related pages listing all of the local bloggers that have signed up to date. And don't forget to check out the association's site which aggregates the posts from everyone on the list.

Wow! How did I miss this? I stumbled onto the Kitchener/Waterloo Craigslist site when I glanced at Ken Dyck's del.icio.us bookmarks today. From their factsheet, I found that the site has been around since January 2006. A brief description from the factsheet reads:

Q: What is craigslist?
A: Local community classifieds and forums - a place to find jobs, housing, goods & services, social activities, a girlfriend or boyfriend, advice, community information, and just about anything else -- all for free, and in a relatively non-commercial environment.

See the Wikipedia entry for Craiglist for more details, but to sum up, Craigslist was started in 1995 in the SanFrancisco area and has been wildly popular since, expanding into 150 cities since then.

How will the job postings fare against Workopolis and Monster? Who knows? Will it put the small papers out of business? Your guess is likely better than mine.

From what I can see, there is very little content so far with a good (bad?) number of SPAM-like postings. If people start spreading the word, maybe that will change?

Update 2006/03/23: I've been getting a lot of hits on this post from the search engines. For people and search engines that don't know it's "craigslist" (one word), I'll add the phrase "Craig's List" so the search engines will catch the two-word phrase as well.

Update 2008/04/28: Wow... it's been about two years since I posted this. Within the past year or so I've found that I had just as good (if not better) luck posting classified ads to the local Kijiji site.

Newsvine.com, a new website that combines newswire feeds, user-submitted pointers to news and personal columns is now open for the public. I've been beta-testing the site for awhile and find it stable, easy to use and not bad to look at. While I'm not dumping all my other news sources for newsvine, I'll keep a close eye on it.

To read about the features and the journey to the public launch, here's the official launch notice on the Newvine blog.

You can read my own column at: http://onecog2many.newsvine.com/

Note: They don't have a region setup for Kitchener/Waterloo or any place in this area yet. For now I've been flagging local stories with the tag "region-of-waterloo"... it would be great if others did this as well. Then you could read local news by visiting the URL:

http://www.newsvine.com/region-of-waterloo

This from CyberJournalist.net:

Gregg McLachlan, the Associate Managing Editor of the Simcoe Reformer, has launched a new site with lots of journalism tips called NewsCollege.

For years he has published the newsroom newsletter The Write Way, which has been circulated to journalists in Canada, the United States, Caribbean, Malaysia, Europe, South Africa and South America.

NewsCollege is a new site that includes many of the tipsheets previously published in The Write Way, some of which have been updated and revised for NewsCollege.

Check out NewsCollege at http://newscollege.ca/. It looks like a great place to start if you are interested in improving the coverage of your own local paper, or if you are starting a citizen-based project of your own. I particularly like the "50 Places to Shop for Stories" page under the "Story Hunting" menu item.

Jeff Jarvis has a good introduction to an upcoming site called Edgeio. As Jeff puts it, it will be a "classified system for the distributed future". Here's what it sounds like to me...

We’re talking about database change feed. I see Edgeio as a distributed database aggregator. Every seller will have their own database of products. They will provide a feed that exposes updates that they make to their data. Edgeio will slurp up the feeds, slice and dice them and make them available to use in interesting ways.

I can see this setup being very useful... keeping control in the hands of the sellers and purchasers and providing tools for parties in the middle that can provide actual value.

Update 2006/02/27: Om Malik points out that Edgeio is now open for business.

My Squidoo Robotics lens is on the list of Squidoo's top 100 ranking lenses... at least it was this morning. I'm not exactly sure how I made the rank or how it was taken away for that matter, but it was nice while it lasted.

Update, later that same day: Now I see... It was the "Top 100 Most Blogged" list... they have several different Top 100 lists. If you check now, I'm still there. I wonder who's blogging about this lens? If it's just me, then not many people are blogging about Squidoo in general! I'm wondering how long it will be around then? Technorati says I'm the only one blogging about this lens.

Out of the blue I received an e-mail announcing a (relatively) new site called Favorville. According to the home page, Favorville is a "social experiment in good will." If you need a favour, sign up for an account and play the waiting game to see if someone will come through to help you out. Maybe you have a service or something else to offer? Post that too.

My concerns... I checked out KW's listings and saw at least one get-rich-scheme post vague on the details. You'll get that anywhere I suppose. The message I received (from one of the founders) noted that the site was created by a couple of Torontonians (who apparently prefer American spellings).

It's good to see a rating system for the users to help build trust, but I already see some ways of pumping up ratings... people are offering Gmail accounts and I'm guessing every account offered (at zero cost to the offerer) will bump up their rating. There's no way to weight a favour in importance... might lead to some misplaced trust. Other than that... I like the idea. It's a bit like LinkedIn or other social networking systems, but with a social responsibility hook.