wordie

Wordie

"Wordie is for people who love words. Start by making word lists: words you love, words you hate, words on a given topic, whatever. Add citations, comments, and tags. See who else has listed the same words. Try checking out a random word. And join the discussion--Wordies are friendly!"

The Book Design Review - Best Book Covers of 2007

The Book Design Review

Amusing America - SFPL.org

Exhibitions - Online Exhibits - Amusing America - SFPL.org: "Amusing America is the premiere exhibition of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library with support from the California State Library. Amusing America is the story of participatory commercial amusements in American cities—San Francisco in particular—and how they changed the way Americans lived. "

Legal Technology - Federal Court Records Opened to the Public

Legal Technology - Federal Court Records Opened to the Public: "The public will receive free access to federal court records at 16 libraries in 14 states in a joint, two-year project by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and the Government Printing Office."

Bletchley Park's Colossus codebreaker to race modern PC in cracking Nazi codes - Boing Boing

so cool...
Bletchley Park's Colossus codebreaker to race modern PC in cracking Nazi codes - Boing Boing: "Tony Sale and a group of British vintage computer enthusiasts is rebuilding Colossus, the gigantic proto-computer that Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park scientists built to crack German codes during WWII. The original Colossus machines were all broken up (into pieces 'no bigger than a man's hand'!) after the war for security reasons, but Sale has tracked down the surviving Colossus engineers and is making great strides in completing the machine. The finished Colossus is to be pitted against a contemporary general-purpose PC in a code-breaking race. The raw fodder for the race is a set of messages encrypted using Nazi ciphers and transmitted by amateur radio enthusiasts in Germany."

Official Google Blog: Where's my Gphone?

Official Google Blog: Where's my Gphone?

"Despite all of the very interesting speculation over the last few months, we're not announcing a Gphone. However, we think what we are announcing -- the Open Handset Alliance and Android -- is more significant and ambitious than a single phone. In fact, through the joint efforts of the members of the Open Handset Alliance, we hope Android will be the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today.

Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications -- all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile. Through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. We think the result will ultimately be a better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities."

FreeRice

FreeRice

Fun vocabulary game! For each one you get right, FreeRice donates 10 grains of rice through the UN to help end world hunger. Play lots, 10 grains ain't much!

Google and MySpace, sittin in a tree...

It’s Official: Google MySpace = OpenSocial

The official news is out on the MySpace and Google deal, first rumored earlier today. The big news: the two companies have actually been working together on OpenSocial all along, which launches officially tonight. From the jointly issued news release:

“MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that they are joining forces to launch OpenSocial— a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web. The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. Today’s announcement underscores MySpace’s commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social Web.”

KitchenBug Brings the Ultimate Social Recipe Application, 1000 invitations

KitchenBug Brings the Ultimate Social Recipe Application, 1000 invitations: "KitchenBug could be described best as a social recipe application. It allows you to create, bookmark and share recipes in a very seamless way. kbug2.jpgYou can store all your recipes within the website by just adding the URL of a page or copy-pasting the text you wrote in your word processor. The interesting part is what is happening around this process, where the service generates a suggestion of tags for the recipe. The best part is when you write a recipe they automatically suggest ingredients and link them to Wikipedia for further reference. It is also interesting because it brings a sort of semantic structure to recipes which helps in better search and classification. However for now their search engine is would work better with an auto-suggest or advanced search feature for example . KitchenBug has all the usual social features for interacting and sharing content with your friends (rating, comments,…)."

docstoc : find and share any document

Welcome to docstoc : find and share any document: "docstoc is a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents. Find free legal documents and free business documents. Upload your documents for all the world to share."

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About

Qipit - Copy and share documents

Qipit - Copy and share documents: "Get Qipit - free mobile online copy service Copy documents, whiteboards and handwritten notes with your camera phone or digital camera to store, fax, email or publish! * Turn documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies (PDFs) * Email or fax qipit digital copies via email, your online Qipit account, or right from your phone * Store all of your paper documents and notes as digital documents for easy archiving and sharing * Tag your qipit documents for easy searching and sorting * Publish and share your documents on the web"

Technophilia: Get Lost in Translation Sites

(a great review of web-based translation services)
Technophilia: Get Lost in Translation Sites: "The web makes it possible to search for documents written in every conceivable language, but what if you don't actually know the language you find that special somethin' written in? No worries—there are plenty of online translation services that can give you anything from just a good idea to a complete translation of what you're looking at."

Free documentaries.org

Free documentaries.org: " At freedocumentaries.org we believe strongly that in order to have a true democracy, there has to be a free flow of easily available information. Unfortunately, many important perspectives, opinions and facts do not make it to our televisions or cinemas (you can watch movies in our media category if you want to know why)."

YouMail

About YouMail: "We created YouMail because we believe basic cell phone voicemail is, quite frankly, lame. We were annoyed by a bunch of stuff, like: * How come we could personalize every aspect of our cell phone - like ringtones - but couldn't change a greeting for a specific caller? * Why did we have to listen to ten voicemail just to get to the one that mattered? * How come if we accidentally deleted a voicemail, we could never get it back? * Why couldn't we easily share or permanently save important voicemails, like a friend's drunk dial or a relative's engagement call? * Why does your phone tell you that you have a voicemail, but not who left them, when or how important they are? * Why do we have to sit through useless instructions all the time? * Why can't we automatically hang up on people who we don't want to talk to anymore? * Why do we have to record greetings at all? We want to just choose cool ones like ringtones! We could go on. The bottom line is simple. YouMail is about reinventing voicemail and making it a fun, powerful personal experience that you'll absolutely love. "

Soundsnap.com: Find and Share Free Sound Effects and Loops

Soundsnap.com: Find and Share Free Sound Effects and Loops
"This is a database of public domain sound effects and audio clips that have been tagged, categorized, and created by users. Previews play right when you click the button, and you can download them right away in multiple formats (MP3, AIFF, and WAV)." (from Crave)

Inventor's Handbook

Inventor's Handbook: "This handbook was created by the Lemelson-MIT Program to address the independent inventor's and aspiring entrepreneur's most frequently asked questions regarding United States patents. We hope that this handbook will provide some helpful information on the patenting and commercialization processes."

Fuser – Simplify your online life

Fuser – Simplify your online life: "Fuser is the coolest way to unify your mail from multiple accounts. View your mail and social networking messages in one convenient location. It's easy and secure."

Database of Historic Wallpaper

(via ResearchBuzz) Database of Historic Wallpaper: "The historic database is available at http://www.spnea.org/wallpaper/catalog/search.htm. You can leave all the search options (including year, country of origin, paper type, finish, pattern name, etc.) blank and you’ll get a list of all the samples. I did a search for handmade embossed wallpaper and got 25 results. Results are shown in a table which includes the sample’s accession number, year span (start and end), exact year (if available, and I didn’t see any that were available) and a thumbnail of the paper."

Library Hotel, New York City, Best Small Hotels

Library Hotel, New York City, Best Small Hotels

The Library Hotel in New York City is the first hotel ever to offer its guest over 6,000 volumes organized throughout the hotel by the Dewey Decimal System.* Each of the 10 guestrooms floors honors one of the 10 categories of the DDC and each of the 60 rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to