Internet Moments

The folks who created CharityNavigator.org know that not all charities are created equal. They launched their website in 2002 to help Americans make more informed decisions when they make donations. CharityNavigator.org is an independent organization that “works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of over 5,400 of America’s largest charities.”   As you are making decisions on how to portion out your next donation you might want to consider spending some time looking at the Top Ten Lists at CharityNavigator.org for some assistance.

BankRate.com is a publically traded company (Nasdaq: RATE) that went online in 1996.  The site is sort of like “consumer reports” for banking.  BankRate.com monitors almost 5,000 financial institutions and provides users with a quick comparison of them all.  They track mortgage rates, CD rates, credit cards, financing college, all kinds of loans and insurance.  It’s a great resource for anyone who needs to research their financial options and it can provide information to anyone no matter how money savy they are.

Some features to check out:  Comparing CD Rates, Comparing Mortgage Rates, Comparing Credit Cards, Comparing Auto Loans, and various Financial Calculators.

SketchUp was introduced by a company called @Last Software in 2000. The creators, Brad Schell and Joe Esch wanted to make a 3D design program “that would allow design professionals to draw the way they want by emulating the feel and freedom of working with pen and paper in a simple and elegant interface…” Wikipedia entry about SketchUp

In 2006 Google aquired @Last Software and currently offers Sketchup as a free download. They also offer a professional version of the software for purchase.

SketchUp has lots of features and is very easy to use. Below is a short video to help you get started with it and here’s a link to download it to your own computer: http://sketchup.google.com/download/index2.html

If you enjoyed the music selection on Pandora then you’ll probably like GrooveShark even more.   It’s simple.  Any song you want, any artist you can think up.  Just type it into their search engine and they’ll find it for you and play it for free. 

GrooveShark was founded in 2006 by Sam Taratino and Josh Greenberg and it’s based out of Gainesville Florida, U.S.A.   It is a service of Escape Media Group and according to Wikipedia (01/04/10) they are streaming 50 to 60 million songs a month and growing at a rate of 2-3% a day.  

Give it a try today, see if you can find your favorite music on http://listen.grooveshark.com/

Until the advent of computers and desktop publishing ordinary citizens simply couldn’t make choices about what font their words appeared in.  There was what your typewriter came with and if you wanted something special you could go to an expensive “graphic artist” for a consultation. We’ve come a long way and the amount of fonts available to the casual computer user is in the hundreds if not thousands.

But what if you wanted to make your own font? You can at YourFonts.com!  Simply print out their template sheet, write your letters as you want them to appear on the template, scan your letters and uploading them to YourFonts.com for processing.  There is a fee for the service but once you download your custom font you’ll have it as an option on your computer in all your software.

YourFonts.com was created by High-Logic.com which is based in the Netherlands.  Erwin Denissen is the owner and creator of the font making software.  Give YourFonts.com a try!  If you’re fast enough you might be able to use this technology to help you with your Holiday Cards!

Internet radio usually consists of going to a radio station’s website and clicking to access the streaming version of their broadcast.  Pandora.com is a little different than that.  It offers internet radio also but it’s customized to each individual user’s taste. Pandora.com has been developed as part of the Music Genome Project which was founded in 2000 by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren.  The goal of the project is to identify the fundamental attributes of music and so far they have developed a list of approximately 400 of these music attributes.  Below is a video where Tim Westergren attempts to explain the Music Genome Project and Pandora.

No matter what you might think of the project, the website is definitely worth checking our.  Apologies to those outside the United States, for various licensing reasons, Pandora.com’s  free music service is not available world-wide.

FlickrVision.com was created by David Troy in 2007 and offers a more passive way to explore Flickr.com.  FlickrVision allows you to watch as pictures are posted to Flickr and geo-located on a map of the earth.  The website was created using GeoRSS which is also used in other dynamic online maps such as Google Maps and Yahoo Maps.   This is only one of David Troy’s many projects, the most recent of which is TwitterVision.com which allows you to see the geo-locatio from which twitter messages are being poste.

If you enjoyed flipping through the multitudes of pictures at Flickr.com you’ll probably also enjoy using TagGalaxy.de to search for photos.  It was created in 2008 by Steven Wood as a thesis project at Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg, Germany. This unique search interface gives you a dynamic globe covered with pictures that you can quickly search through.   Give it a try, you might really like it!  TagGalaxy.de

Looking for a picture?  How would you like to search an online repository of over 4 billion pictures?  Flickr.com is an amazing resource where thousands of people have been able to post and share their photos with the world.

Flickr was developed in Vancouver Canada by Ludicorp in 2004.  In 2005 Yahoo bought Flickr and migrated all it’s photos to the United States where Flickr has been based out of ever since.  Most recently Flickr started allowing video uploads.

Free photo sharing online.  Check it out!  http://www.flickr.com/

The Open Course Ware (OCW) project is an online resource which allows anyone with an internet connection to experience course work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  That’s right, you can essentially “take courses at MIT” for free.  And they have over 1,800 courses to choose from.  Of course you can’t actually receive credit for taking any of these free online courses, but you can get an amazing understanding of what educators and students do at MIT.  OCW at MIT is also part of a much larger Open Courseware Consortium which has over 50 participating universities world-wide.  You can view a current list of consortium members here and learn more about the consortium on their FAQ Page.