All these computers and all this connectivity… it’s just a matter of time before the ultimate online people search engine appears. Spokeo.com is yet another attempt at creating a searchable online database of people. Here are some others: Pipl, ZabaSearch, ZoomInfo, and many more.
According to their website: “Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources.” You can learn more here.
You should check out this website and type in the names of some people you know and maybe even yourself. It can be very enlightening to find out just how much information there is out there.
Maybe the ultimate Internet Moment would be to take some time to just surf the internet randomly. RandomWebsites.net can help you do just that.
From their website:
The Random Web Site Machine is very simple. It lets you surf the web, by sending you a completely random web site. Nearly every site is in our database. Over Four Million Sites. Just click the Random Web Site button below and start killing time… er… I mean start having fun!
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.
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!
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.
Wisdom Quotes, is an online resource for thousands of famous quotes. Assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis, this web page has plenty of famous sayings organized by category but you can also search the site for a specific author or quote. Here are the quotes about computers. You can also subscribe to receive the occasional email update with some quotes.
If you need a good quote for a PowerPoint slide show try this site for free slides that you can easily copy and paste.
Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia that anyone can edit, was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001 with the goal of “collecting and summarizing all human knowledge in every major language.” As of August 2007 the English version of Wikipedia was large enough that, if it was converted to actual encyclopedia books, it would have 1,250 volumes each containing 400 pages each (not including the images). This may not be all of human knowledge but it could be an impressive start.
Wikipedia is not without flaws and critics. Among the criticisms is that because it is written by anonymous volunteers there is no way to assure the validity of the entries. There have also been incidents of vandalism to entries and downright inaccuracies.
Over the years Wikipedia’s editing policies have changed in response to these criticisms. They’ve gone from allowing anyone to edit anonymously to requiring “authentication” to requiring that edits to certain articles be verified by an experienced volunteer. There will probably continue to be changes to the Wikipedia Editing Policy.
Regardless of all the controversies, no one can dispute the amazing size of the online encyclopedia or how easy it is to use. So give it a try today and see what you think.
Google Earth is a free download from Google that offers a unique, interactive, dynamic globe that’s created using satellite photos and electronic data from all kinds of resources. Lets say you want to check out a friend’s new house in Washington D.C. By typing in the address you can zoom right in on a satellite photo of their house that you can then move around. You can search their neighborhood for restaurants, schools, libraries, gas stations, whatever you want. But that’s not all, next you could add layers to the satellite photo that would tell you things like voting district borders, real time traffic speeds, crime statistics, all kinds of stuff. You can even find YouTube videos, streaming webcams and photos of neighborhoods. Try checking out the 3-D renderings of whole cities and, if you go to places like the Grand Canyon you can view the terrain in 3-D.
It’s an amazing integration of information in an easy to use interactive format that has to be experienced. If you need some help getting started try searching YouTube for “Google Earth Tutorials.”
Local.Alkemis.com is a website that offers lots of local information, including access to traffic cameras in cities all around North America and even a few cities around the world. Alkemis.com has several projects underway with this mapping system that combines Google Maps, live traffic cams as well as Yahoo Traffic, Weather radar, local news, Fandango movies, even local subway maps where possible. An amazing experiment in combining multiple forms of data into an integrated and functional website. Keep checking back as they develop more and more information for cities like: New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Toronto, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston, London, and Dublin. Here’s a link to all the cities they cover: http://local.alkemis.com/local/index.htm#infoDiv
This site is one to watch for future developments!
All these computers and all this connectivity… it’s just a matter of time before the ultimate online people search engine appears. Spokeo.com is yet another attempt at creating a searchable online database of people. Here are some others: Pipl, ZabaSearch, ZoomInfo, and many more.
Google Earth
