MOBILE APP: Waze

Robert Scoble spends some time with the WAZE team. The following video is an overview of a crowdsourced traffic mapping / info app for mobile devices that uses drivers to report on various driving conditions. One aspect that caught my attention was the simple feature that turns your car into packman. Nothing like an old school game of GPS packman.

Here’s how the WAZE site describes the offering: “Real-time maps and traffic information based on the wisdom of the crowd. Waze is a FREE social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. 100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets.”

BOOK: The Smashing Book

smashingbook The folks at Smashing – an amazing resource site / community for web design and developers have just released a comprehensive resource in book form.

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

BOOK: We Feel Fine

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We Feel Fine” an expansive project that has mined the web since 2005 for the phrase “I Feel” has expanded to include a beautiful book that captures the project.

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I’ve been following the “We Feel Fine” project and a number of collaborations between Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that harness data in interesting and artistic ways.

Here’s how Sep Kamvar describes the project on his site.

“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.”

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