Category: CoolTools

John Robb’s Weblog
“The concept is simple. Data is usually locked up in monolithic applications (CRM, ERP, etc.). Application seats are expensive. Training is expensive. Etc. People that need the data often can’t get to it.

What if human readable data flows (via RSS) could be generated by these applications? It would allow the development of easy to read weblogs (that republished these RSS flows) that almost everyone in the company would find valuable. The combinations are almost limitless and the flow is completely automated.“

I’ve been recommending this sort of approach to folks for awhile. To me RSS feeds are essentially a by-product of data entry in any db system, just one last statement (open the RSS file and add and entry) tagged on the end of the code that creates or edits the row in the db.

TechWeb | News | Yahoo Launches Search For Nontraditionally Licensed Content
“Yahoo Inc. on Thursday released in beta a search engine that looks for pictures, writings and other creative works that are available for reuse under nontraditional copyright licenses offered by a nonprofit group.

The new online tool searches the web for sites with a Creative Commons license. The San Francisco organization has created a range of protections for authors and artists by replacing the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright with “some-rights-reserved” alternatives.“

Larry Lessig, the engine behind Creative Commons, reports on the new tool here. This feature lets you use Yahoo! to find works that can be re-used and shared according to the various CC licenses. So, need a bit of graphic, a photo, or some music to spice up your site? This is the search tool to use.

InfoWorld: Yahoo’s free mail service to offer 1GB of storage: March 23, 2005: By : APPLICATIONS : SECURITY
“Yahoo will increase the inbox capacity of its free Web mail service for the third time in the past nine months, now raising storage to 1GB, exceeding Microsoft’s Hotmail and matching Google’s Gmail.

Yahoo Mail users all over the world will begin to see the larger inboxes between late April and early May, said Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s vice president of communications products.“

Slashdot | Google’s Library Up and Running
“It seems that Google Print results are beginning to appear on searches. For those who don’t know, Google has been scanning from libraries from some of the world’s greatest universities in order to compile a freely accessible online library. An easy way to turn up these results is to simply type “book”, and then whatever you want to search for. For instance, book origin of species will turn up the full text of Charles Darwin’s controversial treatise.“