Through the generosity of a friend-of-a-friend, I finally got a Gmail account (cantoni AT gmail.com). So far I've been pretty impressed, especially with its ability to group mail messages by threads. I pointed a couple mailing lists I follow to my Gmail account just to generate some traffic. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it combines replies together in a threaded fashion. It's a good combination of digest most with the benefit of seeing each message individually. More exploring to come. I wish it had import/export features — import so you could play around with more “real” data…
Recently some folks pointed out that Yahoo! Maps can show WiFi Hotspots. This is similar to the sponsored links you can see at the bottom, showing things like Denny’s or Holiday Inn. The HotSpots are sponsored by Intel and seem to focus on paid services, resulting in lots of hits for Starbucks and McDonald’s, for example. What interested me more was SmartView which can show businesses (from Yahoo! Yellow Pages I assume) on the same map. This is something I’ve been looking for and I’m surprised this didn’t come out sooner. For a given location, you can highlight various businesses…
I've signed up for Gnomedex 2004. Gnomedex promises that you'll “live, learn, and love tech more than you ever could elsewhere in a single weekend”. I signed up early for $99 on the promise of a 3-day tech conference with open bar. Should be interesting…
Peter Rojas (a freelance writer and co-founder of Gizmodo) just launched a new site: Engadget. From his introduction: Back in August of 2002 I helped found Gizmodo, the gadgets weblog. It was a labor of love, but never intended as more than a part-time freelance job. After nineteen months I’ve decided to take a risk and launch a new site that will let me do what I want: Blog about gadgets full-time. In partnership with The Weblogs, Inc. Network (WIN), I’ve launched Engadget (www.engadget.com), where I’m already posting obsessively about everything exciting on gadgets and personal technology. For anyone who…
Robert Scoble hits some good points about blogging relationship networks — The truth is, my RSS News Aggregator is a far better “friends network” than Friendster or Orkut are. The problem is that it's hard to build a real friends network in blogs. Why? Cause you gotta do work. You've gotta read someone every day for a while. You've gotta blog and build up a relationship network. You've gotta link to them. You've gotta smooze with them at conferences and geek dinners. That's all hard. But Friendster, Orkut, and Linked In, all promise a shortcut. “Get 100 friends without doing…