I stumbled on an interesting website called Personas; it’s part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, that’s currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses natural language processing to create a data portrait of your online identity.

I like the idea, but it didn’t really give any good results. I tried it out a couple of times, and each time I got different results. I understand that I’d get different results for “Melinda Seckington” vs “Miss Geeky”, but I got several different results for “Melinda Seckington”, which just doesn’t make sense. I also don’t understand which websites it analyzes to get its data from. Here’s my results:

Little bit weird, right? I have no idea where terms like medicine, illegal, religion, committees come from; I don’t think I’ve ever written about stuff like that. And even things like politics, and music, I practically never write about that!

The people behind it know that it doesn’t give good results though, and see it as a way to make people think about online identities:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

It is an interesting idea, and I understand the concept behind it. Still, I’m wondering if there is a site out there that truly analyzes our online identities. I’d love to see something that takes tags and favourites from my Delicious, YouTube, Flickr, etc, adds an analyzation of my blog, Twitter and whatever other websites I’m on, to finally create a nice visualization of my online presence. Does something like that exist already?

Shopping nowadays is different than what it used to be. For me, an afternoon of leisurely shopping means looking around for clothes and shoes, and trying them on. Everything else though? Gadgets, books, games, holidays, everything else I do via the internet. This doesn’t necessarily mean I actually buy it online, but I’ll always know exactly what I want to get and where I have to get it.

The days of listening to a shop clerk and trusting his ‘expert’ advice are practically over. For almost everything I buy, I’ll always first do my own online research, reading reviews of other people, figuring out which product does exactly what I want, and where the cheapest place is to buy it. I’ve had a couple of times now that I’ve researched a product so much that I knew more than the shop clerk and had to correct him a couple of times.

But I realised not everyone is that web savvy, and most may not even have the faintest idea where to start finding these online reviews. So for that reason, I give you this blog post. Mind you, these aren’t all the resources that are out there, not by far; I’m only scratching the surface with websites that I like to visit myself when doing this type of “research”.

Amazon

Even though it’s not primarily a review site, Amazon is a useful tool to get general views about products. The main focus may seem books, games and DVDs, but you’ll find a lot of other items have pretty thorough reviews too. The reviews consist of 1 to 5 star ratings and a written review or a video of a user. I mainly like to use Amazon reviews to get that first impression of a product.

For simple items, like books or DVDs, I’ll keep it only to just Amazon, but If it’s something more gadgety (and more expensive) it’s only the first step. A problem in the past with the Amazon reviews though has been that anyone can leave a review, which led to authors giving themselves great reviews or fans giving competitors bad reviews. While it’s by far not the norm, keep that in mind when using these reviews. [Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany]

Reevoo

For those based in the UK, Reevoo is another interesting review website. Unlike Amazon (and most other review sites) Reevoo only allows people to publish a review, if they’ve gotten their product via one of their retail partners. The reviews itself though are quite limited, with users reviewing a product with only a couple of sentences of pros and cons, and a 1 to 10 score.

I mainly use Reevoo when I want a certain gadget, but have no idea what type, brand or even price range. Reevoo has a useful filter functionality for each category, so that you can refine your product search. For instance, in the Headphones category you can filter the price (£3-£10, £10-£20, etc), brand (Sennheiser, Philips, etc) and other applicable groups. It also has a nice price comparison of the different places where you can buy the product. What I’m not sure about though is whether the retailers mentioned in this list are only Reevoo’s retail partners; it doesn’t matter too much, cause a lot of the big brand cheaper retailers are listed. [Reevoo]

TestFreaks

I like to use TestFreaks to find more extensive reviews than Amazon or Reevoo. For starters, it splits the reviews into two groups: Expert Reviews and User Reviews. The Expert Reviews aggregates professional reviews from around the web, featuring reviews from blogs and online magazines. These reviews give much more technical analysis than your standard user reviews.

Besides the reviews, TestFreaks have some useful metrics, like the FreakScore: a weighted index of all aggregated expert and user reviews (expert reviews are given more value than user reviews, while older products and reviews are given less importance). It’s a great way to see what the hottest products are that people are actually talking about. Like Reevoo, TestFreaks also has a price comparison section, but is not limited to only the UK. [TestFreaks USA, TestFreaks UK]

Digital Photography Review

This website is specifically for photography, covering everything from the latest industry news to very detailed professional reviews on cameras and lenses. And with detailed, I mean: DETAILED. Some of them go so far as measuring the time it takes to switch on the camera and to take a photo. There are also sample photos, so that you can view the quality of the camera under different light circumstances. Finally, there’s an compare tool, where you can select various cameras and see the exact specifications of each of them side by side. [Digital Photography Review]

SkyScanner and Kayak

I don’t travel that much by plane, but when I do SkyScanner and Kayak are both useful sites to find the cheapest flights out there. SkyScanner offers a bit more flexibility in choosing the airports; for instance, I can get a list of all the different flights between UK and the Netherlands, without specifying which UK airport or which NL airport. Kayak on the other hand gives a more useful overview of which days are cheaper so that you can select the cheapest combo of depart/return flights. [SkyScanner, Kayak]

Bview

Bview doesn’t really offer reviews of products, but of businesses. It’s handy to find reviews of local businesses like plumbers or electricians. Besides that they also have vouchers for a huge bunch of different stores and restaurants. [Bview]

As I said before, this aren’t all the review sites out there; these are only the ones I use myself. Feel free to share any tips of sites that you use in the comments below.

Episode 107: “The Electric Friendship Generator”

I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand I find it really useful and occasionally “fun” to use, on the other hand it sometimes just annoys me to no end. Anyhow, I found this little video pretty funny on how to “behave” on Facebook:

[Watch the video on MissGeeky.com]

Via raxraxrax

Thanks to the wonderful Annie Mole from the Going Underground blog, I won a voucher to make my own book from Blurb. Blurb is a publishing company providing a print-on-demand book publishing service for the public. In other words: you can create your own books! Blurb offers a free downloadable book layout software client, BookSmart, with which you can create your own books with your own text and images. The completed book can then be uploaded to Blurb, and you can order any amount of copies. 

I decided on a photo book collecting all the photos I made in 2008. I first thought I wouldn’t have enough photos, but it’s amazing how many photos I actually made last year. I only went with the photos I thought were ‘worthy’ to be in such a book, but even then there were a fair amount. Later on I even realized I forgot to add all my photos from my Stonehenge trip; bit of a pity, cause there were some great ones in between them. Here’s how it turned out:

I tried Blurb about one and a half year ago to create a photo book of my family’s summer holiday. It turned out to be a great book, but at the time I had a lot of trouble with Blurb’s BookSmart software for the Mac. It was just so slow, it wasn’t nice to use at all. Those are all problems of the past though, cause now BookSmart works like a charm. Plus not only was I able to import iPhoto albums, but also Flickr sets.

Unlike a lot of other photobook ‘makers’, Blurb’s BookSmart has a great selection of layouts and options. You can really play around with each page, choosing different types of layouts to suit the photos. I’m still missing certain layouts though (like one single vertical photo centered), which don’t seem to difficult to add. 

The only problem I had with Blurb this time was the delivery. You pay about £4 for the cheapest delivery option, with no tracking and 10-15 day delivery estimate. I ordered my book on January the 31st and it arrived on February 23rd: that’s more than 3 weeks! (to be fair though: it was 16 working days, so it’s not too bad, but I remember last time it was way quicker than that)

I’m really happy with the way this book turned out and I’m going to try to make one every year for all that year’s photos. I’d love to make some other type of books though, like a cook book with recipes from my Mum, or a book with all my blog posts. Those will take much more time to create though, but Blurb offers great tools to make them!

I’ve been using Moo business cards for ages now, I sometimes forget not everyone knows what a Moo card is. I twittered about it some weeks ago only to realize a lot of people didn’t know who or what Moo is. So to enlighten you non-enlightened people, I’ll tell you all about them:

Simply put, Moo is a printing company. They’ve got a great range of different products, including business cards, greeting cards and stickers. What Moo does so great (and different from most other printing companies) is that they’re integrated with all these online services you already know, like Flickr, Facebook and LiveJournal. So you can order their products with your own photos or other online content on them. What’s even better is that you’re not stuck to only one image; if you want, you can have a different image on every single item. Cool, right? 

I’ll try to explain a bit about each of their products. I haven’t tried all of them myself yet, but have come across most of them in real life. 

MiniCards

The most common Moo product (most people call them MooCards), they can be used as business cards (that aren’t too businessy) or as gift tags or anything else you can come up with. For the front you can use up to 100 different photos or text designs, imported from other online services (like Flickr) or you can upload them directly. For the back you’ve got six lines, which are more than enough for your basic details (name, what you do, email, website). One pack contains 100 cards and it comes in a nice sturdy recyclable plastic box. 

I love these cards. Practically everyone I know has these for business cards. They’re not that expensive ($19.99/€13.79/£9.99) and the quality which you get in return is just amazing. The texture of MooCards is so smooth and nice, they’re really incomparable to other business cards. 

Business Cards

Since a couple of moths ago, Moo has also started offering normal sized business cards. As with the MiniCards, for the front you can import up to 50 designs from other services or upload the photos directly. The back is a bit more elaborate. For starters, you can upload an image or logo and determine the placement of that image. There are a couple of different templates to choose from, but all of them look pretty neat. Besides that you can also choose from more colors and fonts for the text on the back and you can reverse the text-background color (for instance, instead of orange text on white, you can have white text on an orange background). 

I “ordered” a pack of these with a free LinkedIn offer and they look pretty great. I like that the back is much more customizable than with the MiniCards and that you don’t have to crop the photos you put on them (one of the reasons why I use wallpapers on my minis instead of photos). As business cards though? I prefer the MiniCards, because they’re so… mini. While these Business Cards look great, they are larger and the box is still a pain to drag around. Plus at $21.99 (€15.09/£10.99) they’re more expensive and the pack only contains 50 cards (as opposed to 100 for the Min

Stickers

These are just so cute! Moo produces sticker booklets with up to 90 different photos or designs (15 sheets of 6 stickers). Each sticker-sheet has a perforated edge so that you can easily tear it out and share it with someone else. If you’ve every held one of these in your hands before you’ll notice how well they are designed. You can get them from $9.99 (€6.89/£4.99).

Cards (Post Cards, Greeting Cards, Note Cards) 

Now these I’ve never tried out myself; I’m not the card sending type anymore. Just like the previous products, Moo allows you to print whatever you want on them. The difference between them are the shapes and type of card.

For starters, the Post Cards are, well, simple postcards. You can make a set of 20 (for $19.99/€13.79/£9.99) or a set of 60 (for $49.99/€34.24/£24.99) and you can personalise the front and back with different designs.

Then, the Greeting Cards are standard sized cards. A pack of 10 with 10 different (or the same) images on them is $24.99 (€17.49/£12.99). You can add a message to the inside of the cards and add a photo or logo on the back.

With the third option of Note Cards, you get square cards with a special flap on the side to make them stand upright. These come in packs of 16 cards (again if you want with 16 different images on them) and they cost $21.99 (€15.09/£10.99).

Besides the three that I mentioned above, Moo also offers Christmas and Holiday Cards during the Christmas season. These are the same size as the standard Greeting Cards, but come in larger packs (of 25 for $41.98/€28.34/£20.99) and with different Christmas designs available.

Overview

Here’s a quick overview of all the different type of products Moo offers and how much they each cost:

MiniCards (100 cards) from $19.99/€13.79/£9.99
Business Cards (50 cards) from $21.99/€15.09/£10.99
Stickers (90 stickers) from $9.99/€6.89/£4.99
Post Cards (20 cards) from $19.99/€13.79/£9.99
Greeting Cards (10 cards) from $24.99/€17.49/£12.99
Note Cards (16 cards) from $21.99/€15.09/£10.99

If you’re interested in ordering any of these products (and have never ordered anything with them before), I’ve got two discount vouchers to give away. Just email me at melinda@missgeeky.com and the winners will be notified on February the 28th.

New York Became My Canvas:

I wanted to make my mark on America before I left. And I wanted the world to see it.

Day 1

In a few weeks time I leave New York.
I’ve had some good times here. Met some cool people. And some real jerks.
I’ve seen a new President take office.
I’ve seen the Jets blow it again.
I’ve seen more movies than I can remember.
And I don’t believe I’ve cooked myself a meal more than once.
America has made its mark on me and I really want to make my mark on America.

Day 2

As I looked out of my window on the 57th floor of the Empire State building inspiration struck me. I know what I must do.

Day 3

I’ve spoken to some friends back home and a lot of them want to help me pull this off.

Day 4

We’re on. This is going to happen. Greg is flying in tomorrow with the tech gear.

Day 5

It’s all going to be in the planning now. It’s all very well me saying, “I¹m going to do this” but now I’ve got to put the hours in. I’ve got to get the maps and overhead shots sorted out by the time Greg gets here. Shouldn’t be wasting time typing.

Greg has landed. No problem getting equipment through customs -he looks so trustworthy.

Day 6

Route planned. Up most of the night with a jet-lagged Geordie drawing and then re-drawing about it.

Cops turned up at one point. They stayed outside our block for ages. Really scared me. Thought someone had been monitoring me. Turns out there was a domestic across the street.

Greg had brought everything around with him. We were told it would be a doddle but we don¹t have a clue what to do with it.

Had to Skype Benjamin in London. Thank God for geeks. He may know a little more about Star Wars than is right for grown man but he makes anything simple for simple folk like me.

Day 7

Plans all in place now: we know the route we’re taking, we know when we’re doing it, and I even know which button to press.

Greg managed to sort out a helicopter. Was amazing to look down on the city one last time totally amazing perspective. Made me realise how incredible what we’re about to do will be.

Need to get a good night’s sleep if that’s possible. My heart is racing and my brain feels like I’ve had twenty quadruple espressos in the last five minutes.

Will put Hunky Dory on and see if I can drift off.

Day 8

D-Day. I can’t really believe that this is happening. I won’t have time to write today. I hope it goes to plan. It’s going to take hours but as long as the satellite stuff works everything will be fine.

After seeing a couple of other people post their results on Flickr, I thought I’d give a go of FaceYourManga. It’s an manga-avatar creation website, where you can choose from a whole range of different features to build your own manga face. Here’s what I came up with:

So… does this look like me? In my opinion, kind of. I wished you could specify your own colours (I mean , how hard can that be?). My hair and eye colour aren’t right at all; they’re a much warmer brown, while this is just bland. Anyhow, it’s a nice little app to play with.

Check out some other people’s Manga Faces: Cristiano, Alper, Dan, Eelke and Jo.

Have you played aroung with Wordle yet? This fun tool has been popping up everywhere the past week, so I thought I’d try it out and see what all the fuss is about. It basically generates a word cloud from whatever text you provide, giving prominence to words that appear more frequently in it. You can play around with all types of setttings, like Font, Layout and Color, creating your own personal tag cloud.

This is what it came up with for my del.icio.us account.:

Pretty cool, huh? I’d love to have a T-Shirt with this on it! I’m not sure what else I’d really use Wordle for, but I can imagine you could create some pretty cool presentation slides with it. If you want to make a cool word cloud yourself, just head on over to the Wordle site.

Until about a year ago, I didn’t really have a daily morning ritual. I wasn’t so addicted to my computer that I had to check it the moment I woke up. At the time I didn’t even follow any blogs or other news sources. Since I got a laptop though that kind of changed. My laptop is with hand’s reach of my bed and every morning I sit at least half an hour in bed, slowly waking up and reading all the items in my news reader. Among those items are a great collection of geeky web comics. I’ll share with you a couple of my favourites.

xkcd

Every geek should read xkcd; it’s a weird mix of humor, math, romance and language.

Geek and Poke

Cute comic with some great humor on blogging, Twitter and other “social media”.

Applegeeks

Surprisingly it’s not always Apple related.

Sinfest

I mainly like the cat and dog comics here. The rest can be funny at times, but the cat and dog are always hilarious.

Real Life Comics

Funny comic about a geeky couple, Greg and Liz.

PHD Comics

While I’m not doing a PHD, I am still trying to finish my master’s and this comic sometimes captures exactly how I’m feeling.

I can’t believe this new IMDB feature slipped by me. If you’re reading this blog, then I assume you have at least an inkling of an idea of what IMDB is. If not, it’s the Internet Movie DataBase and contains info about movies, actors, directors, producers, etc. Pretty handy, if you want to know everything about movies and tv as I do.

IMDB has two main cornerstones: Name pages, for all the people (actors, producers, etc) and Title pages for, ehm, all the titles (movies, tv-series, videogames, etc). Last week they added a new type of page to the mix: Character pages. Every character from a movie or tv-series or video game can have their own page including biography, quotes and appearances. The IMDB staff have already created 20000 character pages of the most well-known characters, but the idea is that users can add and edit pages.

This feature starts to get interesting when considering characters that appear in multiple series/movies or have been played by different people. For instance, did you know that Ursula Buffay, the sister of Phoebe in Friends first appeared in Mad About You? Or that Jack Ryan, a main character in books of Tom Clancy, has been portayed by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck?

Sadly, I have noticed some problems with this new feature. Because the content is user generated, you only need one lazy user to create a new page for someone who already exists. IMDB gives a nice disclaimer:

The content of this page was created by users. It has not been screened or verified by IMDb staff.

But does this mean that there are also pages that are screened and verified? I’ve already stumbled on multiple pages for one person (King Arthur) and I wonder how IMDB will deal with this.

It’s an interesting new feature and it gives IMDB that extra dimension to create an even more complex network. If you’re looking to procrastinate, you can easily spend some time just clicking from one page to another. Don’t look at me like that; I never do that !