Technology I need to keep track of
Per Ryan, here are some technologies/trends that I want to keep my eye on:
- del.icio.us – open social bookmarking to see what people are looking at. From the site: “What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.”
- Dijjer – free P2P software that works transparently and is, again, open. If you host a big file on your system simply prepend http://dijjer.org/get/ to the url (like this: http://dijjer.org/get/http://mysite.org/video.mov) and people downloading it will swarm like a BitTorrent
- Kenosis – P2P software built on top of XML-RPC. They seem to have a nice solution for the problem of discovery of P2P hosts.
- Freecycle – P2P meets real life! Instead of throwing something away or donating it to the Salvation Army you first post about it to a mailing list and someone in your area, if they want it, will come pick it up. More focused than simple donation… too bad poor people generally don’t have computers. But it’s a start. (Here’s my local Freecycle group page.)
- Your Redesign Toolbox – a bunch of handy tools for giving a site a facelift
- CSS Zen Garden – a great site featuring the amazing things you can do with CSS while still maintaining accessibility and standards compliance
Here’s Ryan’s original post that inspired this one. He and I were talking about the sea change we’ve both felt recently in regards to the industry. There’s definitely something afoot, some sort of critical mass that we’re reaching in terms of design, usability, plain ol’ usefulness, socialability, open-ness… it’s in the air, that’s for sure.