Predict November web 2.0 election style!

Predict November is a new website for predicting the outcome in November for the upcoming election. To make your own predictions on how weather the Democrats, Republicans, or Independents will win each state you simply go to your map and click states once to turn them red (Republican) twice to turn them blue (Democrat) and three times to turn them yellow (Independent). As you click each states the electoral results will be displayed above your map.

One of the nifty things about Predict November is that once you have created your your predictions on your map you can then, embed the map on your site or blog. Political blogs have been on the rise, and this is a great tool for political bloggers to use as the election comes closer and closer. For fun here is my map:

Here is an extra credit question for you blog readers. I will even through in an invite to a closed beta site if you get the answer right. Looking at my map, what would happen?

If you happen to have a lot of Political friends Predict November also has a Facebook application you can use to put your map on your Facebook page, and to see your friends predictions.

Not only can you make your own predictions and view and share your friends predictions for the elections but you can also see the results of past elections on maps too. For the political junky, these maps are very interesting to analyze and can also help you when creating your own map.

It looks like the upcoming election will be between Obama and McCain, who knows why Hilary is still there…Anywho Predict November is going to be a great asset for Political Blogger sin the upcoming months. To have a little fun, anyone who posts a a link to there predictions in November, and has the closest match to what actually happens in November will win some invites to closed beta website from me.

Lance Armstrong going Web 2.0?

It seems even the famed tour de France winner but more importantly cancer survivor Lance Armstong, is building his own web 2.0 website. The website is centered around health, fitness, and goal setting/tracking.

The website has a goal tracker, groups to talk and discuss in and even member Q and A’s. The article aslo has lots of great articles on, Getting Healthy, Being Active, Eating Well, Finding Balance in your life, and stayign young. Not only are there articles in each of those categories but there are also videos. The information in these articles and videos is very good info that I found extremely informative.

The website is currently in closed beta, but you can go to the homepage and request in when it opens here.

While were on the Lance Armstrong topic, check out Livestrong.org which is the Live strong cancer foundation for helping cancer patients.

Windows 7 Looking liek KDE 4?

Tech Crunch just released a post with some screenshots of what windows 7 is currently looking like, while under development. If you have not yet heard of windows 7 it is the windows version to come after Vista. Why should they bother to continue….jk.

Anywho here is oen of the screenhosts:

To me this looks very similiar to KDE 4….maybe its just me. What do you think?

Should Cononical Sell Computers?

I was recently reading an article on Engadget, about how Ubuntu will be releasing a version that will be specific for ultraportable laptops. With the recent success of the Eee pc, and now many other companies starting to build there own ultra portable laptops, why doesn’t Ubuntu not only create and operating system, but also create and sell computers with there operating systems on them?

If Conanicol built and sold an ultraportable laptop, I would definitely make a purchase. Why would Ubuntu want to make an ultraportable laptop to sell though? Well first it would help bring in a little more income for the company and allow them to expand there efforts is creating a free operating system.

Also Ubuntu like Asus did with the Eee pc could try and get into more mainstream markets, thus brining more of the public to the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

What are your thoughts?

Added the Idea to Ubuntu Brainstorm if you want to vote it up.

Nautilus with Tabs!

Apparently this has been a long and frequently requested feature for the gnome file manager to have tabs. I never knew or heard of a suggestion, but the more I think of it, thats  a great idea! Here is a screenshot from arstechnica:

You don’t have to wait any longer to try nautilus the gnome file manager with tabs because you can grab the source code here! If you give it a try please let us know in the comments, I have finals comming up so I am a bit busy on my end.

Orgoo Email

Orgoo is another new web based email client. It has been in private beta for a long, time now. But I managed to finally get in! The first thing I liked about Orgoo is the pleasant color scheme although the Orgoo team say we will be able to customize it soon.

Orgoo also has a nice built in chat client which supports all the major chatting protocols. The chats open up in tabs above your email inbox. Not only can you chat with all your friends via the internet, but you can also send text messages with orgoo. Also orgoo has built in video chat, so it seems anyway you want to talk or chat Orgoo has it covered.

Lastly they seem to be implementing a calendar feature, the button is there just when I click it, it says coming soon.

Lastly I have an invite to give away, and I was thinking I would trade it for a flickr pro gift? And maybe some free advertising on this blog.

Anywho let me know in the comments if your interested.

Joomeo Online Photo Storage

Here is yet another online place to store your photos. Un-like flickr I would compare Joomeo to a advanced version of Iphoto but online. The Joomeo interface reminds me a lot of what Iphoto looks like on the mac.

Joomeo is free and lets you upload an unlimited amount of photos but up to 150 megabytes a month. I have and 8 mega pixel camera and I am surprised how many photos I have been able to upload with my free account to Joomeo.

Joomeo also offers subscription accounts. A 500mb per month cap for 16 euros a year, a 1 gigabyte for 30 euros a year, and finally an unlimited for 120 euros a year.

Now the neat thing abotu Joomeo is it also allows you to upload movies to! Joomeo seems to be more centered around a place for you to store and organize photos and to share with your contacts. It is not as social as Flickr would be.

I may have to try and get used to this since I can;t seem to get myself a flickr pro account. I think flickr is better for my own needs…

Bringing Aim to Awn! (Finally)

Since the start of Awn I have wanted to bring Aim to Awn, to chat with. I just thought it would be neat. Somone hacked together a small thing with the meebo iphone version and awn. Although I suggested that idea, I found the iphone version of meebo lacking.

since I pretty much know nothing about coding, I decided to decided to edit that applet and make it into something different, more pleasing to me. So after trial and error with a bunch of the code, I was editing, I finally got something to work for me!!

Here are some screen shots:

The nice thing this does is, it tabs all the open chats on it, and you can easily talk to multiple people at the same time. Thats one thing the meebo one didn’t do that bugged me.

I am having trouble packaging it together for easy install, but once I get that I will post it for others to test.

Things I still want to accomplish with it are have the icon bounce upon gettign a message.

If you would like to help me with this, and maybe teach me somethings along the way, leave a comment. Hope you like what you all see, and stay tuned for updates, and the release.

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Google Reader lost all my subscriptions!

I logged into Google reader today, to read my feeds as usual. I had a message popped up when I logged on telling me about a new feature, on how anything I share, gets shared with my gmail contacts list users who use Google reader. I thought it was kind of cool, but then thought this feature already existed…correct me if I am wrong?

Anywho I then proceeded to read my feeds, and bam! They were all there, there were only three feeds in the feed list and they were so not mine. Here is what my list looked like:

And that was a big shocker, since I normally have over 100 feeds….This is kind of alarming because I do not know the name of every feed that I have ever added to my list. The good/bad thing about this is it has happened once before to me and eventually my feeds all came back. This is good, because I may have a chance of getting my feeds back, but its bad because this should not keep happening to a Google product.

Anyone else ever have this problem with Google Reader?

Google Docs Almost perfect

Google Docs today is showing off yet another new feature! It seems to me, Google is working pretty hard on there online office suite. Seems like the get new tools or changes fairly frequently. Anywho, it seems that now you can pick to view the documents, with a fixed page width. What exactly does this mean? Well it actually looks like you are typing on a page like in Microsoft word, instead of an endless white page. Ok, this is hard to explain so here are some photos:

The original view called normal (plain View):

New Fixed-Width page view:

After using the new fixed width page view, I say Google docs is almost perfect because there is one thing missing from this view; th ability to see pages. For example if I keep typing and typing, the page will get longer and longer and not brake into multiple pages. I find this a bit annoying, I don’t know about you, but I like to see how much I have typed. But all in all, Google Docs seems to be going into a positive direction!