While browsing around the blogosphere, I came across this interesting website called AideRSS on one of the comments on Google Blogoscoped’s article “Tips For Dealing With Information Overload”. AideRSS is apparently a free tool that takes an RSS or Atom feed, collects some statistics, and then gives each post in the feed a PostRank, which seems to be an objective measure of a post’s quality, based on “relevance and reaction.” (You might say that PostRank is similar in name and function to Google’s PageRank.) Among the metrics it uses are the number of comments, Delicious links, Digg votes (?), and Google Blogsearch backlinks. You can then use PostRank to filter a feed for the best posts if you so desire.

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The big news that’s rocking the physics, electrical and electronics engineering fields is the proof of the existence of the memristor. “Mem-what?” Well, that’s what my initial reaction was, too. The memristor is apparently the missing fourth fundamental basic element of electrical circuits, alongside the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. And the cool thing about this is that the memristor was first hypothesized in 1971 by Leon Chua, a Filipino-American professor at the University of California at Berkeley who got his degree in B.S. Electrical Engineering at the Mapúa Institute of Technology in 1959, here in the Philippines! Yay, Pinoy!

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“I was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time…” so starts the intriguing short story set in the United Kingdom and told via the Google Maps API. “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cummings is the first story of Penguin Books’ We Tell Stories, a collection of six stories by six authors and released in six weeks (hmmm, 666?). We Tell Stories aims to do storytelling using the various tools, interactive or not, Web 2.0 has to offer; looking at the two stories so far released, the first uses Google Maps API, while the second uses blogs and Twitter. Interesting, isn’t it?

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Found via Kottke is this absolutely geeky blog showing off science- and math-related tattoos from scientists, mathematicians, programmers, and other academics. I find it to be a wonderful blend of the rebellious and the geek.

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Nope, iSketch is not some Apple software or electronic device, but rather an addictive web-based multi-player Pictionary type of game (or Win, Lose or Draw, if you’re more familiar with that game show) that I’ve wasted several hours on last weekend.

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Advertising on the web is here to stay, and that’s a fact of life. Otherwise, there’d be a whole lot less free services and content for us to read. In exchange for free access to a whole lot of websites, we have to accept that most of these websites will have ads.

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Markku once talked about false productivity and asked for suggestions. I commented by explaining my organizational system consisting of scattered to-do lists and organizing mechanisms.

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It’s been a rainy week this week, and it seems the Filipino’s collective prayer for rain to stave of the impending water crisis worked. Well, it did cause a helluva lot of traffic last Wednesday, but at least we’re all safe, right?

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Many of my readers are not into the so-called local blogging community, so here’s my unsolicited coverage of The Kid Blogger Affair, i.e., the question of the authorship of the Making Money Online with a 13-Year Old blog, which is owned by Carl Ocab, now a 14-year-old teenager.

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I’ve heard about OpenStreetMap (OSM) (see the Wikipedia article) maybe one or two years ago and was interested in the collaborative aspects of it. This mapping project aimed to create a free (as beer and in speech) street geodata of the whole United Kingdom and Ireland. While Great Britain already has excellent mapping data care of the Ordnance Survey (the national mapping agency of the UK), the problem is that this data is not free (as in beer and speech). The Ordnance Survey holds the copyright to the mapping data and charges people who want to use it, despite being funded by taxpayer’s money. So the OpenStreetMap project was born.

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After months of planning and setting up, I am extremely pleased to announce that we have finally launched Vista Pinas, my second blog where I give you a virtual tour of Filipino sights as can be seen from satellite imagery found in Google Maps and Google Earth. It’s like Google Sightseeing done Pinoy-style!

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Due to the recent announcement of Google’s top SEO guy Matt Cutts of a way to report to Google sites who sell links on their pages, there has been a lot of online discussion about the whole economy of buying and selling links and how it affects search engine rankings, with particular emphasis on small people like bloggers who use text links from brokers like Text Link Ads as a way to get additional income. For instance, Yuga touched a bit on the topic by talking about links from WordPress themes.

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Not bad. I was able to name 115 UN member countries out of a total of 192 in 10 minutes. That’s almost 60%. Try to see if you can beat me via this cool online quiz. Tip: you don’t have to press the return key if you typed an unidentified country correctly. I would’ve listed my results here but that would spoil the fun! (Via Kottke.)

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While going to work Wednesday morning, I noticed a strange-looking palm tree planted at the southern end of the Manila Golf Club near the Fairways Tower and McKinley Road. It was definitely a new species, probably yet unseen by the country’s botanists. So I took a picture of it this morning:

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Look at the photo above of a billboard along South Luzon Expressway. Notice anything funny? Try to think of it for a minute or two. Give up? Then check out these two links for a clue: link 1 and link 2.

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Check this out. There’s this guy who made his own annual report (like the one’s made by companies for their investors) but this one is about his own life during the past year. The layout, graphics, and color scheme is top-notch. The depth, breadth, and subject matter of information is interesting. And the individual statistical data points border on the anal. (He documented how many times he went out drinking, what he drank, and which bar he went to—can you believe that?—though there is an inebriated disclaimer. Hehehe. )

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Nice. After the very successful Blog Parteeh now comes the first ever Philippine Blog Awards. I think the decision to have a party first before the awards was a really good call by the organizers. This makes it easier to drum up wide sponsor support and media and blog publicity.

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Google is having a contest for building the best school campus in 3D using Google SketchUp. The grand prize is an all-expense-paid trip to the Google Campus in Mountain View, CA. Too bad the contest is only open for residents of the U.S. and Canada.

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I so wanted to watch one night of the second World Pyro Olympics and I did plan to go see China’s and the Philippines’ show last Saturday but I never did get around to doing it. The primary reason was that I was dissuaded by anecdotal reports of the horrendous traffic within 10 kilometers of the Mall of Asia and the secondary reason was that I didn’t relish the idea of spending a lot of time at the mall just to avoid the peak of the traffic.

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I have the lucky timing of being in Tokyo during the time a selection of M. C. Escher’s works were being displayed at an exhibit in Shibuya. The Dutch M. C. Escher has been one of my favorite artists, ever since I saw his work, Relativity, in a Childcraft volume from World Book Encyclopedia. If Relativity seems familiar, it’s because the concept has been used many times, the most notable reference for me being the climax scene in the movie, Labyrinth. In fact, Relativity can be seen hanging on the wall of the bedroom of Sarah, the movie’s lead character.

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This new Elmo toy has got me both laughing and seriously disturbed at the same time.

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I first encountered Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” via this blog post sometime early this year. The post linked to this parody video (warning: NSFW) poking fun at the unintelligible lyrics of the song.

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It really seems like Google is an engineer’s dream place, that is if you can hurdle the tough hiring procedures. Read this post by Philipp Lenssen about insider looks into the world of Google.

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I believe I have created the first Philippine-related Google Maps mashup that is more than just placing points on a map. I remembered recently that I have scanned before an aerial photography plate of the University of the Philippines, Diliman area from the early 90s. (These plates are used by U.P. Geodetic Engineering students in their courses.) So last night, I had this brilliant idea to create a custom map in Google Maps with the aerial photography as a new map type. So now I’m proud to present my University of the Philippines, Diliman Map Mashup located at my dormant U.P. community site ASwalk.net (which I plan on reviving soon). Please select the “Aerial” map type to view the “new” imagery.

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DigitalGlobe, one of Google’s sources for satellite imagery already has a composite image of Metro Manila in high resolution. This imagery was taken in 2004 and the next one will be in 2007. When will Google incorporate this into Google Maps/Earth?

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See this Google Trends graph for Friendster vs. MySpace. It’s no surprise that MySpace has overshadowed Friendster in social networking circles. But if you’re asking, “MySpace? What’s that?” then the bar graphs at the bottom should explain why. While MySpace utterly dominates in Google Searches, Friendster packs a wallop in localized searches, the Philippines in particular and Southeast Asia in general. (Compare with the MySpace vs. Friendster graph.)

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Ok, so the earth shook just a little more than a minute ago. Am I the first Filipino to blog about it? (Was sitting in front of the computer when it happened.) See also this previous post.

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Retrievr is a really cool image search tool. You draw an image on your left and it will automatically return images from Flickr that resemble what you’ve drawn. I agree that Google Image Search should implement this mode. Via Google Blogoscoped.

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Here’s a fascinating picture of Metro Manila taken almost 3 years ago from space by NASA astronauts (I think on the International Space Station). It’s the first time I’ve seen a picture like it; one that shows the metropolis I love from outer space during nighttime. (Compare with this similar picture of London.) Astronomy enthusiasts might also remember this nighttime composite picture of the whole world.

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If you’ve ever enjoyed playing Konami’s Gradius on the Nintendo Family Computer (a.k.a. NES, for those stateside) you need to see this interesting video, Averaging Gradius.

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Read this PCIJ i-Report about the hopelessness and hope at Quiapo. Something to think about this Christmas season.

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Tim Berners-Lee has a blog! If you don’t know who he is, then you either probably haven’t read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, or you haven’t carefully read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. For the still clueless, he’s the reason you’re reading this blog entry now; he’s the inventor of the World Wide Web.

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I’m sure most of the readers have read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. The novel prominently featured several ambigrams in its story. And those ambigrams were really beautiful. They were commissioned by Brown from John Langdon, a freelance graphic artist that specializes in creating ambigrams, logotypes, and paintings that feature words. It should be mentioned that the character Robert Langdon was probably named after John Langdon. (Remember that Angels & Demons was the first Robert Langdon novel, not The Da Vinci Code).

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Did you know…

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Look at this view of Google Maps. See anything missing? I wonder why no one noticed this before.

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Woah. It seems that the Manila edition of Craigslist has been launched sometime within the last three months. I wonder how I missed it.

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This is really cool! Google last year acquired this satellite imaging company called Keyhole. And this year, Google launched Google Maps, one of the slickest webapps I’ve ever seen. People probably saw this coming but Google recently combined the two technologies and added satellite views to their Google Maps offering.

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This entry is a tribute to a holy man who has led my Church for all my life. I have never known any other pope and I’m glad he was my pope since he is one of the most respected and most charismatic popes of the 20th century.

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Jason Kottke, the high-profile New Yorker blogger and web designer, has quit his job and decided to blog full time last Tuesday.

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This is absolutely cool! The first work of M.C. Escher that I ever saw, Relativity, was recreated in LEGO. Explore the site to see more amazing constructions in LEGO, including four other Escher’s works. Also visit the official site of M.C. Escher.

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Via Jason Kottke is this link to Starbucks’ online store locator where I found out that there are 72 branches in the Philippines, all owned by Rustan’s Corporation, might I add? (I’m surprised—there’s only one branch in Cebu City?) From Jason’s post and readers’ comments, you can see that there are locations in New York and London where there are more than 150 Starbucks branches within a five-mile radius!

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Via Kottke is this link to a guy who uses a tortilla instead of a regular breadboard for electronics.

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Via Zeldman is a link to this nifty PDF containing flyers that basically tells people who inconsiderately blabber on their cellphones in closed public spaces (elevators, movie houses, etc.) to shut the hell up!

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I chanced to read Dan’s piece on choosing laceless shoes and while interesting (both my shoes have laces, but I don them slip on/off style like some of the commenters, but I do occasionally re-tie), the more interesting bit is the shoelace knots site linked to from comment #19.

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