02.24.07
Non IT Daily Link List
These are just some cool sites... I found them via another blog but unfortunately between finding them yesterday and going to post this today, the blog link has escaped me. I apologize to the offer of that blog and will link them if they want to contact me with the link.
Anyways... just a few links to share...
Pipl - A People Search Engine... The information that it finds is interesting.. you could do the same using google but it provides a bit more and it's free. It also directed me to A9 Lite (which lists the individual with each company they can be found with on the net). From the Pipl "What makes us different" page:
So how come the best search engines fail so miserably when it comes to people search? The answer lies in a little known but very important part of the web called "the deep web".
Also known as "invisible web", the term "deep web" refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.
Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related information is stored in databases and not on static web pages, most of the higher-quality information about people is simply "invisible" to a regular search engine.
Even when a personal profile is available to search engines, some information might not appear on the page itself and will therefore be "invisible"; for example, the real name of a person will rarely appear on MySpace or Flickr profiles, and although this information is publicly available using a search form on the site itself it is still invisible to search engines.
While I may not agree with all of that... It does make for some interesting searches.
Up next we have Craigs Number. The idea is that it gives you a free anonymous phone number to post with online auctions and ads. I could see this having malicious uses as well, but it's still an interesting site... Currently you can get a number related to the following cities:
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Chicago
- Cincinnati
- Dallas
- Detroit
- Houston
- Indianapolis
- Las Vegas
- Los Angeles
- Miami
- New Jersey
- New Orleans
- New York
- Phoenix
- Pittsburgh
- Portland
- Salt Lake City
- San Diego
- San Francisco
- Seattle
- St. Louis
- Washington DC
The numbers can last for varying times from 1 hour to 1 month and will redirect to your phone when called. It would be nice to see this startup for other countries.
Up next is the Fake Name Generator... While this may seem like an odd thing to be useful, I can think of plenty of times when I've developed web apps that had user data stored and having test data created for me which was accurate would have been much better than me randomly populating the fields. The generated data looks like this:
Carol J. Haynes
4517 Goosetown Drive
Marion, NC 28752Email Address: Carol.J.Haynes@mytrashmail.com
Phone: 828-655-1932
Mother's maiden name: Fitzgerald
Birthday: January 12, 1942Visa: 4532 9847 9280 7632
Expires: 6/2008SSN: 245-30-5007
You an choose gender, name set and country. I know you're all thinking how is this useful... You generate the data and now have to enter it from the format they give you, but this isn't so... They also offer a bulk generation service, that will let you generate and receive data in MySQL, CSV, tab delimited and Excel formats... This is all done free of charge. For a fee you can also have custom data generated.
The last site we're going to look at is SlideShare. SlideShare allows you to upload both PowerPoint and OpenOffice formatted slide shows and share links or embed them in web pages. This could be a great way for professors to make their slides available on a larger base (assuming they don't want them private)... It's also a great way to share slides on your web site or blog. You can also visit the site to search slides that have been posted there.
Enjoy!
