Internal digest

No, it’s not something your stomach does - it’s a round-up of interesting posts from our internal blog.

We use our internal blog to communicate everything online that we find thought-provoking, surprising - or hilarious - and we thought it was time we shared some of the more juicy titbits with the rest of the world.
 

Instapaper
Spotted by Ian.
A neat little personal news/article aggregator which lets you bookmark articles online, then retrieve them at your leisure, via any browsable device. Not the most earth-shattering idea, but a neat execution and simple interface - which is all you need.

http://www.instapaper.com/

Interactive travel maps and more
Spotted by Pete.
MySociety have been doing some really interesting things with heatmaps of various things. These are now interactive, and well worth a look.

http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/

You might also be interested in FixMyStreet and theyworkforyou, which are both extending the ideas of social networking by trying to give users a voice in the real world. A worthy cause and definitely something worth investigating.

Videotrace
Spotted by Joe.
Videotrace uses a combination of a Sketchup-a-like tool and computer vision techniques. Users can outine objects in video frames, correct their shape over a number of frames, and generate texture mapped 3d objects from the sketched wireframes.

There’s some work still to do, but the demonstration on YouTube is pretty persuasive:

And finally…
Games in which you can draw your own environment are very big at the moment. Here are a few of Tim’s favourites for you to try in your lunch hour.

Line golfer
Tower of goo

That’s all for this round-up; we’ll be back soon with more shoals of online fun trawled from the Cogapp nets.