Welcome once again to another spirited read-through of the screenplay that is the Cogapp internal blog. Let’s kick off scene one with a mash-up.

These boots were made for walking
Spotted by Ian.

A fabulous Google Maps mash-up (what, another one?) which lets you plan and calculate a route on foot. Simple, useful and nifty.

Get your pedestrian jollies at: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

Shiny image fun in your very own browser
Spotted by Sam

Now a lot of us at Cogapp Towers are generally suspicious of super-flashy-yet-purportedly-useful browser plugins, but this one is pretty cool.

PicLens lets you zoom around a wall of photos pulled from sites like Flickr, Google Images or Facebook. It’s slick, and actually quite useful for image searching - we’re not just gimmick-mongering here.

Try it and you’ll see - flying around endless panels of images and videos is really quite addictive. You can even navigate through Amazon this way, which is quite an eye opener…

Oodles of Doodles
Spotted by Gavin

Always trying to organise meetings with people and can’t find a time that works for all of you? Then maybe you should Doodle it!

Doodle is a simple and easy to use online group calendar - think Google Calendars but without the fuss. For example:  if you’re trying to arrange a meeting with a lot of people, you send them a link to a calendar you have set up (which takes 5 minutes), and they tick the days/times they can attend.  When everyone has done this you can see which times everyone can make it and arrange your meeting. Particularly useful if you’ve got people from multiple organisations or departments.

Again it’s a simple but powerful idea, well executed. Doodle doesn’t do much, but what Doodle does do  Doodle does do well. Try saying that ten times quickly on a late Friday afternoon.

And finally…

Let’s be honest. We have lots of ‘and finally’ candidates on our internal blog. Too many to mention here, but here are a few tantalising whistle wetters…

Making movement complexity visible, spotted by Tristan - http://www.moframes.net/

An oldie but a goodie, spotted by Tristan - if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging.
Ah it gets better every time I watch it.

The legendary Johnny Lee returns with intriguing thoughts on flexible display surfaces, spotted by Joe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSR_6-Y5Kg

And if you’ve really not got enough things to do today, spotted by Joe - 65 things that look like Pac-Man

And that’s a wrap, people. We’ll be back soon with more somethings from the Cogapp something (it’s late on a Friday, can you tell?)

Yes, it’s that time once again when we roll up our sleeves, plunge our hands expectantly into the digital tombola that is the Cogapp internal blog and pull out exciting prizes for all…

Social networking for your Gran
Spotted by Gavin

This is from a research project created by Middlesex University. In their words the project - known as Jive - is ‘a range of devices that you buy your grandparents. To let them keep up to date and stay in touch with you.’

An intriguing idea linking physical objects and digital communication and one that could clearly be adapted for museums and galleries. One to watch!

‘I’m looking for the mouse’
Spotted by Tristan

According to the always interesting Clay Shirky, that’s what one little girl said when asked by her father what she was doing rooting around behind the telly while watching Dora the Explorer.

Listen to this heartwarming - and thought provoking - story of a digital native, and other thoughts on the ‘cognitive surplus’ in this video from Web 2.0 Expo 08:

Web apps make anarchy easier
Spotted by Gavin

With the current petrol shortage (see how up to date we are?) what better way to find out where the juice is running low than this nifty Google Maps mash-up:

Social hysteria aside, it’s a good example of audience engagement and collaboration and at a very low cost.

And finally…

From Gizmodo, a good example of why you should always take your digital camera with you, spotted by Ian. It’s a twister!

http://gizmodo.com/5016814/why-you-should-carry-a-digital-camera-at-all-times

That’s it for this time. We’ll be back soon with more winning tickets from the Cogapp raffle.

Time for a nice cool cocktail, mixed from the finest liqueurs of our internal blog. Here are a few of the things we’ve been drinking, I mean thinking, about recently:

Biggest drawing in the world
Spotted by Tristan

Makes our Journey On GPS drawing look tiny, but then we’re a bit suspicious of all the curls in this one…

White glove tracking
Spotted by Joe

http://www.whiteglovetracking.com/

Internet users collaboratively helped isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. This took 72 hours. The data was then released into the digital wild for people to play with. The results were great.

Got to love the Giant White Glove idea:

Human Brain Cloud
Spotted by Gavin

The Human Brain Cloud is a massively multiplayer word association “game”. A kind of  cross between a tag cloud, the Dictionary and Mallett’s Mallet. Badombom…ping!

It’s interesting because it might help us think about the links users see between different words, plus it’s funny because it asks you to say the first thing that comes in your head when someone says “BLABBY” to you.

iPhone as remote trackpad
Spotted by Joe

http://www.touchpadpro.com

Inflatable New York street art
Spotted by Joe

That’s all for now, we hope you found it refreshing. More coming very soon.

Following Ian’s distillation of our internal blog a few weeks ago, here are some more delicacies we wanted to share with the wider world. A useful forum for ideas, observations and mind-boggling curiosities, our internal blog is sometimes just too good to keep to ourselves…

Here’s a peek; and expect more soon.

Zoomable Interfaces
Spotted by Joe
Does the Internet take advantage of how humans best process information? An interesting article in Newsweek suggests that scrolling and linking are inferior methods of taking in information when compared to zooming, which comes far more naturally. This observation has not been lost on technology giants and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, who are rapidly trying to develop effective zoomable interfaces. The obvious example is the iPhone, but also look at Deep Fish, and more importantly Seadragon (demonstrated at a 2007 TED talk by Blaise Aguera).

Explore the whole universe!
Spotted by Tim
Talking of TED, the highly regarded Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences, Tim spotted a recent talk by Ray Gould on Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope, which combines feeds from satellites and telescopes and weaves them together into a ‘media-rich, immersive experience.’ Not dissimilar to Google Sky in effect, it’s an interesting example of a zoomable interface as discussed above.

Read all about it
Spotted by Sam
PDFs, while undoubtedly a useful format, seem increasingly incompatible with the modern web surfing experience. The Safari browser allows you to view them without having to open another application, yet the memory-hogging bulky approach is not terribly effective. So where to now? Enter iPaper, a Scribd Platform development, that converts a range of document types into an embedded flash object, much like YouTube converts videos and allows them to be distributed across the internet. It’s lightweight, accessible, and may be an effective solution for organisations looking to make large amounts of text available online.

And finally…
Instead of combining element from two or more sources to create something new, let’s try removing one of the elements from a single source and see what we get. It’s the reverse of a mash-up. Garfield minus Garfield. Spotted by Ian

And how can fashion and technology live in harmony? Meet the iPod suit. Spotted by Gavin.

Digest over; we’ll be back soon with another online stew, cooked to perfection in the Cogapp kitchens.

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.