Random Links.

From now on when I do post random links, I’ll try do so around lunch so that those of you who are bored at your cubicle can have some lunch-time reading.

Check out this site. It’s called WalkScore. You put in your address and it tells you everything within walking distance as well as gives you a score on the “walkability” of your neighborhood. It told me what I already know. That suburbia is SUV heaven and the suburban gods mega-loathe walking. (ht: Wess Daniels)

5 Minutes To Kill Yourself Game – If you’re bored at work, take 5 minutes and try to kill yourself within the confines of your cubicle. It’s actually pretty amusing. Be sure to look for the Pentecostal chick who unleashes snakes on you, the pinata, and be sure to go in the bathroom and upstairs to the boss’s office.

Subversive Blogger Awards – My friend Jake awarded me with a Subversive Blogger Award. I’d like to thank my momma, Jesus, and Rick Rubin. Now I tag Ariah Fine and Corey Hau, for their fine work at flipping the system on end.

Keane Fine has another excellent Moleskin Doodle.

Julie Clawson is one of the best bloggers out there, consistently blogging great content and squeezing in time for podcasts too

Adium.

Again . . . proper disclaimer . . . I’m prone to exaggeration. But Adium is just about the coolest download I’ve ever put on my computer. And naturally it’s only Mac only (jab). It’s basically an open-source chat client that allows you to incorporate all of your accounts into one instead of having them spread out. Granted I only use iChat and Gmail. But to have them both in one spot has been extremely helpful.

The fun part is that it’s not only extremely functional . . . but it’s amazingly fun to use and customize. There are plug-ins and downloads for everything . . . themes, icons, skins, colors, etc. The options are limitless. Every color and every icon can be changed in a matter of seconds. I ended up with what’s below.

If you’re a Mac user . . . and have more chat accounts than just iChat, give Adium a spin for 1 day and you’ll be hooked.

A Vision of Students Today.

I was meeting with a local pastor and friend today and he showed me this really interesting video. It is from the authors of the YouTube meme The Web Is Using Us. They have created another video that I think is equally good. It takes a look at students, education, and technology. Exploring the art of collaboration and time. It’s really good. It seems that it’s coming out of the “hotbed” that is the Anthropology department at Kansas State. Check it out here.

YourStreet & Hyperlocal News.

Here’s a cool new site I found last night that has some potential functionality. It’s called YourStreet. If you’re like me, you don’t read the paper anymore and rely almost exclusively on web media for your daily news. But most sites that I read our national and international. There aren’t many local alternatives without having to go to the main Atlanta site and go about 7 levels deep to your specific county and then city before you can even start to find the news that is pertinent to your local community.

The site is basically a mash-up of Google Maps and an algorithm that extracts geographical information from stories, such as street names, neighborhoods, and cities. It then geo-codes the articles against a longitude and latitude database so that it can place them on a map.

Again, this is in the same vein of what I discussed last week with geotags and metadata. So instead of me going to the news now . . . the news comes to me contextually and locally. If you don’t get fired up about this . . . then as my old Baptist preacher would say . . . your wood is wet.

As you can see below it pulls the news from your specific location and you can even pull the RSS feed from your specific location. I’m not sure how well this will work in more rural areas. It looks like the news is even kind of sparse for my area.

But you can see the way in which the web is changing. And how tagging information with metadata is creating a whole new web.