Not sure if this is a good idea or another candidate for “USB Devices Gone Wild”:

http://customusb.com/images/access-warm.jpg

I am not sure how exactly I chanced upon Answers.com today, but I became a fan in about five minutes. The site is incredibly useful for getting information on concepts, things, people, places etc. versus pure (and blind) search.

What I like most about it is that you don’t have to go to their website to search. If you install their 1–Click Answers mini-app, you can Alt-Click on any word in any text area on your screen (doesn’t matter which application it is) and you instantly get a browser page with lots of helpful and relevant information about that word.

The site doesn’t fare too well on phrases, returning a standard Google search result list in those cases, but for nouns, it works remarkably well.

I have been using Memeorandum for the past month to get my tech news and making a general comparison to tech news from other aggregators. From a relevancy and timeliness standpoint, I think this is the best site for up-to-date tech news.

I’ll keep an eye on the day-old Gada Be which has some nice virtual URL capabilities (keyword is persisted as host name; add /opml to get OPML of results).

Rick Segal has a great idea and the resources to provide housing for those left homeless by Katrina. He's trying to get this information to someone in the government who can take action. Can you help?

Below is a synopsis of his post, and here is the post in its entirety.

"...we have a facility that can turn out homes, elder care facilities, condo projects, apartment buildings, churches, strip malls, etc, that are rated to withstand 160mph wind, in effect a Cat 4 hurricane. They are cost comparable to wood, will go up fast and will stay up.

In light of all the towns that are not in the press spotlight and seeing relief trucks flying by, we thought it would be a great idea to try and go in to help rebuild some homes. Donate some homes, in kits, that can replace the structures which were destroyed. Maybe homes, maybe a senior care facility, small town heath clinic, etc. The point is that we will donate a bunch of this to try and help."

Lately, I have become very interested in the whole tagging/folksonomy phenomenon that seems to be a defining element of Web 2.0. In particular, I am drawn to tag clusters. While tag clouds are great for exploring the relative importance of tags in a simple manner, they don't give you any clues about the relationships among tags. Tag clusters do just that. Rashmi Sinha explains clusters here very well, so I don't have to do it.

So far, I have not seen a very good navigation interface for tag clusters. Flickr tries in vain to provide "clustery goodness," but to be quite honest, their interface is quite lame. While bread-crumb navigation works well within a site, it is bad for navigating clusters because it prevents the user from doing what comes naturally -- exploring. Instead, it forces a single-step hierarchy navigation (which works well for websites) while the user's brain is probably accelerating with the brakes on wanting to see more clusters and the relationships between them.

I think clustering calls out for a Web 2.0 version of a hyperbolic interface. Hyperbolic interfaces lend themselves very well to providing a visual representation of graphs which is basically what tag clusters are (assuming you have a starting tag). You can see this in implementations such as Thinkmap's VisualThesaurus. Unfortunately, VisualThesaurus, like Inxight, went the Java route. This makes it a complete pain to use in any kind of quick and meaningful manner. An ideal solution would be a hyperbolic U.I. that is easily implemented using either Flash or XmlHttp (Ajax). This would be more usable since most people's browsers already support it.

I Googled and came up with only one Flash instance of a pseudo-hyperbolic U.I. that I liked. It was on a marketing company's site -- Renegade Marketing. I emailed them twice about getting the Flash source, free or for a fee. Both my polite inquiries were ignored. (Tangent: Makes me wonder why companies claim to be in the marketing business when they don't even have the ability to do something as simple as acknowledge an email enquiry.). 

Does anyone know of a good, Flash-based, hyperbolic U.I.? I am creating an application that aggregates tag-based information from a variety of sites and then allows exploration of tag clusters and would like to use such a U.I. I will post more details of the application soon.