The Round Up: Cool Stuff I Found This Week!

Each week I try to keep track of all the interesting and exciting companies/products/services/websites and general "goings-on" online. Trust me when I tell you this is no easy task. There are more companies that pop up on the radar than there are hours in the day and I have to be somewhat selective of what I'm able to peruse, so rather than keep all this information to myself I decided to share the knowledge.

I subscribe to the same tenet that the age-old scholar, KRS-ONE stated; Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone. I too am a philosopher. Yes. Yes! So with that obscure reference to 80's hip hop, check out the Round-Up for this week!

MUXTAPE: I mentioned these guys the other day, but they are worth mentioning again. I love music and I love the web, but i get annoyed at how much "other stuff" is always going on within some of the community sites and such. It's too much. This site has no extemporaneous junk. Just music. Just mix tapes. Check it out (The blastmaster woul dbe proud).

PREDICTIFY: Have you ever wondered how the Vegas odds makers get so close to predicting the outcomes of games? Well, this site won't answer that question but it will help you see what the rest of the world thinks about questions related to the world around you. If Nostradamus were alive today, this is where he'd be working.

AGGREGATE KNOWLEDGE: I am meeting these guys today and the technology they have is pretty interesting. Take Behavioral Targeting and lay it over a rich media application and that's what you've got. They read your profile, predict what products you might like, and then show you ads that look like the Google Ad Sense ads, but are products you may be interested in. It's a profile play and has nothing to do with Predictify. Just a random coincidence. Both are trying to tell the future.

DIIGO: At first I wasn't sure this was going to be cool, but then I changed my mind. Diigo is a way to do research online and create a virtual "web report" of content and links which you can use later to collect information and/or share with others. Imagine doing research on a topic like "HTML programming" and bookmarking each page of relevant information with highlighted portions that you can evaluate later. If you can imagine it, then Diigo is where you sould spend some time. I dig it, you might too.

LOTAME: I have to be honest, I still cannot quit figure out what they do, but it has to do with Behavioral Targeting and since that topic takes me awhile to explain, I thought I'd let you know about it too.

MATCHMINE: The topic of prediction came up ALOT this week. This is another company that is trying to predict; this time predicting what I might find interesting. I enter in something about me, and they tell me what I might like. Think Amazon for the rest of the web. Not sure I buy it yet, but interesting. For advertisers, I can see them working to predict what types of ads I might find of interest and crossing against actual response data. Could be cool.

COMPFIGHT: Ever try to find a picture on Flickr? It sort of sucks and takes waaay too much time. This site makes that easier, so give it a shot. I like Pearl Jam, so I searched for them. Go figure.

FRIENDFEED: This could be cool or it could be completely annoying. I'm not too sure yet. I don't want everyone else to now what I'm doin online all the time, but maybe that would actually be of interest. Who knows for sure!

OK - that's enough for this week. Back to work!!!