If you still haven’t tried Sliderocket, now is the time to give it a go, this is definetly one of the new web tools worth trying.

Polar Rose works by having people tag images through a browser plugin (see picture to the right), and then building a model of that person using some sophisticated technology that came out of EU-backed research projects at the universities of Malmö and Lund in Sweden, where they are based.  After their model gets good enough, Polar Rose is then able to automatically recognise who a face belongs to.  It is even capable of recognizing all the people in a photo – searching for someone on the website tells you who they’ve been seen with lately (Barack Obama was seen with Rev. Jeremiah Wright much more than with Hillary Clinton, for instance).

Polar Rose seems to work great, but to become efficient it needs a lot of people tagging photos, and right now I don’t see much of an incentive to do that.  Yes, I am using the plugin, but then I wil try out just about anything new that I can come across on the ‘net, which is not something you can expect most people to do.  The technology itself is great, but right now they need to work on engaging users to build their index.  And hey, if you want to get the web celebrities happy about you, then you really should recognize Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble (see the screenshot)

[UPDATE] Problogger’s Darren Rowse replied through Twitter, and it’s ridiculous: he’s had 3,911,810 comments blocked so far in one of his blogs!

This fits right in to something I’m reading right now, and which has completely fascinated me – Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.  To keep it short, the book is all about how we are greatly affected by completely unexpected and unpredictable events (the Black Swans).  So Marco Kaiser was just hit by a black swan – there he was, happily coding away at his hobby project, when one day he gets offered a nice amount of cash and a job because of his previously unprofitable time-sink.  It’s just like the book’s analogy to a turkey that gets continuously very well fed for one thousand days, making it feel very good about life in general, until it gets slaughtered to be served for dinner.  So, never throw away an idea so lightly, you never know when a black swan might be coming your way – and keep spending all the time you like in your worthless, non-profitable hobbies

To finish off: readers who have read the book might say that I am falling for confirmation bias, that is, I am using one single success story to justify my point, ignoring the millions of failures out there.  Not quite true – all I am saying is that if you enjoy it, keep doing it, and you might just find a black swan around the corner.  If you don’t find it, but enjoy yourself in the process, then all is well.

Comapping is one of the better online mind mapping tools, and I first heard of it while researching for the first series of mind mapping tool reviews here at Daily Iteration. The newly added features were really important things that were missing, turning Comapping into (on my opinion) the best online mind mapping tool out there.

Now you can import and export files in Freemind format, meaning you can now work on your maps in a full-fledged desktop application and upload them to Comapping to have them available online and edit them together with your remote friends and colleagues. This alone makes this a noteworthy upgrade. You can also exchange files between Comapping and MindManager, a popular commercial mind mapping tool.

Another nice feature, specially for you blogger types, is the ability to embed maps in web pages, just like you currently do with videos. Below you can see a simple map I’ve put together to showcase this option. It is still a little fidgety, as I had to copy and paste the code twice to get it working – but it looks beatuiful once you get it right! and in fact the map I had embedded here no longer works, so I removed it – this might be because I only have a test account, so my maps are not saved permanently, and my embedded map could be pointing to an inexisting file. but after being contacted by Michael (Comapping’s R&D Director) who explained to me the correct procedure, things worked out.

I’m not sure if this is a new feature, or if I missed it when I first looked at Comapping, but there is a “Presentation” feature that allows you to create slideshows from your maps. Leave the map at the state you want it to appear, click on “Add snapshot as slide”. Expand or contract a few nodes, then take another snapshot. Arrange the slides in the ordr you want, and presto, a very nice presentation, with the map changing from one state to the other at the click of your mouse – very nifty! The video below shows this feature at work.

A word about video on this blog: I am still testing things, and for this post I thought I’d try Revver’s Quicktime embedding, as it gives better video quality. If you have problems viewing this, or if you prefer me to post Flash video + the original avi, please let me know in the comments.

A couple of smaller updates were also introduced. Now you can add notes to nodes – not breathtaking, but it can be useful. Also, the “Share” menu was improved, and you can send the invitations to look at your map by e-mail. You don’t have to be a registered user to look at the map, but if you want to edit it you have to pay

And here we get to Comapping’s biggest problem: it is the best online mind mapping tool, but there is no free account available. If you want to edit maps beyond a 30-day trial, you have to pay. On the other hand, they charge a very reasonable US$11.99 for six months, for a full account – no limits on usage.

Overall, if you use mind maps often, need to edit them colaboratively, and are willing to cough up a small amount for the finest online tool there is, it’s worth it.

The first application to make use of this feature is Google Reader, the company’s RSS feed reader. The first time you access Reader with Gears installed, you are asked if you want to enable this feature. If you chose to do so, a small green icon gets added to the menu at the top right of the screen. Click on this icon, and your browser will start downloading items for offline reading (check out the screenshot). After that, you will have 2000 feed items available for offline reading. Embedded items, such as Youtube videos, are not downloaded, and are displayed as grey boxes. Clicking on them will cause the browser to ask you whether you want to go back online to download the content. Once you reach the end of your offline items, you get shown a little message that tells you have to go back online to get more content. Overall, everything works very smoothly and provides a perfect, “normal” user experience.

This is something that will show up more and more, specially with the release of Firefox 3. Google was quicker than everyone else in releasing their own solution, which should give them a nice advantage over competitors. Their technology is actually a bunch of Javascript libraries, which means that anyone can use Google Gears for their own web apps. While I expect most people will wait to see what happens in Firefox 3 and what Microsoft’s reaction will be, the fact that Google has opened this up under a very permissive BSD license and is cross-browser and cross-platform, will surely get a lot of people interested. Things will get really interesting in this area once we start getting things like Basecamp, Tracks, ActiveCollab, Nozbe, and other great web apps taking full advantage of this kind of technology.

A couple of interesting features: search results are tagged (ah, the golden sound of buzzwords – Spock has them all), and people can add tags or vote for them. Positive votes make tags more relevant, negative votes has the opposite effect. A nice well thought touch is that you can view who voted for a particular tag (see screenshot, click for full image). Supposedly this would disencourage people from thoughtlessly clicking on defamatory tags.

This is all stuff you get to see as an anonymous user. When you log in, you have the option of importing your own contacts from a variety of sources (see screenshot to the left). Here I found Spock to be still a little rough – everything is well presented, but the website failed to load any of my contact on repeated attempts. Since we’re always a little lenient with everything that smells of beta (and these days everything does), let’s move on. This is where Spock’s social features begin to see some action. You have the possibility of adding people as your favorites (anyone, but supposedly you would do this for your contacts). Cool, so now I can have Bill Gates, the Queen of England and my boss all in my favorites list!

Then there is your own profile. You can add up to twenty pictures of yourself (but again, this did not work for me), and also add tags and an about blurb. I guess the idea is that by adding as much information about yourself as possible, it will be easier to find you, or at least help place your profile where you want in terms of keyword affinity.

I might be dumb, but I really fail to see the point in this. If Spock is about getting yourself a nice web presence, it would be much better to use a business-oriented social networking site such as LinkedIn or Xing. If you need to be seen by everyone, how about starting a blog? Either of these seems to me a better option for showing up online. Spock does bring in some nice ideas and adds a new twist to the whole search engine thing, technically it might be great, but for me it needs to offer something more focused, more objective. Then there are the social network possibilities.  I’m not a user of sites such as MySpace or Orkut, so perhaps I’m not the best judge here.  But Spock lacks the feeling of having a home, there isn’t a homepage or some little place to call your own.

I could be wrong about Spock though, and who knows, it might be the next big thing among celebrity-seeking teens or something…

I have my own, but I’m not telling – just be careful which numbers you use from now on, I’m watching