ponoko.com

I learned about this site via my Make magazine. By the way Make is an awesome magazine for the tinkerer in all of us. Ponoko is a bunch of things, but at its most basic, it is a way to have your own personal manufacturing plant! This is from their about page:

Create, make and trade your product ideas

The post-industrial revolution is changing the way products are created, traded and distributed. Now everyone can engage in the manufacturing process through their PCs - bringing personal manufacturing of individualized products to the masses. the big idea. Ponoko is the world's first personal manufacturing platform. It's the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand. The ponoko.com marketplace connects creators, consumers, digital manufacturing hardware and service providers to promote, make and trade products on Ponoko and social networking websites.

That is cool

two cool things

Make Magazine published a project to make your own tricked out Guitar
Hero controller!
HOW TO - Make a DIY PS2 Guitar Hero controller:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/08/how_to_make_a_diy_ps2_gui.html

Tech crunch blog reports that Morgan Webb from X-play is hosting a new
daily news show focussing on breaking technology and gaming news.
got to the webbalert: http://www.webbalert.com/
or go to the tech crunch post:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/02/webbalert-a-lot-like-rocketboom-except-its-interesting/

User Services Blogging

Each day in the news we hear about a huge variety of topics, each of which could be used as "Hot Topics" feature on a library or reference blog. For example, NPR has "Science Fridays" feature which discusses the science behind current events. With a little work, librarians could perform some quick research to find supplemental materials on the subject of the latest topic. It could be a current awareness service or a way to show off our collections to patrons.

Chime in with presentation ideas on Web 2.0

I am giving a presentation on Web 2.0 to faculty members and administrators who may or may not have any idea of what Web 2.0 is comprised.

I thought one way to illustrate the social and collaborative nature of this evolution of the WWW would be to leverage the power of Web 2.0 tools to help me create the presentation.

I want to make the presentation using an active network connection and feature my google docs, flickr, blogger, facebook, del.icio.us, youtube (you name it!), accounts as the location of my content.

I will of course have a canned presentation as well, if there should be some network burps.

My hope is that all my 2.0 homies, by which I mean all of you seeing this post via blogger, friendster, facebook, myspace or RSS willl chime in with a novel idea or comment about how I might utilize Web 2.0, or Library 2.0 in the presentation.

The presentation is only 10-15 minutes long, but I think can illustrate a great deal of the power of Web services in that time.


If, on the other hand, I do not have a readership or participants, then I will strategically leave this call out of my presentation. :)

Early adopters, Web services, and viral agents

A post on Eszter's Blog about vanity license plates got me thinking about something completely different.
I read her blog in Omea reader. It is a bit much since it wants to be your feed reader, news reader and mail and browser all in one, and I just use it to read rss posts. Anyway, when I read the blog, the "Bookmark and share this post" icons are formatted in an unnumbered vertical list, so I noticed them more than if I was reading your blog from its native site. I wonder, in this nascent stage of web services, linking utilities, and folksonomies, are early adopters diligently posting to del.icio.us, reddit, digg, furl, spurl, etc. in order to proliferate or populate their favorite service? If so, are eager users becoming "viral marketing" agents?