99 Designs looks interesting. Some people hate the very idea of stuff like this, and some people enjoy being involved. I think it could come in handy.
Quoth:
Need something designed? Crowdsource it to our community of thousands of designers. Choose a winning design from hundreds of concepts created for you in under a week.
Normally I can’t stand these little things, or their related sites, but this one is pretty funny, and actually has some original and interesting stuff – for instance:
UPDATE: if it wasn’t giving you the results, but taking you to some lame dating site after hitting “finished”: I fixed it. Lame viral marketing. It now links to the correct place to take the full working survey.
Aaron Bassett wrote up a cool concept/article on using a “Focus Cloud” instead of the usual Tag Cloud (link to explanation and picture on Wikipedia) for conveying popular categories/tags.
From the Article:
For example when the iPhone was announced bloggers all over the world started talking about it. I would guess that for some of them it would have been the first time any apple product got a mention on their blog. But suddenly its what everyone is talking about. So if we looked at all the tags for all their posts iPhone would be a tiny little spec. But if we had visited their blog during the inital buzz period it would have been the main focus.
So a Focus Cloud should show not what has been the most popular tags overall, but what is the most popular tags at present. What is your current focus.
Basically, he has a good idea in turning the “point system” around a bit. If you know how tag clouds work, you might already understand how all this is working. In the comments section, he had this to say about the scoring:
Rather than penalizing a tag for being used a long time ago, I decided to reward those used recently. This way I hope allows new tags a chance to gain traction while still allowing more established tags to receive some attention as well.
I think it’s a great idea, and I’m very grateful that he was willing to share the PHP code for implementing this as well.
The End.
Link: SharpDevelop @ic#code
An Open Source C# and VB.NET IDE and Compiler? I’m not really following this yet, as the category mentions, I just stumbled upon it. I’m going to check into some more, and let you know what I find out. If you already use this or know more about it than just the feature list, by all means post a comment or email me.
