Amusing Real Estate Listings
Lovely Listing is a collection of user-submitted finds in the the real estate world. Sometimes you just have to wonder what people were thinking, whether it be the agent’s choice of photo, the seller’s interior decor, or the builder themselves, as exemplified above:
Dude. Check it out. The weirdest thing ever is going on here. You see? You see it? So bizarre: the toilet paper is hung on the shower stall door. Crazy!
There might be something else wrong here, too.
(Photo: Netti Asunto)
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There, I Fixed It
There, I Fixed It is a blog profiling the strange and imaginative ways people rig up what they need with what they have. You’ll be forgiven if you thought this radiator repair job was supposed to be a still. Link -via Metafilter
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Wolfram Alpha: Blind to The Blogosphere
Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha. For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame).
Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.
What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How is the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Impressive, eh?
Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair, Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore, the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed to it by its programmers.
But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha: it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning of life, and it has its own blog, but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.
Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie, Gizmodo = komodo (the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal); Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).
Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama (which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind of 7 mph and few clouds).
At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker" instead.
Heck, ask what is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:
Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards (dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram Research will rectify this oversight soon.
But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.
If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...
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Got $15,000? You Too Can Intern at HuffPo!
Want to "jumpstart your career in the blogosphere" with an internship at one of the world’s largest blogs? Arianna Huffington’s blog Huffington Post, currently ranked #1 by Technorati, has an opening. But there’s a catch: you have to pay at least $15,000 …
Forget a paying internship. Forget working for free. You’re going to have to fork over more than $13,000 if you want to intern at HuffPo.
Oh, and did we mention you’d only be there for two or three months? At least you get to pick which office you’d work at — New York or D.C.
Incredibly, so far 10 people have bid on the internship, which is "valued" at $500, on online auction site charitybuzz.com. HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington donated the internship.
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Neatorama: Blog as a Teaching Tool
You
all know by now that Neatorama is a fun blog and a breezy read, but apparently,
there it also has a use that I haven't expected. Neatorama reader Barry
emailed me that he has been using Neatorama as a teaching tool at his
local community center.
Here's what he wrote:
Hello Alex,
I teach a class at my local community center that centers on technology use and recommend your site to the students. Many of them are underprivileged youth and I have found that sites like Neatorama can sometimes inspire them into other avenues aside from what's left for them on the street. Several students have gone on to pursue a job in IT and we even had one older gentleman pursue his GED at 60 years old because he wanted to become a successful blogger like those he saw on sites like yours. In fact I have it on personal account that at least fifteen people now know what "Large Hadron Collider" means. At any rate, thank you and well done.
When I asked for more info, Barry replied:
I use blogs in class because they're such a novel form of communication. One of the students drew the parallel that, after realizing he had spent five straight hours reading, "blogs are like books used to be in the old(en) days". What he meant was that when printed publications first started showing up all those years ago, literacy rates soared and that the very same effect had happened to him right in class. He went on to say that he couldn't remember the last time he spent five hours reading anything.
Aside from most blog reading being non intensive, I encourage the students to check out the sources of the posts they enjoyed because that was where they could find out more about the topics they enjoy.
I don't think that, even with the internet at their fingertips, new users know how interconnected things are online. This can lead to the intimidation a lot of them experience when all they have to consider is that it all really is right there in front of them. Neatorama especially bridges this gap with its combination of silly, serious, and intellectual content which is what makes it so effective as a tool.
Thanks Barry! I'm honored and humbled that this li'l blog has helped your students!
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Leaving Camera Memory Cards in Public Places
The Photochaining blog is a continuous project where people randomly leave memory cards in public places to be picked up and used by others, who then do likewise.
First, take funny/original/creative photos with your own camera using a cheap memory card. Then write a note in which your explain the concept to the "finder". You also provide a name to the memory card (research on Photochaining to ensure that the designated memory card name has not already been allocated). Put the memory card and the note in an envelope. Hopefully the "finder" will pay it forward and you will be able to track images and the journey of your card online.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
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Pam Anderson Totally Looks Like Bride of Chucky
I could waste a lot of time at TotallyLooksLike.com. No, wait, I already have. Some of the comparisons are astute (Billy Mays really does look like Al from Home Improvement!), some of them are funny, and some of them are just plain mean. You can make your own by using their archive of pictures, or upload your own finds. A couple that I thought were funny: Suge Knight totally looks like Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Rod Blagojevich totally looks like Lego Man, and Axl Rose totally looks like Pickles.
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Twingly Top 100 Blogs
Twingly, the spam-free Swedish blog search engine, has released its list of the Top 100 blogs in the world and Neatorama made it! (We’re no. 35)
Twingly groups the blogs it follows by language – so if you don’t write in English, you can still find out how you rank against other blogs in the same language. Another interesting thing that Twingly has is BlogRank, which is sort of like Google PageRank, but for blogs.
Link – Thanks Anton Johansson!
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So You Wanna Blog ...
To kick start the new Neatorama forum, I’ve written a little how-to guide on blogging for those of you who want to know the secret of Neatorama’s success:
So you want to blog. Perhaps you’re worried about your job security, or perhaps you just want an extra source of income in these bad economic times. Blogging is fun – and it can be profitable, if you know what you’re doing.
In the first of what I hope is a series of forum posts about blogging, I’d like to give back to the readers of Neatorama. If you want to blog, you don’t have to buy an eBook that promises to tell you the secret of making money online. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from three years of blogging – what I think I did right and wrong. In a nutshell, I’ll tell you the secrets of Neatorama’s growth and success.
In this article, I’m going to assume two things: you’ve never blogged before (but you want to try) and you want to blog for fun and profit.
I hope you like it – if it’s popular, I’ll post more: Link
(Chart: Time to Look Busy by Jessica Hagy of Indexed)
(Comments are closed here, but open at the Forum)
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Owl Tattoos
You want to talk about a niche blog? Here’s one for tattoos of owls. And nothing else. Owl Tattoos has an extensive collection. Pictured is a tattoo by Valerie Vargas. Whoooo knew there were so many owl tattoos? Link -Thanks, Patrick!
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