SOMEWHAT FRANK

Mygazines: An Online Magazine Community

There is something nice about being able to flip through and feel the pages of a good magazine. I subscribe to such titles as Wired, GOOD and a few others but I often see them piling up on my coffee table. Mygazines might offer a solution to help me get to read magazines while I am online with its community approach to magazine sharing. Mygazines enables its users to upload and share magazines with the rest of the community like the YouTube for magazine publishing.

How Bad Is Your Twitter Addiction?

Twitter, like anything, can be a little addictive as we look to reach out and communicate with all our friends and followers. Xefer has pulled together an interesting mashup which leverages Yahoo Pipes and Google Chart API to plot the usage of twitter of a specific user. So of course, I had to plug the somewhatfrank twitter id in and chart it.

Give it a try here for your twitter username.

Kirix Strata: Web Browse Your Data

At the heart of just about every web application is a database. Getting at and manipulating that data is often done through SQL statements which involve a level of database understanding. Kirix, a Chicago-based startup, is looking to help change that by exposing your data in a Web browser experience with the launch tomorrow of Strata. Strata is a powerful set of tools that enables anyone to access, browse and manipulate data from a Web browser.

Mashup Open AIM For Cash Prizes

For all you developers out there that like to create mashups, there is currently a developer contest being held with cash prizes called the Open AIM Developers Challenge. All you have to do is create a mashup that leverages the Open AIM APIs and submit it to dev.aol.com. There will be 29 winners with prize allocations from $10K to $500. Scoring is based on a number of criteria but 20 percent is based on usage so the sooner you get a mashup submitted the better your chances are to win.

Video: What's Up Next For BricaBox?

Brica Brica What? BricaBox, the social content platform which I covered previously here and here, that launched a few weeks ago offers users the ability to display structured content with social features. After many attempts I finally got a chance to sit down with BricaBox founder and CEO Nate Westheimer while attending FOWA Miami 2008 which is the latest SOMEWHAT FRANK TV episode. You can subscribe by visiting SOMEWHAT FRANK TV.

LOUD3R Network: Quick News For Enthusiasts

If you are a motorcycle or political enthusiast than listen up because you are going to like this. LOUD3R, a network for niche enthusiast offerings, has launched a couple of different aggregation sites. FAST3R the motorcycle site and VOT3R the political site are pulled together by leveraging a semantic publishing engine used in combination with natural language processing and human intelligence the engine selects and publishes the best and most interesting content to the network. Users can also contribute content and comments to the site.

BricaBox Social Content Platform Launches

BricaBox, the NY-based structured content platform I previously reviewed, publicly launched today to enable anyone to create access and create these rich content experiences with ease. Funded sole by its founders BricaBox has been refered to a "wiki" on steroids (don't tell MLB or Congress) or "WordPress for structured content" as it offers a way for publishers tools to better display listings and such. It should also be noted that BricaBox offers social capabilities to enable community and sharing features which are sometimes confused with those of Ning or other social networking platform options.

ParkingHunter Helps You Find Monthly Parking

Finding a place to park your sweet ride everyday near your home or work can sometimes be tough, especially in larger cities where there is less real estate in the first place. Most condos and homes have parking included but some do not and that is when your hunt for parking begins. ParkingHunter, a Toronto-based startup, looks to help by aggregating available parking spot listings into one search-able place. The goal is to connect car-less home owners that have empty driveways, with motorists who want affordable parking.

Google Maps Twitter Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday! Did you get the load of election action you were looking for? If not, you might still be able to catch some thanks in part to a map mashup that TechCrunch reported Google teamed up with Twitter to provide. The Google Maps Twitter mashup is similar to Twittervision but for political related twits (a twit is a Twitter message) so you can track the today's Super Tuesday elections on real-time on a map. Acquisition next?

EveryBlock: A Hyper-Local News Aggegator

Map mashups have become almost a dime a dozen these days as the release of open APIs by just about every major online mapping site and and development tools has lowered the barriers of entry. That was not always the case though and as recently as 2005 trailblazing mashup like HousingMaps.com (a cross between Google Maps and Craigslist housing listings) and ChicagoCrime.org (used Google Maps and Chicago Crime data to display crimes on a map) developers actually had to reverse engineer JavaScript code to create  mashup. This all changed with the release of Google Maps API and most of the major mapping sites on the Web have since followed suit.

It was recently announced that due to some server issues and overlaps with another new mashup the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism award winning early mashup ChicagoCrime.org will be redirect to - EveryBlock. EveryBlock, launched recently, is also mashup of sorts created by Chicago-based Adrian Holovaty the developer that produced ChicagoCrime.org. EveryBlock is a news aggregator site for Chicago, New York and San Francisco that looks to help you answer the question:

“What’s happening in my neighborhood?”

The site compiles all the openly available public records and then slices and dices them so that they are easily accessible by zip code, address or neighborhood.

OUTSHOUTS Makes The Music Go Round

OUTSHOUTS, a Palo Alto, California based three employee startup, takes 'making music going round' seriously. OUTSHOUTS enables anyone to act as a DJ to create and send their own mixes of your recorded voice and pre-recorded music or other content over email and text message directly to your mobile phone.

Help Finding A Nintendo Wii

Are you looking for a Nintendo Wii? I know some of my friends are. One of my friends is even thinking about getting in line at 5 o'clock in the morning at the Nintendo retail store in New York to try and snag one. The store only allows you to buy one Wii at a time if you are one of the lucky souls that gets one at all. However, there may be a few other options on the Web that might be less time consuming and physically challenging to get your hands on a  Nintendo Wii.

Ask500People Live Polls The Web For Answers

Ask500People aims to live up to its name by taking a simple poll question and opening it up to the Web to interact and answer. It offers a social and public polling record that is plotted on a map real-time. The map moves around as poll questions are answered by 500 people (which attributes to its clever name).

RedLasso To Search, Clip and Share TV & Radio

Have you ever been watching the news and wanted to get a copy of a particular segment to play or embed online? While the latest DVR technology has made it easy to record television, it is not all that easy to get a copy of your recorded items for use on the Web. RedLassso, a Philadelphia-based search company, offers a service and search technology unlike any other I have seen thus far making it easy to search for TV and radio content to then clip and share on the Web.

Use twitterfeed.com To Aggregate Your Facebook Status Updates On Twitter

Though an early Twitter adopter, I found that when Facebook came out with its open application platform which included mobile and web status updates I stopped updating my twitter page as frequently. I just couldn't keep up with updating two places with my status updates. When you also factor in Flickr photo uploads, myAOL 'Mix & Share' Favorites and regular blog posts (on Somewhat Frank, TECH cocktail and myAOL Blog) I had to start to looking for a way to cut corners. I recently found twitterfeed.com, thanks to my good friend Eric Olson. Twitterfeed.com turns twitter into a status feed aggregator as you can pull all your status updates together to be published on twitter.