Cool Stuff for January

Following a recent discussion with colleagues and a post from Manoj on Web Analytics World, I will summarize a couple of cool discoveries, some quite new, some a bit older but worth taking a look.

Design/Usability

• Crazy Egg: I talked about it a while back under the heading "heat maps for the mass". You might want to take a look at Click Density too.
• CSS Zen Garden: a must see if you are into web design and separation of form and content.
• Form Assembly: it's form garden is the web forms what Zen Garden is to content. Take a look and you will be enlighten by how flexible careful design can be.
  

Blogging

• MyBlogLog: this community service, simply configured trough a couple of JavaScript lines added to your blog template, brings a lot of useful information about your readership and links and affinities between blogs.
  

Personal

• LinkedIn: I started using it May 2004, which probably makes me an early adopter of this professional networking tool. The power is in the network, the more people use it, the better it gets.
  
• Plaxo: A contact management solution that follows you everywhere. Early on people were suspicious of their privacy protection, but it's getting more widely used. However, I found it automatically establish links with people I only communicated once or very few times.
• Pandora: the ultimate and coolest music engine! It offers recommendations based on your preferences and results from it's user network.
• PageFlakes: you know Google Personalized? PageFlakes goes way beyond with a very nice interface, a vast array of widgets to use, and your custom page can be shared.
  

Culture

• "Inside the soul of the web": this article from the November 2005 issue of Wired is a fascinating inside look at Google, still worth reading today.
• "startup.com: the raise and fall of the American dream": check out my review from February 2004 if you want to better understand the craziness of the Internet Bubble era.
• EPIC: if you have never seen this video about a future where Google and Amazon rule the world, check it out.

Simply cool stuff

• Amaznode: provides a visualization of the links between books found on Amazon. Pretty cool!
• TouchGraph: this company offers a tool similar to Amaznode, but is much more powerful (see snapshot). It also offers a visualization tool based on Google relate which is really interesting to find how a site or a topic is being recognized as part of an "ecosystem" by Google.

Cool stuff you want to share? Post a comment!