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Last week on April 15, Facebook announced Lexicon, a tool which lets you graph the use of words throughout all of the Facebook walls (it would be nicer if it was only within your friends, as an option).

As Facebook describes it:

Lexicon is a tool to follow language trends across Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words on Facebook Walls. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers.

It’s definitely a cool gadget to play around with.  Search to your heart’s content and maybe you’ll come across some amusing things.  I searched for “hiv” and there was a massive spike mid-March, uh oh!

Here’s a screenshot of a more tame search that’s a good example of what exactly you can see:

Link to Facebook Lexicon

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KartOO, which has been around since 2002, is starting to bubble around internet social bookmarking sites.  What KartOO does is take your search query and basically shows you several websites and what keywords join them together in a visual map.

At this point, it’s more of a fun tool that you’ll play with and go “hmph”.   But, this kind of visualization strikes me as interesting because it can be used in other more specific ways to build a meaningful map of how people and items relate together.

Here is a screenshot of a search for my own name, pretty accurate:

It’s not perfect, because it pulls up some websites that I have designed that don’t necessarily reflect my own personal taste, but it was able to pull “developer” as the most significant phrase.  But, as you can see I am a developer from Boston and a clever cookie is my blog, not bad.

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I hope it’s a crossover cable!

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Simplicity is king here.

With Muxtape, you can create an account and a mix in a matter of minutes and share it with your friends. What good is that? Well, if you’re working and you want to listen to a nice assortment of songs, you can check out everyone’s mixes on the site.

Eager to check it out, visit muxtape.com now.

You need to upload your own MP3s when creating a mix. Is it legal? I’m not sure. From their TOS:

Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes. Users may not upload multiple songs from the same album or artist, or songs they do not have permission to let Muxtape use. Individual users may not create multiple muxtapes. Accounts not meeting these restrictions are subject to termination without notice.

I suppose this is a way for them to fly below the radar by preventing people from uploading entire albums.

All-in-all it’s a great service and anyone who likes music should give it a look.

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This is definitely a man who lives on the edge. How can you understand life if you don’t tempt death on a regular basis?

Embed this on your site

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I don’t know what’s more disturbing about this picture.  The dog definitely lightens up the whole situation thought.

Thoughts?

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When I say Napster, I mean the old school one. The one where we ran free and downloaded at a gluttonous level.

If you visit Songza, you will see you can just type in an artist or song name and you can play any song that comes up in the results. What Songza does is scrape the web for any mp3 or even video and it will play you the sound track.

If you use Firebug (an add-on for Mozilla Firefox), you can use the Net tab to download the file that it loads into your browser to play.

Get it while it’s hot!

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37Signals, an internet-based technology company (known for their flagship product Basecamp), has been doing a little experimenting in the workplace.

Some of the things they have implemented:

• 4 day work-week

  Fri-Sun is the new weekend.  37signals believes this will make people happier and that the same amount of work or more will get done.

• Pay for your hobbies

  37Signals will pay for your hobbies.  e.g. they are helping pay for one of their employee’s flight lessons.  Maybe they’ll pay for your World of Warcraft subscription.

• Give you a credit card

  They will pay for your work-related learning or networking expenses.  Conferences, books, and whatever else comes up.

If you want to follow the progress of these experiments or learn more, check out this article from their blog.

These are some interesting ideas that have been toyed with before.  I’ve heard of the 30 hour work weeks in France with the 2 months of vacation per year.  All in the belief that if people are happier they will work harder and better.

Best of luck to the crew at 37Signals!

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