Rev2.org

Have you ever wondered about that creepy guy living across the street from you? Today there are over 650,000 registered sex offenders living in the United States, and that number is growing by a whopping 25,000 per year. Knowing where these individuals live can be a real advantage and can create peace of mind.

With Vision 20/20’s POM sex offender locator service, you can track where sex offenders live by address. The service brings together the state databases of sex offenders with the easy to use Microsoft Visual Earth mapping system. Similar to other mapping services, users can search by street, city, state, or zip code. The map will show a small criminal-looking icon (he is wearing a winter cap and has a handlebar mustache) at the exact registered address for sex offenders. Information about the person including name, address, crime, a photo, and last date of registration is available.

This is a really great use of web technology, and I think this could prove very valuable especially for families with children. Users can also register with the service to receive alerts the moment any new offender moves into their neighborhood for free. This service is available only in the United States, and isn’t available in every state yet.

More Commentary: Gizmodo, TechJuicer, and Smart Mobs.

Yesterday I finally accepted my invite to join SpiralFrog, the upcoming music download service backed by major and independent record labels. SpiralFrog offers advertising supported music and music video downloads, and is currently in private beta.

The interface of SpiralFrog is all web based. Initially, the service requires a small download which updates Windows Media Player and installs a small piece of software which runs in the taskbar to allow for downloading. The page is divided into genres, artists, new releases, top downloads, and videos. As you browse the site looking for songs to download, a small box called the download manager stays on every page, showing you the songs selected and waiting in queue for download. Each song must be downloaded individually, and takes a little less than a minute.

Music downloaded to your computer resides in a folder of your choice or the My Music folder by default. I play the music with Winamp, but any music player works. Amazingly, as you play the songs, no ads are shown. The advertising is web based, so you see ads as you browse for new songs. To keep your music collection active each user must visit the page at least once a month.

All of the music on your computer can be transferred to compatible portable devices. Each song is protected with DRM technology, which disables the music until you visit the site to re-validate each month. As users browse for new music, SpiralFrog is able to serve more advertisements, and the revenue is mostly given directly to the Record Labels. No credit card is required, but users must visit from the United States. SpiralFrog boasts a collection of over 700,000 tracks, including many of today’s most popular artists. The top list features artists like Gwen Stefani, Rihanna, The All-American Rejects, and Nelly Furtado.

I found while writing this post that “SpiralFrog” is a very hard name to type, so it is a great thing that the developers of SpiralFrog bought the domain name SprialFrog as well.

More commentary: TechCrunch, MarketingVox, and Mashable.

YouTube’s comment system has been one of the most frustrating features of ANY service online for a very long time. A scroll through a video’s comments would yield racist remarks, spam, more spam, and the occasional British-American supremacy debate. Now it seems, YouTube may have taken the first step towards fixing the problem.

Some of the changes made to the YouTube Interface:

Comment Ratings - This is a new Digg-style comment ratings system. This was the most needed change, and the developers did a great job implementing it. Each video can be given a positive vote or a negative vote, and comments are either displayed or not displayed based on their overall rating. Great stuff.

Recent Ratings on Videos - The channel pages now show the last five videos a user has rated. This feature is optional.

Other changes - There is now a section on each video’s page showing other users who have added the video to their playlist, intra-channel search has been added, and the video toolbox has been redesigned. You can see a more detailed explanation of the changes on the YouTube blog.

More commentary: Mashable (Funny), AppScout and Webware.

Splice is a well designed and very entertaining music remixing service. With Splice, users can upload and record sounds, compose songs, listen to music, and meet new people. According to the developers of Splice, the service features “the most advanced online sequencer” available. For the novices, there are pre-programmed mixed tracks to play around with. More advanced users can start with a clean sequencer and can blaze their own trail.

Music created by other users is available to browse or search. The songs are sorting by rating, play counts, and by the number of fans the song has. Splice also features a forum for community interaction.

Splice is completely free, and the page and sequencer are well designed. The only minor problem I noticed was some minor lag and skipping when playing tracks. Go ahead, give Splice a try and get your groove on.

More Commentary: Computer Tips from a Computer Guy, Under the Radar, and Embracing Chaos.

B*SH is an interesting website.  A visit to B*SH is a bit depressing, but funny nonetheless. B*SH is a place to get it all off your chest, everything that bothers you and ruins your day.

With B*SH, users post short messages which are visible to everyone. B*SH was created “as a way to vent to the vastness of the internet.” Profane language is not recommended, although it is present. Reading through some of the complaints will probably make you feel better about the way your day is going. Here are some examples:

“You said “I love you,” and I did too. But when I said it, it was actually true. You dropped me like a firecracker set to explode.”

“We got too much biology homework. I hate having homework and hate the person who came up with the idea. I am sure many of you agree with me!”

These B*SH sessions are divided into three categories; life, work, and school. There is also a top 10 list of the best complaints. Be advised that some of these people are mad, so some of the language is rough.

As announced on the Facebook blog recently, Facebook users can now send messages to Facebook users and to email addresses outside of Facebook. The sending works the same way as traditional Facebook messaging, and the recipients can even reply to the emails you send. Most content you include in the messages will be included, but some may be excluded because of specific privacy rules (images, notes etc.).

This same process applies for events as well. For friends, family, or co-workers without Facebook, invitations may be sent to regular email addresses, but the discussion board is not available without registration.

This is what web 2.0 is all about. Anywhere.FM, based in San Francisco and founded by a team of MIT and UPenn graduates, may well be the next big thing in online radio. I use Pandora for my online radio needs now, and I occasionally visit Slacker. However, Anywhere.FM is something entirely different, allowing users to upload their entire music collection to the Anywhere.FM servers.

Anywhere.FM was originally funded by YCombinator, and has steadily grown, hosting almost 1.5 million songs at the time of this post. Songs can be uploaded through the site, or users can upload their entire iTunes library. Users who upload their catalog of music can share their music with their friends through “friend radio.” The music player and the site in general are very slick, user friendly, and well designed.

Anywhere.FM also a Facebook group for those interested.

More Commentary: SeattleP, AppScout, and TekJuice.

BuiltWith is a simple and very useful tool designed to give everyone simple access to a list of the technologies behind any website. BuiltWith.com’s goal is “to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using, which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves.” BuiltWith provides info for many different types of technologies such as widgets, analytics tools, frameworks, publishing tools, and hosting software.

The BuiltWith robots list the technology by matching substrings of the technology name. Here are some examples of information returned (using Rev2.org as example) from BuiltWith:

“Mint - Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referres, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard,” “1% of the top 5000 profiles sites use mint.” As you can see, BuiltWith provides a lot of great and detailed information about the technologies supporing any websites.

Note: Pictured is the BuiltWith.com robot, used to find detailed information about your website.

More Commentary: SiteGuide, Mashable, and ReadWriteWeb.

Although I am not sure this is anything truly revolutionary, the NYTimes is reporting that Hewlett Packard has “quietly introduced” a mobile printing feature. Cloudprint, as the project is known, was developed over several months by a group of H.P. researchers. Supposedly, the service will give users the ability to print on almost any printer in the world.

H.P.’s director for Internet and computing platforms technologies is quoted as saying, “[t]he world is going to flip…[w]e want to ride the wave of the Web.” Evidently the service will work like this: Users will first print the document to H.P. servers, then the servers will transmit the document to a cell phone. With the cell phone in hand, the documents can be printed from any location.

One great feature of this service is the public directory of available printers, which will be implemented using the Google Maps API. Hopefully larger organizations like universities will find uses for this technology, especially considering the poor design of many of the mobile printing solutions now available. iPhone users may find this technology appealing, but I somehow doubt that this service will make anyone “flip.”

Other Commentary From: Electrogeek, AskTheAdmin, and CrunchGear

Note: The bride in the picture is not calling to see where the groom is, she is printing this picture.

“Fishing is Religion!” At least it is for the community at Hook.TV. If you are a passionate fly fisher, Hook.TV is a video community with a great assortment of fly fishing videos. Some of the videos are professionally created, but many are user submitted. Hook.TV is meant to be a meeting place for outfitters, guides, and consumers.

Along with the videos, Hook.TV also provides fly fishing news, products, travel tips, and lodge booking. Hook.TV Adventure Guides is the name of the first outdoor sports TV series to be released on the site, and should be available on cable and satellite soon. The site has great information for both rookies and experienced fly fishers including a good selection of how-to videos. The community is strong at Hook.TV with e-tournaments, fishing film contests, and user specific fishing channels.

Registration for Hook.TV is completely free, and for fly fishers, I definitely recommend giving Hook.TV a visit.