Filed under: Blogging, Web services, Social Software

Twitter is a vast network of individuals posting about all sorts of different things. Take for instance this very second, members are posting about cupcakes, the military, Ferrari, mobileme, the Olympics and much more. But these topics change so quickly you would be mad if you tried to keep up with them yourself. Thankfully, Twitscoop has automated this process so that you can continue to sit in front of your computer staring endlessly at other people conversation.

Twitscoop works by monitoring all the publicly available tweets out there and measures the frequency of the words used. The more mentions of a subject the more popular it must be.

Twitscoop then places them in alphabetical order in a Tag Cloud, the more popular the word the bigger it is compared to the rest in the cloud. Mouse over the tag to find out who is speaking about what, click on the tag and it will take you to a graph that will display the frequency of the topic along with the users. With all of this information available, you’ll be one well informed Twitter!

In our time with using the site we only had one gripe with it, the lack to sort the cloud via the size of the tag. This is only a minor complaint really but something that should be added for those of us out there that like a little order in our lives.

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Filed under: World wide web, Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Sometimes the ideal web services are the simplest ones. Drivepricing lets you compute the cost of gas for your road trip.

With gas prices so high its nice to be able to know how much to put in the piggy bank to save up for the trips you’ve coming up this summer.

So when you’re going to visit grandma in Albany from Philly, you can drop your gas mileage in there and get an estimated cost of what you’re going to have to beg her for so you can get home.

Even if you don’t know your gas mileage they have a link to FuelEconomy.gov for you. Drop your zipcode in there, start address, end address, the type of gas you use (which is a great feature) and whether its a round trip or not.

After a few seconds of loading, booya there you’ve it. Price per gallon and cost for trip.

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Filed under: Debt, Shopping

The garage was stacked with thousands of dollars of merchandise still in original packaging. There were 100% cotton t-shirts studded with rhinestones (2 per package - $5.00), stacks of heavy knit sweaters in pastel colors (8.00), boxes of shoes and boots still wrapped in tissue paper ($10.00/pair). It was a yard-sale shopper’s feast, distinguished by the fact that everything was new. It was also - as the niece running the sale explained - a display of her aunt’s full-blown QVC shopping addiction.

How many days or nights had a probably sad and lonely woman sat in front of the television set, ordering two of these and six of those? How many UPS deliveries had arrived? What percentage of the purchases had actually been worn?

Closets of clothes with price tags still attached are one of the signs of compulsive buying. This one was hard to miss.

Much more common in women than in men, compulsive shopping often appears in a cluster of other addictions - alcohol, drugs, eating disorders. It can show itself as a symptom of depression as well as of bipolar disorder. It may also be associated with a trauma history or emotional deprivation in childhood. Like other addictions, compulsive shopping and spending initially makes a person feel better then ultimately much worse. When it comes to on the web addiction, what’s frequently found is women shopping, men viewing pornography, and teens playing games.

Addiction is a way, as Anne Wilson Schaef has put it, “not to feel and not to deal.” Sad, lonely, angry, fatigued? A brief, chemical blast of good feelings can be purchased for the price of a sweater or a pedicure. Compulsive shoppers purchase for the high, to alter their mood, but the behavior, initially a relief, brings a host of problems in its wake. Compulsive spenders wind up preoccupied with buying and with debt as well as by difficulties in their relationships at home and at work.

As with other addictions, denial is often the compulsive shopper’s first line of defense. If you suspect that you - or someone you love - is spending compulsively, the first step is to gather information. One place to start online is the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery. Behaviors to look for include:

-Shopping when you feel disappointed, angry or scared
-Spending that causes emotional distress in one’s life, for example arguments
-Feeling guilty, ashamed, or embarrassed after shopping
-Lying about buys made or how much money was spent
-Spending a lot of time juggling accounts or bills.

A therapist experienced with addictive behaviors may be helpful to both the spender or - if (s)he isn’t ready to look at the problem - a concerned family member. Another good source of information is Debtors Anonymous.

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Google, Social Software, web 2.0

If you’ve ever thought it would be a good idea to embed a chat widget on your web site, Google has another proposition for you: Why stop there? Why not embed a 3D environment, let users create avatars, decorate a room, and chat with one another? The company has taken the wraps off of Lively, a 3D social networking/chat service that does just that. You can create or join Lively rooms through Lively.com or you can embed rooms on any site using a small snippet of HTML code.

We got our first clue that Google was up to something in the social networking/virtual world space last year when a student at Arizona Say University snapped a screenshot of the signup page for a top secret Google project. At the time we guessed that Google was building a Second Life competitor. But since it’s a web-based service, it looks like Lively is more of an IMVU competitor. That should come as no surprise, since as VentureBeat points out, one of the founders of IMVU now works for Google.

Continue reading Google Lively: a 3D social networking/chat tool that nobody asked for

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Filed under: Debt

In the midst of a 23-month prison sentence on dog-fighting charges, former Atlanta Falcons star quarterback Michael Vick has filed for bankruptcy protection. The bankruptcy filing says that Vick owes between $10 million and $50 million to creditors.

It’s hard to know what to state here besides the obvious: Michael Vick is a complete moron. He jeopardized his career and freedom by participating in animal cruelty and mismanaged his money. Is there some facet of his life that Vick hasn’t messed up royally?

In the bankruptcy filing, his lawyers stated that Vick hopes he “can, after the conclusion of the bankruptcy case, rebuild his life on a personal and spiritual level, resurrect his image as a public figure, and resolve matters with the NFL such that he has the ability to resume his career.”

Anything’s possible. He’s broke and in prison, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Perhaps he can make a comeback as a late-night televangelist.

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