JFNO’s Blog

2 link to start doing extensions in chrome:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/
http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/getstarted.html

I recently checked a TED presentation by Dan Pink on External Motivation. The presentation clearly establish it doesn’t work in most of the cases. It seems the only case where external motivation works is for repetitive, simple tasks. Check it on TED.

Now I just read Seth Godin post titled “Everyone Gets Paid on Commission“. I can’t reconcile both. Can both be right?

That is right, I am a “Google Qualified JavaScript Maps Developer” for 3rd Crust. You can see the official listing on Google Solution Marketplace. I didn’t thought about blogging it before, but I should say it somewhere.

So contact 3rd Crust for any Google Maps developer need you have. We also do iPhone, Android and Ruby on Rails development.

I just start a small compilation of information on where to stay when you choose a hotel near Times Square. It is appropriately named Hotel Near Times Square. Let me know what you want added to the site and I’ll oblige.

One of the neat thing of this site is that it is hosted completely on Google App Engine. Currently it is not really a grand demonstration of all you can do with App Engine, but I find it nice to know this site exist and yet no server is dedicated to it nowhere.

I tried to do some marketing by connecting with people on Twitter. At first I thought a simple search on twitter to get the relevant tweets and then reply to them. It works, but it gets boring pretty fast and I abandoned it. Then I saw Guy Kawasaki plugging hockey.alltop.com to all that dared talked about hockey on twitter. This was basically what I was doing, but the fact it was automated was obvious. The replies were not very relevant and this was the reason why I was not willing to go that route.

That is when I thought about Amazon Mechanical Turk. I always wanted to use it, but hadn’t really had a project for it. Now was my luck, I logged in and was denied because Amazon Payment was restricted to U.S. credit card. It slowed me all of 3 minutes. In fact once your account is setup you can use any credit card you want, not just U.S. issued ones. back to twitturk, I now had all the ingredients so I put together a little ruby script.

First it reads the feeds for a query on search.twitter.com. Each is posted as a hit on mechanical Turk, a “hit” is the name of a unit of work. A hit is basically a form to input the best answer for the original question. Here is the tricky part, you want to allow the worker some leeway, but not too much. It must be possible to say the original twit doesn’t warrant an answer, while the answer must contains all the right stuff for your goal. Here is a sample scenario.

If the original twit is “Going to play hockey with the guys, I just love this game”. Then it is probably ok to answer with a link to hockey.alltop.com. While if the original twit is “My significant other is still glued to the TV watching hockey, I just hate it”, then you may want to pass. After that there is the leeway in the response you want to leave the worker. You want the link to be correct, but at the same time you probably want a human to craft an answer with some reference the original tweet. I think that an answer that target something from the query is much better. Mechanical Turk allows some validation on the fields of the Hit. like mandatory, maximum size and regular expression. This allows to at least validate the answer will fit in 140 characters and contain a URL that leads to the page you wanted to target.

When the script is restarted it checks for completed hits with an answer and post them to twitter. I kept the duration for the Hit pretty short, but there is some delay. On average I would say less than 60 minutes from query to answer. You also have to monitor Mechanical turk so the work is done properly, but it is not too bad and you can just let the hit be, they get auto-approved after a fixed period of time. Once the tweet is posted, the script follows this person and will not send them another tweet unless they are following back.

I ran this little experiment for about 3 weeks, the result where interesting. At 0.055$ per Hit, I found it a bit too expansive for my case. At a lower price per hit, I was not getting enough Amazon workers. In the ends this means that for about the price twitterhawk is charging per tweet you could have someone decide if a tweet is warranted and compose one. I guess it really depends on the value you put on your tweets. Also I learned that most people didn’t saw this as spam. I was bracing myself for outcry, but just some people complained. I was thinking I would have to pull the plug in 2 minutes, but it was not the case in the end. In fact if you look at alltop you’ll see not that many reply in outcry. I really feel like I’ve created a monster, but it was fun.

Anyone knows why Microsoft Live maps as such a superior street coverage in mexico than Google Maps?

A nice stunt, I was wondering if this was a new game. They certainly catch my attention and it is for a good cause.

Now I’m really on my way to make my reprap. I’ll try to post photos of the next components too as I make them, I’ll try to get the real camera and not my IPhone for those. The Sanguino maybe doesn’t look like much but it is a cool micro controller and even if I’m bad at soldering, it works.

Micro-loans are great and have never been easier than with Kiva. You can see my lender page there. It’s fun, but I think they should also make an RSS feed of my activities there, then I can link it to my FriendFeed stuff, and then we can all challenge each other to do more.

I was on the Plains of Abraham last sunday for Sir Paul McCartney show. Great night, my 7 years old daughter danced to the Beatles, the Wings, etc… The official report is that there were about 250000 people. I took the opportunity of taking some pics from my IPhone 3G. They are not very good but here they are.

Those were the people behind us:

And more of them

The scene from where we were

We Mostly watched this screen (the ones showing Paul McCartney are all overexposed)

Although the pictures are not that good it’s nice to get them wherever you want without carrying anything else than your phone. It also nice I uploaded them with the Wordpress IPhone app.

Go over the official Paul McCartney website for more informations.