Google, Transit, Apartment Listings Mash Up – A Killer App

Here is an App I’d like to see someone develop. A Google Map that incorporates transit scheduling data to help people figure out where they should live – if they know where they are going to work or go to school. It would work similarly to King County’s Trip Planner page, but not exactly.

This is how I would envision it working: Each step would filter OUT places where you would consider living.

Step 1

You would enter the destination. (This idea was inspired by trying to help two people who needed help figuring out a good place to live convenient to North Seattle Community College. Just knowing which buslines serve the university doesn’t help.)

Step 2

Indicate how long of a commute you’d be willing to make.

Step 3

Indicate how many transfers you’re willing to make.

Step 4

Indicate how far you’re willing to walk from home to the bus stop

Step 5

Indicate how far you’re willing to walk from the bus to your destination

The idea is that the user would get a radius/list of possible neighborhoods too look at. (It would be even better if it could connect with apartment/house listings with appropriate filters on residential information.)

Google Transit, Google Maps, Craig’s List, King County Transit and others out there in cyberspace – is this doable?

Doodle – Calendar, Not Drawing

Ever try scheduling a meeting or event with people outside the office – where you can’t use Outlook’s calendar feature? Coordinating schedules can be a real challenge sometimes. A professor at the University of Washington told me about Doodle – something he uses to schedule meetings with multiple parties.

Check it out at www.doodle.com

Word Clouds

Thank you to Andrea James of SeattlePi.com for tipping us off about Wordle, a free website where you can create colorful word clouds of any group of words. (Her article focused on how Starbucks is changing the way they talk about themselves. Click here to read her article.)

I experimented with some of my wife’s papers for school, an old resume of mine, an article on Obama’s first 100 days and finally settled on the New York Times and Seattle Times endorsements of Barack Obama.

A lot of fun and some practical applications if you want to start analyzing speeches, articles, etc. – particularly how they might change over time.

Here are the two word clouds I came up with:

New York Times Endorsement of Barack Obama. (Click here for article)

Seattle Times Endorsement of Barack Obama. (Click here for article)

Eco-Friendly Printing

Three great ways to save on ink and paper. PrintWhatYouLike, GreenPrint and Ecofont. I haven’t chosen yet between the first two.

PrintWhatYouLike is a free web-based solution meant for printing more efficient web pages (without ads, unecessary graphics, etc.).

 GreenPrint is a $29 software download that also lets you more efficiently print documents on your computer (avoiding the three lines on the last page problem.)

I’m leaning toward the first option but haven’t installed the browser plug-in just yet.

EcoFont – if it’s easy to read, looks great. Theoretically 20% savings on ink just by printing holes in your characters instead of the full character.

What a concept!

Introduction

I have occaisonally thought about starting a blog. In fact I have more than once. Even with a FB page and an experimental Twitter page, I always thought a blog was the way to go. Links to news articles are something I’ve always wanted to collect. FB doesn’t work for me because I’d overwhelm my friends. As an avid photographer, a photo blog appeals to me as well. This is – as many things are – an experiment. We’ll see how it goes.