I recently installed and started using Chickenfoot, a Firefox extension which lets the user write simple scripts that are executed on webapages. The scripts can be triggered automatically or run manually. Either way they manipulate the webpage after it loads.

Chickenfoot is similar to Greasemonkey except that Greasemonkey forces you to use properly formed Javascript and to actually understand the elements of the DOM to manipulate the page while Chickenfoot helps you along. It comes out of an MIT research project on Computer-Human Interaction so it recognizes common form elements and provides shortcut commands to manipulate them.

I just finished putting a page up to test the Quintura search widget.

The process is quick and straight-forward. You register your site. Quintura crawls it and provides you with a search widget to embed where ever you like. Here is the widget I made for Assorted Wisdom.

It is easy but the results are strange. The initial results from Quintura include li, ul and ol. I admit that these HTML tags are common on the site but I think a search engine should be smart enough to disregard them.

Yesterday, I tried to set up an Amazon astore and embed the store into the site. Setting up the store was a simple four step process which required no programming knowledge.

You can see my efforts here.

Unfortunately, the functionality seems to be limited to a fixed width so it failed to embed elegantly into my drupal template as you can see here:

That image was taken on a widescreen laptop. On my other laptop, the integration looks even worse. At some point, I will explore using widgets to integrate Amazon more seamlessly into the site but I was disappointed with the final outcome of my experiment.

The Economist – The World Next Week podcast had the following great quote about the Doha trade talks:

If it [the Doha talks] does come alive at this stage, it's going to be the greatest re-animation since doctor Frankenstein plugged in his monster.

Sometimes, I like playing stupid mind-wasting internet games.

To the extent, Kongregate makes it easier to find a decent silly distraction and helps me keep track of distractions that I have liked in the past. I like it.

I really like the photo-tagging implementation in Facebook but manually tagging a large quantity of pictures is boring. I think that Facebook should integrate Riya's technology to auto-suggest tags on photographs.

For a social networking application, Facebook does a poor job of understanding my network. For example, why doesn't Facebook use its existing knowledge of relationships to make it easier to confirm new relationships?

My wife had already confirmed that her sister was her sister and that I was her husband so why didn't Facebook know that my sister-in-law was my sister-in-law when I added her as a friend? The process to add her and explain our relationship could be significantly streamlined and Facebook could be smarter.

I got an invitation to the Freebase alpha and gave the service a spin over the weekend. Try this link if you are wondering what Freebase is all about.

As a more structured version of Wikipedia, Freebase could make the community-generated content easier to manipulate and would be a great resource for mash-up hobbyists everywhere. I found Freebase easy to use and already filled with data. It has been cleverly seeded with Wikipedia content to jump-start the user experience.

While I like the technology play, I am not so sure about the business model.

I searched quickly for Microsoft's Gatineau Web analytics project to see if it was ready for launch yet. Here is the page I got:

Many people have post links on their blogs and by extension in their RSS feeds. Most are only a collection of text links but GigaOM makes the effort:

The icons mixed into the text make the feed attractive. The little details do count.