KnowMore

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Finally! I just discovered a site, the type of which I was looking for quite a while.

Knowmore is a mediawiki based site who’s aim is to raise awareness of corporate abuse and actions and generally to create more informed consumers who avoid supporting companies with a track record of corruption.

The funny thing is that I was having an idea for the same thing a few months back but looking around the web, I couldn’t find anything relevant. I knew that I couldn’t have been the first to think of this but without any such place I was honestly thinking of starting it myself. Fortunately, I was right. Other had thought of it before me and had created something already that is much, much better than I ever expected.

Not only is KnowMore wiki based and open for edits for everyone, not only does it already have an estabilished community but it also has a great firefox extension that will inform you of company abuses when you visit their website, when you see their result in google or when you are about to buy their product on online shops (currently amazon only)

It is actually through their extension that I discovered Knowmore as I was looking for more kewl plugins to add to my wonderful, wonderful browser. I am actually surprised that not more people are talking about it. I mean, I just checked and it seems that there are 0 blogs linking to it!

Anyway, I’m very excited to have found this resource. It was desperately needed in this day & age where croynism and corruption run rampart. Did you know for example, that Coca Cola has problems in pretty much all areas of concern? Worker Rights, Croynism, Environment, you name it.

So, to cut this short, at the very least, just go and install the extension on your browser and then forget about it. You’ll only get informed when there is something wrong and then you at least have the chance to avoid it. If you have information on a company OTOH, just head over there and put it in and help the rest of us know.

A great tool for debates

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Once again I have to express how much I love firefox and all the great plugin that exist for it. I just discovered WikiLook which allows you to search for dictionary definitions of various words in the text you are reading on the fly.All you do is press the shift button and move over the word you want to lookup and presto.

I can just imagine how useful this will be my online debates where it is quite often that I have to lookup the exact definition of a word in order not to look like a dunce and generally to avoid or see through equivocations and the like.

Not only that but it translates foreign text on the fly as well! For someone like me, who is in the middle of learning a new language this can really help when attempting to read. I generally couldn’t be bollocksed tryint to read online articles in german as it took too long to look up every word I did not know.

Good stuff.

Visionary

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Heh, once mor, my personality is calculated correctly 🙂

You Are An ENTP – The Visionary [1. What’s Your Personality Type?]

  • You are charming, outgoing, friendly. You make a good first impression.
  • You possess good negotiating skills and can convince anyone of anything.
  • Happy to be the center of attention, you love to tell stories and show off.
  • You’re very clever, but not disciplined enough to do well in structured environments.
  • In love, you see everything as a grand adventure. You enjoy taking risks for love.
  • And if things don’t work out, you’re usually not too much worse for the wear!
  • You would make a great entrepreneur, marketing executive, or actor.
  • At work, you need a lot of freedom to pursue your own path and vision.
  • How you see yourself: Analytical, creative, and peaceful
  • When other people don’t get you, they see you as: Detached, wishy-washy, and superficial
Of course the whole thing is pretty much all about feel-good but it’s nice to see that I keep getting the same results in almost all such tests

Nexus of activity

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I’ve recently started taking a more active role in the Atheist Nexus (A|N for short from now on) which has recently reached 2200 members.

It all started when I decided to promote Get Satisfaction as a better place for support than the fora. Brother Richard picked it up and after some discussion and simple coding, we implemented it on the sidebar and started urging people to use it. I took the admin role in it and that was my trigger to take a more active role in the whole thing.

So currently there’s a few things going on. First of all, there is a new group for people who want to volunteer for the improvement of the Nexus. Currently they are just asking who wants to participate (in the various categories( but they’re not doing anything specific. My fear is that if they don’t step up and start asking for specific things to do, people are just going to lose interest. I’ve voiced my concerns and ideas on it but all I can do at the moment is wait for further news.

To tell the truth, I think it’s wrong to wait for instructions from “higher up”. We all know how disorganised and argumentative Atheists are so expecting them to take orders is a recipe for failure. We need to employ a way to use that to our advantage. My idea is that we should have a very decentralized concept of organization. People should be free to do what they wish to promote, help and expand the nexus. We should be promoting creativity unbound and ways to allow people to do absolutely what they want, how they want in order to build their networks or their projects. All that the nexus should be doing is serving as the hub and now and then giving the necessary sparks of activity to jump-start more of these.

At the moment unfortunately there’s only discussions in the fora going on, which is not very different than a regular message board like the Internet Infidels. While this is all well and good, it does not provide anything new or exciting and unless something more social or unique is created soon, people will stop bothering, especially since the forum engine is not the best I’ve seen.We need to start doing exciting stuff while iron is still hot!

I have an idea on what might make the Nexus stand out from all the other social networks and I’ve taken a first step by starting a group on it and I have had a moderate interest in it but I need more solid tools in order to make it work. The basic group options are just not sufficient.

Last thing I’ve been trying to have is to open the A|N to search crawlers and have it indexed in order to increase the SEO and discoverability. The others seem not to agree so much with my idea mostly because there is a general feeling of persecution going on (understandably in some cases). However having the A|N private does not provide any more security and it still stops people from linking to it. Anyone following a link to forum discussion or whatnot, will end up on a wall asking him to register and few would take the hassle, especially if they are not atheists. Thus, any interesting discussion outcomes or whatnot, are effectively closed off.

Another thing that I did manage to arrange from there is to discover more Atheists who use Twitter. I’ve started following most of the ones that I knew of and I’ve found that it is a good way to have some quick answers or conversations. I suggest that if you use twitter, add the rest of us and if you know other Atheists on it, tag them so that we can find them.

Anyway, currently there is still a lot of activity at the A|N but I have already noticed that most people who registered at the start don’t even bother logging in anymore. Hell, we’ve got 2k members and I can only ever see about a dozen or two online at any one time. I only hope that this will not die out before it even gets off the ground.

Dr. Horrible

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Alright, I finally succumbed to the promotion to see the Dr. Horrible and let me tell you. I’m glad I did. Once again Joss does not let you down.

In truth I was initially turned off when watching the first few minutes of Act 1 as it seemed to me that it was going to be all monologue but after today I took the time to watch it in full, that turned out to be false.

The musical is great, and I loved the whole superhero setting making fun of classic comics where the bad guys always seem to be able to go free after their mischiefs. The humor was also great.

Anyway, I hope to see more of these in the future although I really do hope that instead of continuing the story of Dr.Horrible and Hammer, Joss creates a totally new 3-part storyline and promotes it in the same way as Dr.Horrible.

I want to see different characters. I want to see Different storylines and most importantly, I want to see more Firefly cast taking roles in them 😀

PS: I can’t believe he is still working with Fox for his new series after THEY CANCELED FIREFLY! Argh!

Scour

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Scour LogoI just found a new search site (launched two days ago) which seems promising. The name is Scour and it it is a  search aggregator for Google, Yahoo and MSN which pays you for searching.

The way it works is that you earn points for searching, voting and commenting on the results and thus you help improve them. Once you earn enough points, you can use them to get a gift certificate. I won’t go into details but suffice to say that it’s an interesting concept. Since it aggregates the most popular searches, doesn’t bother you with adds and might even give you a small bonus for doing what you’re already doing, why not use it?

The page provides a small toolbar to use it but since I hate installing stuff for searching, and I also hate installing toolbars, I discovered the Firefox search engine. Why they don’t have a firefox plugin or something, I don’t know…

In any case, If you like the concept, you can register and start earning those points. Even if you don’t use them, you have nothing to lose and two months from now you may find out that you’re eligible for a gift 🙂

Found via LifeHacker