I was out recently with a couple of freelancer friends of mine when they started talking about the near constant requests they get for spec[ulative] work, which is basically work done for something other than money. I didn’t really understand it since I’m not a freelancer anymore (and haven’t been for quite some time) but then I read this, I felt their pain.

Tag clouds are a Web 2.0 device so ubiquitous I’m looking at one here in Wordpress and developing one for Wonderfile. The Wordpress version is simple; no sizes are applied. In Wonderfile however (see also del.icio.us for an example of this), we make tags larger or smaller depending on how many items have been “tagged” with each particular tag. More items, bigger tag.

I was thinking as I applied this technique though, large sized tags attract the eye, so a big tag that’s not quite right for the job might often win out over a smaller, more suitable tag. Thoughts?

Want to work at Amazon? Now you can, answering incredibly mundane questions that computers aren’t generally very good at. I decided to try out Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service which allows programmers or others with hard questions for computers but easy questions for the human mind to interact with anonymous humans. This is a cool idea, but the implementation of it is a little unfair; now I know how HAL felt. (more…)