TechnoCloud

Every wonder what the world of social networking looks like as a map? No? Me neither.

However, if ever you do, a comic book artist has drawn this map which reflects relative audience sizes. Unfortunately, you can’t quite make out the TechnoCloud pixel - the map equivalent of a desert island with single palm tree…

If ever you get bored with uploading and categorising your photos on Flickr, have a play with these tools that make use of their API.

Among the highlights:

• Make your own mosaic
• Warholise your images
• Create a magazine or movie cover

Those source photos you uploaded are becoming for many just the raw materials for an increasingly customised web experience.

Google Personalized Homepage, now surprisingly renamed the unoriginal iGoogle, is opening up gadget production beyond developers with ‘make your own gadget‘.

Now people without development or web design skills can use a wizard to create a series of personalised gadgets to embed into their iGoogle and share with others. Gadgets (or widgets depending on platform and prevailing wind) are being democratised across the web.

We’ve progressed from fixed content elements, to select your own ‘official’ gadget, to add/create a developer gadget, to now add/create your own ‘laymans’ gadget, it’s all part of reducing the barriers to entry of contributing and sharing content that we are seeing across the web.

Expect to see the wizards grow in number and sophistication across gadget (and other) platforms as web users grow more and more comfortable with personalising content consumption and the tools that enable them to do so become easier to use and build.

Interesting to see that Google is moving into StumbleUpon’s serendipitous discovery territory with the addition of a recommendations button to its toolbar.

In a twist from StumbleUpon’s social discovery approach (people like you, like this), Google’s dice icon will take you to its recommendations based on your own search history.

Another step in Google’s personalisation of the web, following the likes of custom search and the personalised start page.

As a fan of StumbleUpon I hope that their critical mass in terms of community and more social method of discovery will help them survive the competition from Google and many others.

How long though until Google incorporates social search into the service - after all aren’t inbound links just that?

Now I’ve seen it all, with MSNBC’s NewsBreaker, news for the addicted gamer (or easily bored).

They have taken the classic brickbreaker game and added a news twist. During the game, news stories are released by knocking out certain bricks, with the headlines drifting down, before aligning themselves in a right-hand column. Click on a headline and the game pauses.

You can picture hardened news professionals (plus quite a few of the rest of us) raising their eyes to the sky at the mere thought of this, but no doubt some will enjoy this way of consuming the news.

If you could add your own feeds and escape the drudgery of ploughing through your news feed backlog while knocking bricks from the sky there may be something in this after all, particularly if you could tie it into a more entertaining game. Football news while playing FIFA on PS3?

OK - so I should have said one widget API to rule them all. Netvibes have released the Universal Widget API, which, according to the details here, is an API that allows you to write one widget and run it on most platforms (I suspect that the marketing department vetoed the suggestion that it be called the Near-Universal Widget API.)

Here’s a chart based on threads on LinkedIn and VentureBeat that shows the hottest startups of Silicon Valley.  The usual suspects are represented and a few besides.  Worth a look.

Not so long ago, as I posted here, Steve Jobs was setting out a vision for a DRM-free future.  Today, the future has arrrived a little more quickly than some might have thought: Apple have announced that the entire EMI Music catalog will be available DRM-free worldwide starting in May.  The DRM-free tracks will be a little more expensive, and better quality (256kbs as opposed to 128kbs.) Click here for more information about this ground breaking move.

Handy link for playing with Google mobile search via a computer browser when you’re not actually on the move…

If there’s a more visually appealing way to discover music, I’d like to see it. Step forward, Musicovery, an evolution of the liveplasma discovery engine idea.

Navigation is through an innovative, yet intuitive, panel offering choices of genre and era, subdivided into a mood grid covering dark, energetic, positive, calm. Beyond this is a central navigation panel to select cross-genre mood and dance tempo.

The music catalogue available is of reasonable breadth, if short of exhaustive. On selecting your start point, Musicovery creates a playlist for you, illustrated through a colourful interlinked journey which you can drag to explore.

In the latest version, the e-commerce offering has been improved. You can now click through to buy the track on Amazon or iTunes and can listen to higher quality audio by paying €9.99 a year or €2 a month.

It will be interesting to see how financially viable the e-commerce options prove, but as a music discovery engine it has already expanded my horizons for one.