No spam here missus

Earthlink seem to have added this new feature to their email service. If you send an email to one of their customers who does not have you on an approved list Earthlink will mark you as spam but sends back a message to your address asking you to fill in a small form (with visual word recognition) and a short message to try and get the person to open your email. Clever stuff, as the effort of doing this for most spam people is excessive, but for your normal non-spamming person it’s only a minor inconvenience.

Spore

Check out this video of Will Wheaton’s latest game in production. After the city creation of Sim City and relationship overload of The Sims, now we have ‘be everything through the entire history of a race’. Yep, you start from an amoeba and end up conquering galaxies.

What’s really great about this is the way you can completely edit your creatures – from kinks in their tail, to how many legs they have, and then you can share these amazing beasts online with other people. Genius.

Tag up your clouds

Tag Cloud provide an ASP mechanism to generate a ‘tag cloud’ on your webpage, either based on tags just from your site or from an aggregate set of feeds of your choice. I’m a great fan of tag clouds and it’s interesting to see how many are popping up all over the place – a random example being Skype’s job page with my perennial favorite being the awesome we make money not art. Just looking at them you see how they create an organic, truely representational indication of importance across a website – none of this spending ages trying to decide where ‘contact us’ should go on a global nav malarky!

Signals to noises

37 Signals is an amazing company that has a simple philosophy when it comes to creating new web apps: cut out the crap and just build the thing now. Using this approach they’ve created a constantly expanding suite of small, targetted apps that make life easier for businesses. Not only that, but they give it all away in their amazing Ruby on Rails framework.

Want to find out more of their ‘special sauce’ – well they’ve just released an e-book called ‘Getting Real‘ that expands on their philosophy and how you too can be a Web 2.0 darling.

Tag Clusters at Flickr

Flickr have just introduced tag clusters to their tagging mechanism. I would imagine this has something to do with the similar functionality over at del.icio.us and the fact that Yahoo now owns them both. The concept is very simple, you select a tag to search on and when the results comes up it suggests other tags that are similar – for example ‘cat’ might suggest ‘feline’.