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I used to work for a startup back in 2009 that used semantic tagging and your social graph to improve results on the big three search engines. It was a pretty cool idea with the semantic tagging (type “apple” and you would get a drop down to select apple the fruit, Apple the tech brand, Apple the record label, etc.) and then your search results were filtered to what you were looking for. They pivoted and added your Facebook network so others using the system that you knew would prioritize results with the assumption that if you were searching for something that someone you knew had already searched for, it was likely that their findings were relevant. Yes, a ball of privacy issues to be sure. Always anonymous, and you could opt out of sensitive searches being included, etc. But, it did provide some means of social proof in your search results. Short lived job for me as funding ended and I moved on to create my own company.

Good riddance. One less grifter grifting.

Utzp - Angine de Poitrine

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch would make an excellent movie. Maybe a bit too on the nose for these times. His novel Grace could also be amazing as a film or limited series.

Add me to the pile. Still play for 20-40 minutes, 3-5 times per week, but can’t just sit down and write anything new. Maybe soon…

Aww, thanks.

The best way to gain skills is just to start. Find a problem that needs solving and try to solve it! On that note, if anyone is interested in building a similar site for their area, reach out. I’d be happy to clone what I have and help with the setup to build out a network of sites that are ready to go, The tech is fairly basic - the hardest part is the initial time to find all the information that will be needed and having someone ready to run point in their area when bad things happen.

Thanks. Very kind of you.

I don’t know about that. If you see someone that needs help, you help. I do appreciate your kind words though!

It’s no longer online in order to minimize data exposure, but during some major wildfires a decade ago, a small city was evacuated with my city being the nearest safe place to be (~4 hours away), so I built a site within a couple of hours to let people with spare rooms offer space to evacuees. For nearly a week I became the place to find vetted information about resources for everything an evacuee needed to know. It took the province and Red Cross 4-5 days to get their systems up and running so I was an important stop gap. I’ve since devised a system for evacuee information that I can deploy in less than an hour (it’s always running, but I confirm data for each deployment to make sure links and phone numbers are still valid).

This is really cool. Simple, fun, and easy to understand. Nice work!

I had a couple of chest tubes removed that had been in for around ten days without any sedation or numbing. They had to give them a twist to break them free. I didn’t care, two weeks in the hospital and all I wanted was to get out of there.