I've been really interested in people search Web 2.0 apps such as Wink, Zoominfo, and PeekYou. These online apps are a cross between a phonebook, search engine, and social network and work really well for the narcissistic and the occasional voyeur. But I just learned about a new site via Guy Kawasaki's blog called Spokeo which, in my opinion, turns the small world of people search on its head and will get privacy advocates up in arms. The site will as you for sources to get identifiable information, in my case it was Gmail where I got a whole lot of email addresses. The site will then trawl 35 social sites for information relating to these people by name or any identifiable information the system can get out of my Gmail address book. Immediately, I get a summary page with information like:

Walter Lim posted new photos on Flickr Rosalyn Wee posted new photos on Flickr Vanessa Tan posted an entry vantan's QuickMix on Pandora Titus Seah posted an entry titus_yorke's QuickMix on Pandora Victoria Ho posted an entry me8477's QuickMix on Pandora Olivia Choong posted new photos on Flickr Kelvin Chan posted new photos on Hi5 Vernon Quek posted new photos on Friendster Victoria Ho posted new photos on Friendster Victor Quek posted new photos on Friendster Yilin Chow posted new photos on Friendster

And a side bar that tracks every one of my contacts and their online activities. What was amazing was I never had to leave the site to see thumbnails of photos these people posted on Flickr, links they posted on Digg, etc. It was all there just like a feed reader. This is where it gets spooky. Instead of just searching out and finding, this system lets you log back in to track the updates! I mean I love automated technology and all, but if you thought Facebook was revealing, this is the motherload!

You know that nagging feeling that you're under-paid? You might just be right. Check out some stats for pay matters in Singapore. You might also want to know that the average wage per month for a Singaporean is S$3,481 as of Q3'07 according to the Singapore Bureau of Statistics.

Here Comes Another Bubble - The funniest videos are a click away

The truth of Web 2.0 told in a viral video. Simply hilarious!

(via Arron's blog)

What have you been doing with your time last week? Well, here (above) is what I've been doing with mine.

In a quick summary, most of my time was spent in the office and I've actually done more writing and email than listening to music! Well, that's not entirely accurate of my life, but it's a sure indicator based on the applications I've been running. The service is called RescueTime; I found out about it via LifeHacker, and this my review of it.

This was a regular work week for me, so as expected I spent most of my time in the office on "productivity" apps. To my amazement (or embarrassment) I've been found to use MSN Messenger more than Outlook. (Justification: I do have colleagues and clients on my buddy list).

RescueTime is available as a download on both the PC and Mac which works great for me because I use a PC in the office and a Mac at home. I have RescueTime installed on both machines feeding data to the same online account giving me the chance to measure my activities in the office against what I do at home. For example, working on MS Word is done in the office but Pages is used when I'm home (or wherever I sit down with my MacBook Pro).

The service also measures how long you've been spending on web pages and in my overworked life I've spent most of my time on Factiva doing media research for clients. I do however spend a good amount of time on Gmail as well.

Think of this as intelligence for personal productivity and I'm starting to appreciate the insights its giving me. But it isn't perfect.

There aren't many options with this service and you can't break down say access to sites from Firefox vs Safari which I think would help my office vs home situation and you can't filter out sites you don't want documented, so don't share your data if you've been spending lots of time on... ahem... you know... type of sites.

Although you can drill down into the specific days to see when you've been working and when you've been playing, it doesn't let you see a view wider than a week making it hard to measure improvement and changes in your computing habits.

But overall it's a really nice service to have and just as web analytics have grown to become more sophisticated I'm looking forward to better personal measureability in the future.