1.18.2007

blogspot down for most of the day?

what's the deal with the sporadic outages that I'm hearing about from friends and family who are having trouble accessing blogspot.com sites. What gives Blogger? Please shed some light on what you are doing.

1.17.2007

Yahoo! Flickr.icio.us - Save to del.icio.us from Flickr auto-gen's a thumbnail image for your del.icio.us entry.

UPDATE: Boy did I miss the boat on this one. Lifehacker posted this way back in May. sigh. I do like the fact that I can use this feature to mix up my del.icio.us page a bit with some flickr goodness though. Perhaps add some pieces of Flair, if you will. Think I'll tag some of my more interesting pics.heh.

Holy Yahoo! Flickr.icio.us batman. I was just over @ del.icio.us/popular and noticed something that I don't recall seeing exposed in their GUI - image thumbnail previews. Check out the screenshot of my silly self-pic taken earlier today on from my aging v3 RAZR. All you have to do is click the Save to del.icio.us link on whatever flickr pic you want to tag. this could change the game a bit.

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Geni - Create your family tree. Check it.

UPDATE #2 - site appears to be back, but experiencing intermittent technical glitches. 4:44pm pacific Jan 17, 2007

UPDATE: Geni down? Must have gotten overwhelmed by the traffic. Thanks TC.



Wow. Kudos to Mike Arrington for turning me on to this cool new site. I spent a couple hours tinkering with their lovely Flash GUI, and I must say that I'm very impressed. From a usability and UI perspective, this is one clean web2.0 app. Easy to use and jammed full of spiffy features. Of course there are some skeptics and haters, as you can see from some of the comments on Mike's post over at TechCrunch, but all in all, it was one of the best GUI's I've seen in a long time. Kudo's to the Geni design team. Well Done. Here's a pic of my tree so far. Pretty cool eh?

Check it out: http://www.geni.com

Here's the slickly crafted viral email that gets sent out to email addy's that you include in member's of your tree.



Dear Mom,
>
> I've added you to our family tree on Geni, a new website that helps families create and share their family tree and stay in touch with each other. Our family tree already has 18 people in it!
>
> Please click here to see our tree:
[url removed]
>
> Or you can login to Geni.com with this information:
> Your Username: [username removed]
> Your Temporary Password: [pwd removed]
>
> Here is how Geni works:
>
> * Each family member can add relatives to our tree. So please add any relatives that are missing. Just click the yellow arrows to add someone!
> * You can invite a relative to join the tree by entering their email address. That relative can add and invite other relatives so our tree will continue to grow!
> * Add a photo and create a profile of yourself so the rest of our family can learn more about you! You can look at others' profiles by clicking their names in the tree.
> * Geni is a private network. Only the people in our tree can see our tree and our profiles. Geni will never spam you or share personal information with third parties.
>
> I hope to see you on Geni!
>
> -Bria
>
> To unsubscribe from receiving any more emails from Geni.com:
[link removed]
>
> Geni, Inc.
> 9255 W. Sunset Blvd, Suite 727
> West Hollywood, CA 90069

1.15.2007

WTF - More craziness on Digg Swarm

WTF - this is the second time I've seen this in as many days over at Digg Swarm. A newly registered user digging stories at insane rates. Must be a script/bot doing this.

Digg User = robertkrose [Joined Jan 15, 2007]

Swarm activity ~3:30 pacific time, Jan 15, 2007



User profile for Digg user robertkrose:
Same profile but a few minutes later. The total number of stories Dugg more than doubled in about 5 minutes (from 1527 to 3645)Can anyone explain this activity? Seems like an automated Digg script/bot to me. Is Digg being gamed again but in a slightly new and improved way? Please someone shed some light?

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post on need for tagging standards makes del.icio.us most popular page

Just came across a recent post focusing on the need for standards (or not) for tagging systems. Furthers my case that we need to do something about these tagging systems or we're never going to be able to bring it to masses.

[UPDATE: Via trackback links on the above article, I read this post, and left this response to the author. ]

I think the KISS model is highly applicable in this case. Simple, effective tagging systems that all share the same baseline features might help, but may not address the inherent issues that crop up in socially-driven systems like del.icio.us and other sites.

My comments are really focused on the need for some level of commonality and consistency across tagging systems in the following areas:

  • Ability to gracefully handle compound words, phrases, and multi-word tags. Space, no space, quotes, whatever. Pick one.
  • Spell checking. FF2.0 brings this into the fold, but spelling errors in tags results in bloated and inaccurate tag clouds.
  • Better equivalence detection capabilities - singular vs. plural, synonyms, typos, etc.
  • Better tag management - for example, right now, on del.icio.us, I can only delete one tag at a time. Tag replacement helps me get rid of equivalents, but only one at a time.
What do you think?

1.14.2007

WTF is going on with Digg Swarm?

Came across a post by Muhammad Saleem, over at The Mu Life about a strange object over on Digg Swarm. I also noticed something very strange on Swarm this morning. Check out the screenshots below of the crazy activity from Digg User BigYellowDot.

As of ~11:15am pacific on Jan 14, 2007, this account has dugg 14674 stories. Either this is a bot/script that the Digg team is using to test, or someone else has written some slick code to auto-digg.

Watching this user's activity on swarm was very interesting. You could literally watch the size of this users BIG YELLOW BALL grow before your eyes. Also note how the stories that were dugg are sucked in like a black hole. Whatever it was, it was pretty cool to watch on Swarm.



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King 5 News uses my cameraphone picture on their Top Stories web page!

Check it out: My cameraphone pic (sent to king5 via my flickr stream set link) made their online news report. the power of mobile phones. I'm just glad to have water again. Enjoy this set my people's!!! Happy new year everyone.

Browser screenshot of my cameraphone pic:

--Brian