As I reported in my last post, I noticed a new feature on del.icio.us today. I think they just rolled it out. The strange thing is that I don't recall updating my del.icio.us bookmarks plugin anytime recently. what's that update process del.icio.us devs?
So here's how it works - there's a new keyword field that is available as an option when you ctrl+d or click tag / use what ever save to del.icio.us method you use. I will say that this technique does require the del.icio.us bookmark extension.
Above example: I want to be able to type tc into my browser url bar and go to www.techcrunch.com. All I need to do is enter tc into the keyword field and click save. that's it. I just added keywords for all my favorite sites - flickr, del.icio.us, gmail, owa (outlook web access), digg swarm, orginalsignal, myblog, etc etc etc.
this is kind of like having a launchy-style cmd-driven interface for your favorite bookmarks. I think its pretty slick.
Update: Just posted on TC forum to see if others have noticed this feature.
2.17.2007
del.icio.us team rolls out sweet new keyword feature for quick launch from browser bar.
2.16.2007
an important milestone
Where to begin. It's been a heck of a week for me with several projects at work reaching critical mass. Under immense pressure to build no fewer than three custom solutions with buggy software nonetheless. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about something much more important.
Today I reached a new plateau in my quest to move from the desktop to the browser. Allow me explain - our company just rolled out Exchange 2003 and the associated Outlook Web Access (OWA) client - you know the browser-based version of the Outlook client (which I deplore, hate, and have wanted to ditch for many years). I've been looking to move to a 100% browser based email client for Exchange for some time and while OWA tends to be an IE-centric interface, I've got a quick and dirty solution that allows me to open OWA in a Firefox tab. Here's what you need to do:
- Install the IE Tab firefox add-on
- Restart FF and fire up a new tab in Firefox.
- Use the IE tab context switch (click the FF icon in the browser status bar - bottom of browser).
- Enter URL to OWA webmail client.
- Tag it with the brand spankin new del.icio.us keyword feature "owa" and now any time you type owa into your browser url bar, OWA will open. (you'll need the full blown Firefox del.icio.us extension to do this step). [SEE UPDATE BELOW]
- You're done. That's it. No more need for outlook application.
Do you realize what this means for me? I've finally rid myself of my dependence on Microsoft Office as a desktop platform for personal productivity. Here's my list of Office replacements (all of which are tagged in my del.icio.us bookmarks with "start" tag - I use this to rapid fire open all in new tabs for super productivity when I need to start my day.MSWord > Google Docs
Excel > Google Sheets
PPT > Thumbstacks
Outlook > OWA
Other MS Replacements that are part of my arsenal of tools:
Outlook Express News Reader > Google Reader
MSN / Windows Messenger > Meebo
Windows Search > Google Desktop
MS Paint > Irfanview
Windows start menu > Launchy
DEL.ICIO.US KEYWORD FEATURE UPDATE: this feature has magically disappeared. I snapped a screenshot of it. I wonder if the del.icio.us guys are rolling out a new feature? For some strange reason, I don't see this new keywords field anymore. But I do have proof that it was there at one point. See:
2.12.2007
I got me an obama-blog-o-rama
I've read a couple articles on Barack Obama's new social network so I thought I'd create an account and take it for a spin. While I'm definitely intrigued by Obama, I'm not all that political, and I especially don't blog about my political views, not to mention that I'm not really ready to think about '08 yet. For now, I'll just keep watching Colbert & Stewart for my daily dose of political reality.
I'm more interested in seeing how each campaign is using 2.0 tech and other socially-driven techniques in their overall strategy. Clearly there are some interesting 2.0 trends like "wisdom of crowds", "collective intelligence", and "long tail techniques" -- that if applied to the political maelstrom spinning out of control in our nation's capital -- might just turn DC politics upside down. Either way, it's going to be interesting to watch it all play out.
After a quick register > create blog > create hello world post on the MyBarakObama social network site, I must say that it's a pretty primitive blogging GUI that is kind of klunky. Overall, the social networking aspects of the site are pretty decent - support for groups, basic profile, friends, comments, etc etc. Will be interesting to see how quickly the site grows. Hopefully Arrington will post a detailed breakdown of the site's first month traffic report over at TC.
2.11.2007
Pipes to organize the feeds in the tubes on the internets
OK. I just spent about an hour tinkering with Yahoo's latest innovation - Pipes. Pretty interesting concept. The general idea is to empower users [geeks] with the ability to slice and dice rss feeds in new and interesting ways, in this case - bringing unix-style piping capabilities to the browser in a drag and drop GUI.
Edit mode:
View Mode:
It's a concept that has the blogosphere buzzing, with the likes of Tim O'Reilly, Nic Cubrilovic, Nial Kennedy, and others offering up their take on this new piece of 2.0 tech.
I really like the concept of tools to slice and dice my feeds. I've also been toying with some other feed manipulating tools like feedrinse, and feedburner for some time, but it seems like Pipes may give me additional capabilities. I'm thinking tip of the iceberg here.
With OPML being the preferred format for marshaling around my >150 aging feed subs - I went from Bloglines to Google Reader to Technorati Favorites to FeedEye and now am looking at my best options for further pruning my feeds with Pipes. Need to find some time to further explore this. Either way, with feeds being such an important part of my 2.0 arsenal, these tools may be just what I need to fine tuning the signal-noise ratio in my chaotic life.
Here's my first pipe - a mashup of my blog, del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, and YouTube Videos, sorted by PubDate. [UPDATE - I modded this one using the technique from the pipe I cloned below]
Here's my second pipe [which I cloned and modded from this one]
Happy Piping geeks.
[UPDATE: Grrr. I just started to get excited about the usefulness of Pipes, and then I read this blog post. Sigh. I too noticed some weirdness in the sorting of items in my feed mashups. Also check out the different sort selection options based on the feeds you are working with. I noticed that del.icio.us uses Dublin Core metadata:
whereas Flickr appears to use something else: 
Don't get me started on that Peanut Butter crap again. Come on yahoo, please tell me that the stuff I read in the above link isn't the case. Just when I thought I had some useful pipes to bring order to the tubes in my internets. ]
1.27.2007
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.
Tags:
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?
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.
1.14.2007
WTF is going on with Digg Swarm?
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.
Tags:
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
powered by performancing firefox
Tags:
1.11.2007
Some new pics of my reef tank to spruce things up a bit.
Here are a couple pics I took earlier tonight of my reef tank. Just wanted to post something non-tech and non-geeky for a change. Enjoy. More pics coming to my flickr stream soon.
Rose Bubble Anemones
My latest acquisition - a ginormous brain sized bright green candy cane coral
Devil's Hand coral, assorted leather corals, and my mean ass female Clarkii clownfish (my oldest fish)
Digg Down! Upgrade? Installation of the anti-spam-laser-blasters?
Digg down @ 5:07PM January 11, 2007
No activity on Swarm:
more signs of strain on the web2.0 bubble
I remember about a year ago when I came across an odd new Amazon service called Mechanical Turk. I actually signed up for an account and tried to do some simple mturk HITs. I spent a couple days fiddling around, and while I saw the genius behind the application, I thought that back then, the concept was way ahead of its time. And here we are today, a year later and the folks over are ReadWriteWeb dicussing the rather lackluster rate of adoption of MTurk services in webapps and the fact that there really hasn't been a killer app implemented that leverages this service. Is there a killer app for MTurk? I think there probably is, but I'm not sure the dev community is ready to build mature apps with something like this yet. What do you think?
the end of the socially-driven-web2.0-era? Social sites reeling from spammers
OK. This now confirms what I've been suspecting for the past couple months. Spammers have REALLY increased their activity and infiltration of the socially-driven sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, and many others to the point where it could bring the whole thing crashing down.
It's a damn shame. I get the feeling of impending doom where the entire socially-driven web2.0 bubble could come crashing down rather quickly unless these sites do more to combat the sleazy and constantly-evolving spamming techniques. We need better anti-spamming features built into these sites.
Digging and burying of comments (kind of like a peer review for comments) on things submitted to Digg is a start, but man, the flame wars going on over at Digg make me think that everyone over there is in high school. I mean come on people. The quality of content, commentary, and user participation on the social driven sites has really done downhill. Del.icio.us is in danger of following suit.
More evidence - I came across a post on the MyBlogLog blog earlier tonight where they were asking for feedback on where do draw the line between those pesky spammers vs. honest folks like myself who are just trying to grow our communities. My post from earlier tonight on the existence of possible spam-laden comments over at the TechCrunch MyBlogLog Community site also alludes to the spam-related issues that are currently plaguing the socially-driven sites.
Another example - del.icio.us spam - Here's a screenshot that I just took from del.icio.us with a lot of suspect links rising to the top of the Most Popular page. I took this screenshot at approximately 12:56am pacific time on January 11, 2007. Notice the two entries that I've blacked out below. Both link to adult-oriented porn with tons of ads, links, spyware, and such.
Very concerning trends for techno-geeks like myself who have come to enjoy the GREAT benefits these sites have [had?]to offer. Wouldn't you agree that there were MUCH more interesting things rising to the tops of the socially-driven sites about a year ago. Now the waters are muddied and the future of this amazingly interesting phenomena may be in dire straits. I certainly hope not.
It just goes to show you that it's not about the software and features driving these sites, it about building a community where users are encouraged to participate, contribute, and interact with one another instead of spamming and flaming the latest and greatest poster-of-stupid-content-that-gets-dugg-then-buried-then-flamed-in-comments.
Double sigh. Just when I thought we could bring web2.0 to the masses, I start seeing trends like this that make me think otherwise. Time to go throw a temper tantrum over on Digg.
1.10.2007
Techcrunch MyBlogLog Community getting excessive amounts of spam in comments?
It's amazing how vigilent us techno-geeks must be to stay on top of those pesky spammers. Look at the comments from the MyBlogLog Community page for TechCrunch in the screenshot below.
@ Michael Arrington - might want to break out your spam laser blasters and clean up some of these community comments. Or not... ;-)
Catholic dating? Myspace codes? seems awfully suspicious to me...and please do correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't visit the MyBlogLog TechCrunch community page all that often.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of the spammers. I'm sick and tired of Digg. I'm getting sick and tired of web2.0. Sigh. I think I was on to something in my earlier post on the impending doom of web2.0.
I want my Radio Shack TRS80, tape cassette drive, list of BBS's, and my trusty 300 baud modem back. Ahh the good ole days when life was simpler and there were less distractions. I've gone anti-digg and am starting to digg down all the stoopid stuff that amazingly makes its way to the top. unfrikinbelievable some of the garbage that makes it up on Digg.
Question to my fellow techno-geeks - where are you going for your daily dose of socially-driven content these days?
I'm still using Original Signal and PopURLs, but I'm finding myself constantly scanning my 48 Technorati Favorites. I've got 200+ feeds in Google Reader, but I just can't seem to get in the habit of using it.
That's all for tonight. More fun tomorrow.
1.09.2007
Finally. Flickr approves my account and removed the NIPSA lock so now my pics are searchable.
This is the response from Flickr after I sent yet another request for them to review my account in the hopes of making my pics searchable by others. Tanks Flickr.
Hello, bdeseattle!
This is an automatically generated copy of a help case reply:
Here's the response I got from Flickr after I asked for yet another review of my account to allow my pics (which were previously marked NISPA) to be indexed and available via search.
Hello,
Thanks for your question.
Your account has been reviewed and set to public status. In a short time, your photos will be visible in searches and public areas of the Flickr site.
Regards,
Monish
Digg swarm activity around Steve Job's Keynote @ Macworld
Wow. Check out the Digg activity on Swarm following Steve Jobs keynote.
http://labs.digg.com/swarm.
Link to Keynote as reported by Engadget.
Holy F@#$%@#$%@# --- Eric Schmidt just joined Steve Jobs on stage. Then he brings up Jerry Yang, co-founder and Chief Yahoo!!!!
Swarm is going frikin nuts. I want a MacBook, Apple TV, and iPhone, and I want them now.
1.06.2007
heading to crystal mtn - solo - with pack + gear
In the spirit of being smart, I'm headed up to Crystal Mtn. this morning for some cold deep fresh pow pow. Expect to leave around 7:30am and back to Seattle this afternoon. If you don't hear from my by 5pm, please call Crystal Mtn Ski Patrol. I have my full compliment of gear - avalanche transceivers, shovel, probe, fire making tools, shelter, water, food, etc. etc. Will not be heading out of bounds or into the back country, but knowing that Crystal has gotten over 40" in the last 4 days, its going to be deep. Pics will be taken from my mobile and posted to my flickr stream.
