20041230

What's wrong with Technorati?

What's wrong with Technorati? - The RSS Blog: "oin the club. I stopped using Technorati. It just doesn't work anymore. Try Bloglines citations. I get much better and much more results"

RSS 0.93

RSS 0.93: "RSS 0.93 is open for discussion."

Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatar

Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatar: "A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80�80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing "

Conversation with Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines

Eric Peterson: Conversation with Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines: "The essence of his answer is 'AdWords on Steroids' (my translation, appropriate given their proximity to the BALCO scandal in Northern California). The idea that any article or feed I'm interested in will be littered with content that can be mined and transformed into relevant pay-per-click advertising"


bloglines

codepoetry :: Human-Readable RSS

codepoetry :: Human-Readable RSS: "Did you know you can format RSS so that normal humans can read it? Useful? Sure. Preview the data without the mess."

Push: hype

Wired 12.05: START: "Before long, push was a byword for hype.

The inspiring technology this time is RSS, a specification that allows easy syndication of news, blogs, and other frequently updated sources."

20041229

blog search

cyberSaps business: "The long and short of searching the blogoshere: far too complex, far to annoying. "

20041223

Gay.com Launches New Social Networking Features

Gay.com Launches New Social Networking Features to Enhance Popular Community Offerings: "Gay.com Launches New Social Networking Features to Enhance Popular Community Offerings, 'Hot List,' 'Buddy List' and 'Who Thinks I'm Hot' Features"

20041220

Social Networking Services Meta List

Social Networking Services Meta List : "Once again, this is my recently updated Social Networking Services Meta List. It is broken out into nine loose categories that will continue to shift. These social networking categories are: business; common interest; dating; face-to-face meeting facilitation; friend; MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software); pet; photo; and ‘edge’ cases or social networking ‘plus’ sites."

About Elfster

About Elfster: " Elfster is a free, web based tool that makes it easy to arrange Secret Santa gift exchanges."


A very social network and a fine idea.

connotea: about

connotea: about: "Connotea is a place to keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with other users"


More science oriented than

20041217

The Internet Topic Exchange

The Internet Topic Exchange: "The Internet Topic Exchange hosts topic channels, public archives of weblog posts on defined topics.


If you have a TrackBack-enabled blogging tool, you can also link to or ping and your post will appear in the channel."


An interesting idea that seems to be underused.

TrackBack Development

TrackBack Development


Docs, news, and tools surrounding blog trackbacks (a method of notification between websites).

Men Lazy, Women Talk Too Much

"Men Lazy, Women Talk Too Much": "'The 'typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life,'' ..., 'the most dramatic finding was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned."

20041213

Blocking RSS advertising

Blocking RSS advertising: "Given that people who use newsreaders are still of the early adopter sort who are used to blocking ads with Firefox or fast-forwarding through commercials with their TiVos, it seems likely that blocking advertising in RSS/Atom files might soon become an issue."


Comments from developers from NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and, later, Mark Fletcher of Bloglines.


Personally, I can read over some text ads. For example the Obituary feed from Moreover contains untargeted 'ADV:" style ads from Kanoodle that are only minorly obnoxious. Some magazine (I don't recall which anymore) was putting large graphic ads on the right and I unsubed on sight. I agree with one of the comments to Kottke that the feed should be summaries that pull you to the site where targeted advertising might lie.

20041210

Trying to Remember New Passwords Isn't As Easy as ABC123

Trying to Remember New Passwords Isn't As Easy as ABC123: "How does the 28-year-old monitor of drug trials remember her passwords? Easy: They're written on a blue Post-It note affixed to her computer.


Ms. Prior knows that her display threatens to undermine the very security that passwords are supposed to promote. 'The IT people yell at me,' she says, referring to her company's information-technology staff."


Send an internal bill with the sticky! It certainly wakes up some managers ...

20041209

Humanity

Marc’s got Huminity: "Huminity, a leading social network has become the first social ecosystem on the web by blending and interconnecting free personal and group Blogs, clubs, geographical user location search to its social networking and chat clie"


They completly loose for having some ugly floating 'join now' on their home page. I'm looking at their page for data and might well join if I could see the page! Amateurs. It requires a windows (only) download. There's three strikes right there. It looks like a 6-degrees chat with blogs outsourced. It also looks like they just created one for each user, stuffed them into google and then tried to make it buzzy.


Their out of here!

Kibop

Yet Another Friend Aggregators: "Another swiss-army-knife friend aggregator with a cultural focus. ... targets the Hispanic Global Community"


Kibop sure looks like Friendster. Profiles, photos, and birthday's are hardly anything special.

Blogchalking

Collaborative Learning Environments: "Michael Feldstein points to BlogChalking as an applied example of shibboleth collaboration"


Searching around Blogchalking turned up the odd SocialGrid dating service which generates an extremely ugly barcode that one can google. Odd that no one made a good run with the idea. We certainly saw plenty of Geek Code and there has been Blogger Code floating around recently.

20041208

Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?

Slashdot | Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?: "the bandwidth issue" yet again.


They point to RSScache (feed caching proxy) and KnowNow
(even-driven syndication) as solutions when just getting off of the desktop and onto a nice server-side application like bloglines works great. Heck, they'll even store and forward for you!


Bloglines | News: "We also announced that several leading
desktop aggregators,including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and
BlogBot, will be supporting
the new functions, which will allow their users to synchronize their
desktop accounts with Bloglines."

20041207

The Paper Napkin email rejection service

The Paper Napkin email rejection service: "That's where Paper Napkin comes in. Give them anyname@papernapkin.net (or paamail.com, to be less suspicious), tell them it's your address, and when they write you, they'll automatically get a response telling them how badly they've been rejected. If they sound desperate enough, it may even get posted and ridiculed. Yes, it's cruel, so use it wisely."

The rejection blog as an rss feed.

Blogdigger Groups

Blogdigger Groups: "Blogdigger Groups allows you to combine the contents of two or more blogs making the combined content easily accessible all at once.

You can create a Blogdigger Group using any blogs that have RSS feeds. Once you specify the feeds that comprise your Blogdigger Group you will be able to view the posts from those feeds, sorted by date, and even export your group in OPML or OCS, or subscribe to your Blogdigger Group as an RSS feed."

GuessWhatiHeard.com

GuessWhatiHeard.com: "GuessWhatiHeard.com enables users to see a visual display of people they know as well as people they don’t know yet. Each display will feature a rating of that person in several different categories such as friendship, dating, and business relationships. Not only that, but people can also post personal messages about someone, which are then viewable by other members. Anyone who has comments written about them can then, “defend themselves”."


Yeash, YASN.
You have to be signed in to see anything, and there's not much to do. A quiet General Message Board and a few chat rooms. The profiles are long but there's no place to point to IM handles, blogs, or anything outside of the service. YAFriendster ...


via The Social Software Weblog

Deeper Thoughts on Netflix Friends

Deeper Thoughts on Netflix Friends: "High level, Friends is well conceived and well executed, with nits to pick for those of us who are either a) more familiar with social-networking functionality from a technical perspective, and/or b) overly curious about the impact of 'Friends' on basic Netflix functionality"

via Social Software Weblog

20041206

Jigsaw Contact Market

Many-to-Many: Jigsaw Contact Market: "ts one thing to put your contact information in a social networking service. Its another thing to make connections explicit. But its an entirely different thing to make contact information literally tradeable.

The Jigsaw platform is basically a cross between the online marketplace of eBay and the social networking site of Friendster.com. Jigsaw users are able to buy, sell and trade business contact information. "

Blog ethics movement afoot

CyberJournalist.net: Blog ethics movement afoot: "proposed Bloggers' Code of Ethics"

Read and comment

20041205

Information Overload, RSS & Feed Envy

Library Stuff: "Yesterday, the audience gasped when I mentioned that I subscribe to 400 feeds. It's really not that much, considering that I don't read every single thing that comes into my aggregator. But, as I mentioned, the probability of my seeing something worthwhile increases if I subscribe to the feed. If I don't subscribe to it, then the chances of seeing the content is 0%. If I do, then at least it has fighting chance to grab my eyeballs."


Information Overload, RSS & Feed Envy: "Over cocktails last night with Jenny and Steve and lots of other bloggers, it became apparent that the new challenge is how many feeds you can subscribe to in order to keep up with the changing material on the Web"


I've been on a tear seeking good data sources and am peaking at 444 feeds. And still, there is envy, I might miss something!

So long and thanks for all the links

So long and thanks for all the links


Links from Tom Mangan, a features desk copy editor at the San Jose Mercury News

20041204

Messagecast

Alerts Sign Up: "Microsoft� Alerts! This service lets you receive important messages through your MSN� Messenger or Windows� Messenger, your e-mail, or your mobile device."


as found on Adrants

Kinja, the weblog guide

Kinja, the weblog guide: "Kinja is a weblog portal. It was established in 2003 by Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan .


Nick Denton , Kinja's president, is the backer of a collection of weblog media projects, including Gawker and Gizmodo, niche online magazines dedicated to Manhattan gossip and high-tech gadgets respectively. Previously, he founded First Tuesday and Moreover Technologies."


Yet Another News Agitator, not unlike Blogging as breathing or how to find time for blogging?: "Asking me how much time I spend blogging, is treating blogging as an additional activity in my life (which it was at first), and feels to me like asking how much of my time I spend breathing.


My answers to this question are pretty similar: I can afford spending quite a lot of time blogging only because it's so integrated with my regular activities that it's not an add-on anymore."

MSN spaces

MSN spaces: "I set up an account there today (and was required to use my Microsoft Passport, which didn’t thrill me). My first impression was generally positive. The blogs support trackbacks, a notable omission in Blogger."

Blogchalking?

Blogchalking is certainly strange. A little code snippet to give "you the opportunity to disclose something personal without revealing too much"


searching revealed too much ...


I have no idea what this is.
They tell me I should put this in my blog:

link


Blogchalking has been superseded by other, more effective markup techniques. Thus, I am officially abandoning what I had de facto abandoned quite some time ago.

link

XFN - XHTML Friends Network

XFN - XHTML Friends Network: "a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. XFN provides the basis for a world-wide distributed network of personal connections."

Wikinews and the Growing Wikimedia Empire

infoAnarchy || Wikinews and the Growing Wikimedia Empire: "the Wikimedia Foundation has now officially launched the Wikinews project in English and German editions. More languages will follow soon. Wikinews aims to be to news media what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias: a free, comprehensive and, eventually, reliable source of information, collaboratively created by volunteers around the planet."

Red Herring Redux? Not quite. :: AO

Red Herring Redux? Not quite. :: AO: "AO was conceived in June 2002 as an “open source media company.” The mission was to borrow on the underground blogging tradition and produce online services, live events and a magazine that encouraged direct collaboration between global thought leaders and technology industry insiders whose ideas and innovations are shaping the always-on world. "

2004 Weblog Awards: Best Online Community

2004 Weblog Awards: Best Online Community: "Best Online Community
2004 Weblog Awards"


You'd think that they would have learned to use subdomains by now ...
2004weblogawards.com indeed!

20041202

Carlo's Bootleg RSS Feedpalooza

Carlo's Bootleg RSS Feedpalooza: "Scraped Feeds For A Better World"


Some good gaming and comix feeds

Chief Blogging Officer

Chief Blogging Officer: "hope you laughed at the name, or at least smiled knowingly. Chief Blogging Officer is a hack on the proliferation of Chief X-ing Officers in business these days."


The idea is to make it easy for bloggers to enhance their blogs with information found on the HighBeam Research Engine


via Big Blog Company

Loudwire

Loudwire: "Loudwire is the next generation social network built from the ground up to promote true self expression, intelligent communities, and unique relationships between people."


Dunno, looks like more of the same to me ...


via

20041201

MSN Spaces

MSN Spaces: "With your own space, you can:


Create blog entries and publish your thoughts for the world to see.

See what visitors to your space say about your blog.

Search other people’s blogs to find the information you want.

Upload photos from your mobile phone to your blog.

Create and manage your space from a mobile phone."


via SFist


More info and some pointers via Robin Good and
Boing Boing

Lemon Tonic

Lemon Tonic a dating service that needs Microsoft Explorer, Microsoft IM, and Flash. Whatever were they thinking?


via The Social Software Weblog

Bloglines | News

Bloglines | News: "We have also reached the milestone of 200 million articles indexed. It took us a year to reach 100 million, and less than 4 months for our blog and news feed content index to double"

blogsnow

blogsnow: "blogsnow was specifically designed to be the fastest blog news aggregator
possible: 5 to 12 minutes after a blog entry has been saved it will exist
in the blogsnow index. below every topic you will find a link called 'track this ...'. On those pages you will find weblogs that discuss the topic in question."

If you already use a different site just add blogsnow for a few days. You will be surprised how many of those 'emerging topics' on other sites will be visited links for you.

Attention.XML

"The world of syndication leads to redundant information. This where developments like attention.xml will be extremely important. Attention.xml will parse out redundant info so that you only have one resource."


Vander Wal


Attention.XML is an open standard, built on open source that helps you keep track of what you've read, what you're spending time on, and what you should be paying attention to.


Attention.XML is an XML file that contains an outline of feeds/blogs, where each feed itself is an outline, and each post is also an outline under the feed. This hierarchical outline structure is then annotated with per-feed and per-post information which captures such information as, the last time the feed/post was accessed, the duration of time spent on the feed/post, recent times of feed/post access, user set (dis)approval of posts, etc.


Attention.XML doc

and a prototype