Google ig

Google personalized homepage now has bookmarks, news search, and arbitrary rss feeds. Plus it's fun to drag the boxes around ...

Last of WWII Comanche Code Talkers Dies

Charles Chibitty, the last survivor of the Comanche code talkers who used their native language to transmit messages for the Allies in Europe during World War II, has died. He was 83.

They recently had a Living Museum for the 60th Anniversary Commemorations of the end of the Second World War, in England, but, said that that would probably be the last since there were so few survivors. The The Last Days of WWII on the History Channel has been all about "60 years ago today." Which is kind of odd as that means that they can't play it again next year without editing.

I note that a G.I. Joe Navajo Code Talker was made some years ago.

Dead Tree Edition

It's been a week of dead tree media with some BBC news thrown in for good measure. It was interesting trying to get news out of the likes of the Daily Mail or the Guardian Weekly ... I'll be glad to settle back into the high-signal world of The Financial Times and the Economist. The cover pictures alone have been quite surreal.

Orkut

orkut is certainly a poster child. Plenty of interesting people have accounts, yet, there are few posts. Heck, the social software community has 2425 members and almost no traffic. I get more requests for invites to orkut than all other 'limited beta's combined. They're selling some mighty fine sizzle over there ...

Infoware

'And once you start thinking of web sites as applications, you soon come to realize that they represent an entirely new breed, something you might call an "information application," or perhaps even "infoware." - Tim O'Reilly

"Next-generation infoware ... because both of them let you quit

Syndicated news (and blogs) succeed because they only trade in meta-data and thus are fully shareable; it matters not one iota to anyone if you read that BBC story off a weblog sidebar, inline on a portal page or on the actual BBC.

picking up my signal across a network of enthusiastic relays each aggregating, reformating and rebundling in their bid for your membership attention." - TeledyN

"But I'd love to see competition based on the value that's wrapped around the portable data we choose to mesh with infoware services, rather than on data lock-in." - Jon Udell: Next-generation infoware

Tag: infoware

Tribe.net

Tribe 'open container' profiles allow one add and arrange modules in a two column format (plus one for ads). The modules can contain pictures, lists, rss feeds, a blog of sorts, and tribe content like friends, tribes, events, etc. I'm quite fond of the stalk module that shows your recent posts to public tribes.

The modules allow one to pull in rss feeds, so you could create a public
Digital Lifestyle Aggregator of sorts ... Livejournal posts of what they had for lunch seems to be popular. I have seen a few people put the rss output from a tribe into their public profile, mixing metaphors nicely. Ironically, tribe itself is not producing rss feeds for the in-profile blogs making the place smell of walled garden. In spite of former Tribe CEO Mark Pincus arguing for interoperability and open standards to allow users to interact with members of different networks without having to join those networks. Add the injury of no discussion post edits (every word is sacred) and no html markup we've got a near miss. Heck, even Friendster has Typepad blogs bolted on.

I've shifted most of my community reading to rss since discussion threads load like slow snot and now that people can put all sorts of interesting content on their profile page those often load even slower.

For some occasional under the hood data, check the Briatribe.

Tags: tribe.net, social network

Meta Social Networking Coming Soon

Something that looks like this is going to do something somewheres, Real Soon Now. Pull one of the others, it's got bells on.

tinytoolsmith YASN

Wanted: a social network to aggregate the toolsmiths: "I want something for folks building TinyTools: extensions, hacks, automator actions, dashboard widgets, cron scripts, Wordpress plug-ins, and the like. Since I’m nodding to Lazyweb anyhow, I may as well ping… anyone interested in building a tinytoolsmith YASN"

Humm, sort of a call to arms/request for widgets? More than a blog or del.icio.us pool, but, not quite the walled garden of a SN? We're already lousy with blogs, wikis, (anti-)social networks, source control repositories, search engines, and clipping and tagging services. No need to build a place for the widgets, just center of linking, tagging, and annotation. Color me interested.

However, we do need a SN just for invites to betas of SNs ...

Weekly Word War

The SFWeekly.com has huge SFWarfield/Fillmore ads this week. The
San Francisco Bay Guardian has full page whinge about it. (and this in a ish with the huge pull out Rasputin Manifesto section)

"'Under the terms of the deal, New Times will pay Clear Channel a sum in the high six figures for naming rights to the Warfield Theatre, which for the next three years will become the SF Weekly Warfield', BGP representatives said. In exchange, Clear Channel will spend so much money on advertising in the Weekly and Express that there will be little or no money left for competing print media." - San Francisco Bay Guardian News

Thankfully, Dog Bites throws the Guardian a bone.

Rojo - Your news, your way

Ah! I've hit upon an ideal use for Rojo. LazyWeb! Subscribe to lazyweb itself and a stack of searches then use Rojo's sharing and taging ...

profile if you want to play along.

Etc

Stacey's Literary License members save 20% on everything in the store, Thursday, July 14th through Saturday, July 16th. Including the paperback edition of A Hat Full of Sky by PTerry.

The Onion weekly in SF has good event listings and a newsletter. Dunno why you can't get to any of it online .... A new occasional paper, The East Bay Daily News which doesn't seem to have any news in it.

Rand McNally closed the Market street store. Looks like they only have a couple open nationwide, anymore. The Disney Store is also going the way of FAO Schwarz.

Typepad: New sidebar feed

Whoa, check out the preview of a sidebar feed at The Long Tail "So if you'd like me to serve as your filter and aggregator of Long Tail comment around the web, just copy the 'syndicate this sidebar' link into your favorite feedreader."

There are also reBlogs, that facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds, such as Eyebeam reBlog, unmediated reblog.

My tool of choice is Bloglines Clipping Blogs, even though
they point back to bloglines and don't expose the source url ... hence, not playing well with others.

Rojo has both shared and recomended links. But they're only good for other people using rojo. No rss feeds outbound that I've located.

London Online

Nice to see Wikipedia, Flickr, and Technorati, do good work and get props for it. (Technorati got Slammed. Flickr moved to Yahoo in a timely manner. Oh, and Yahoo provided hosting capacity to Wikimedia, too.)

Yahoo! launched a news blog. A first for Yahoo! News. Oddly enough, the blog had no feed listed, but the general feed page had one.

Transport for London feeds have been quite good. (and really show up BART)

People turned to the Londonist for news (which is more known for snark and event notices), so, they started to provide it.

One of my most treasured news sources remains Cagle.

Joi Ito's Web: HonorTags

Joi Ito's Web: HonorTags: "They are soliciting feedback. Maybe I should suggest HonorTagJoker."

HonorTagJoker is certainly catcher than HonorTagUnTag ...

orkut - communities

Invited some people to orkut and was surprised by how quickly it was running. Poked around a bit more and it turns out that all of the communites have no topics or events. That's one way to have a snappy anti-social network ...

Orkut is certainly the most anti-social of anti-social networks. Profiles are not visible without logging in, there are no rss feeds in or out, and they seldom even bother to post any news (much less server status reports).

Feednation

Feednation YANaggregator. Interesting in that you can subscribe to other peoples groups of feeds and copy them around (not sure what happens if the owner alters the group). Clumsy in that adding a feed can only go into 'new feeds', actually the entire UI is nonintuitive. Feeds can be turned off, which more sites should certainly adopt, and also copied to email. Mark All Read is nice, I'd really like a Mark Folder Read. Searching for feeds doesn't work well.

Profile

Technorati Tags: agregator, feednation

Google OS in the Works?

Google OS in the Works points to Google's Master Plan. Why is it always Orbital Mind Control Lasers? They need new Illuminati (or better Hats anyways).

Bloglines

Bloglines 325/761 and discarding rapidly.

Introducing HonorTags

Introducing HonorTags!

Wow! Massively incoherent. Citizen Journalists everywhere weep. Honor Tags is an idea introduced by Grass Roots Media (Dan Gillmor, Michael Goff and Jay Campbell) to put some really ugly self-tags on things that should be obvious by reputation at best or used to fib at worse.

I'd have to go HonorTagUnTag "I hate your tags. I'd rather not say anything and my work doesn't fit your categories." on everything.

Nearest Neighbor News Network

Shifted a stack of reading on human rights and media over to Nearest Neighbor News Network a collaborative filtering RSS aggregator. The Recommended Articles haven't been that interestng yet, Recommended Feeds have been medium, Similar Users has led me to several excellent feeds. Reading everything in time order without marking anything read is appealing for some types of feed.

Technorati Tags: aggregator,

Bloglines

Bloglines 366/840. Shifting stuff over to nnnn and perhaps Rojo today.

US casts doubt on new leader's legitimacy

US casts doubt on Iran's newly elected president: "Speaking on Fox News, Mr Rumsfeld admitted he did not know much about 'this young fellow'.

'But he is no friend of democracy. He's no friend of freedom. He is a person who is very much supportive of the current ayatollahs, who are telling the people of that country how to live their lives."

Oh no, in a civilized country the freedom fighters would never ally with the religious right and tell people how to live their lives. Throwing black kettles in glass houses after the horses have bolted, and all like that. Democracy good! (may not be valid in all countries).

reBlog

reBlog by Eyebeam: "A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software. "

There is a short stack of live reblogs to read from. Clippings.reblog says "I was using an RSS reader called NetNewsWire which has a weblog interface and allowed me to post items of interest directly to this site. However I have recently started using reBlog by eyebeam which provides a web interface for RSS aggregation filtering and publishing via moveabletype. Reblog is a more efficient method that allows for better attribution of sources."

I'm quite fond of Bloglines Clip Blogs that lets you easily create a blog while reading feeds or in the wild with the Firefox Toolkit.

Bloglines

Bloglines 348/826. Moved a few feeds elsewhere. Maybe Org/O43 too ...