Posts tagged #blogging

Invasive monitoring and a fresh round of layoffs have workers I spoke to on edge. Is this the future of knowledge work?

Not that anyone reads it :) I admit it's mostly for my entertainment. Tags and Collections are much better supported. The access to raindrop is better. The ui for creating posts is much nicer.

If this site looks a little different to you, it’s because I am doing a complete overhaul using Claude code. I have drunk the cool aid 100%! Over the last 2 months I’ve done a lot of “coding”. Actually very liittle coding, more directing Claude Code to code for me. I am using Python ouf of habit but it almost doesn’t matter.

I am posting using Mars Edit! I wrote (back before Claude) the interface to metablog API to allow this. Mars Edit was the only tool I could find on Mac that still spoke that. It wasn’t an exhaustve search but this is what I came up with.

I don’t know yet whether I will be. blogging here. I have posted occasional things on LinkedIn where I have a built in audience. I am sure they never look at my blog. In fact the traffic to this blog is non existant I am sure. So why post here?

Thinking out loud now, maybe I automate this blog to automatically display whatever I post to LInkedin. Or the other way around.

Help listeners follow your show wherever they get their podcasts.

A static site generator combines a markup language with a templating engine to produce HTML files. Learn more on Full Stack Python.

Swallow Boathouse – Wikipedia –

In-depth, one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. The journey, lessons learned, and the struggles. Let's do this!

Farnsworth House – Wikipedia –

Another guide to help you figure out how to use IFTTT to post on Mastodon. I am still tweaking this.

The scenario I have a server that receives twitter-like posts, and twitter-like posts emanate from it. I have users who use my server, so there must be some way to do identity. So it's -- i...

Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.

Social Media automatic posting tool. Seems popular with the cognizenti

Marc Andreeson is a somewhat legendry technologist. His advice may not fit you, but it is still worth listeneing to: "Some people argue that college will be your one chance in life to pursue your passion—to spend four years doing nothing but studying whatever you love the most, whether that’s Renaissance literature or existential philosophy.

I disagree."

Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don't make the rules.

Argo (oceanography) – Wikipedia

December 3, 2021 at 07:45PM

Codebase on which safari web browser was built is apparently an open source project

Free audio books

Not all rss readers/aggregators are created equal...

Short Ruby on Rails screencasts containing tips, tricks and tutorials. Great for both novice and experienced programmers.

Built on AI and blockchain, SkyGrid provides an end to end solution to monitor the airspace, execute optimal flight paths, and manage a drone fleet.

Premium domains add authority to your site. Transparent pricing. 1 year WHOIS privacy included. 30-day money back guarantee.

GLG is the World's Insight Network connecting clients to powerful insights from our network of more than 900,000 experts.

something between wikipedia and what.com

Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, aggregated from sources all over the world by Google News.

Award-winning news and culture, features breaking news, in-depth reporting and criticism on politics, science, food and entertainment.

Breaking news and analysis from the U.S. and around the world at WSJ.com. Politics, Economics, Markets, Life & Arts, and in-depth reporting.

Reporting, Profiles, breaking news, cultural coverage, podcasts, videos, and cartoons from The New Yorker.

I just finished Antonio García Martínez’s excellent memoir Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, and it…

Do me you dare?

Really useful tool to find podcasts and episodes. A nice looking podcast search engine.

I came across my old blog that I’ve not posted to in 3 years and, well, found some really good stuff. I recently dropped all social media because it had become a total time sync. Bit yeah, some really good stuff. Also WordPress is a very nice platform. It’s evolved right under me and now it’s downright pleasant to use. Maybe… Should I start blogging again?

In moving my blog to Squarespace 6 I’ve had a lot of contact with their support service. They are ‘just ok’. Yes, they have the usual boilerplate, “so glad you contacted us” and “i think I understand why this is important to you.” Ok, ok. Enough cut and paste.

The problem is that they are probably pretty junior and used to answering easy questions. But when they get at all subtle or maybe even pointing to a bug, they are lost in the woods and give you useless help. But that’s not the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is that there’s no continuity. Each part of the support email ‘conversation’ is answered by some random other person. And while they probably make a good will effort to mai...

I have been noticing more and more serialized tweets. In other words, someone tweets several times in a row because what they have to say will not fit into 140 characters. They number them and fire them off one after the other. That way you, the reader, can reassemble them in your head. Of course the arrive in reverese order (the newest ones are the last one.) Also you need some way to note that your series is over, which might beget a new twitter shorthand

Why, if I can attach a 5 minute video or a photograph or a 3 minute mp3 to a tweet, can’t I attach a 2 paragraph messge? Why not allow me to have as much text, and why not fonts and styles? It’s just a matter of time.

The 140 Ch...

After a glorious run of almost 10 years, regretfully, I’ve decided to decomission BlogBridge. My longtime freinds and blog followers will remember that I and Aleksey worked on BlogBridge quite intensively for several years, and then gradually less and less.

Over the last several years BlogBridge was more or less on auto pilot, but still with a decent set of devoted users. And every week and month brought in additional users. Not a huge amount but enough to keep it interesting.

Our pricing model was very lopsided, w...

Flying back home yesterday I read this article about Wikipedia in the New York Times: Wikipedia, What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page? – NYTimes.com:

The three tenets of Wikipedia articles are “No Original Research,” “Neutral Point of View” and “Verifiability” — terms that, in and of themselves, are open to debate. At any rate, Mr. Wales wanted to make real the words of Charles Van Doren, one of the editors of the Encylopedia Brittanica, who wrote in an essay in 1962: “Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too. It should stop being safe — in politics, in philosophy, ...

You probably don’t know what a social login button is so forgive this bit of geekyness. I am sure you’ve seen them: “login with facebook or twitter?” If an app or a site wants to “save you the trouble” of registering a username and password, they may “make your life easier” by allowing you to register using your facebook or twitter password. Conventional wisdom in the world of apps has been that this is a user requirement, and plus beneficial to the business as well. Here’s an interesting article that refutes that belief, at least in certain significant scenarios.

...

Yahoo, Tumblr, and the Loyalty Factor – Ben Gomes-Casseres – Harvard Business Review: a blog post analyzing f some of the strategic issues underlying the Tumblr/Yahoo deal:

“…Still, after the initial shock subsides, can Yahoo count on Tumblr users staying on? That is probably how the investment bankers framed it — as a question of switching costs, lock-in, network externalities, and the like. Where are these users to go? There is no equivalent forum of this type, richness, and network size (at least not yet). It would seem that the 18-24 year-old demographic that Yahoo is pining for does not have an easy exit choice….” (...

In Venture Capital Deals, Not Every Founder Will Be a Zuckerberg – NYTimes.com:

It’s the dream of entrepreneurs to sell their company for millions of dollars. But the dirty secret of venture capital is that the dream can be dashed as the venture capitalists make millions in a sale, leaving the founders with nothing.

I don’t know what’s going on, am I suddenly famous? LinkedIn invites are picking up. I think it’s more likely that LinkedIn has come up with a clever way to encourage people to link to others. I don’t know, but I am receiving LinkedIn invites, from people I never heard of before, and from other cities and even countries. Whatever, first I was feeling important, now I am starting to feel a little besieged!

I am a pretty regular LinkedIn user, so the news that some unspecified number of LinkedIn users had their passwords compromised was of some interest to me.

Here’s what a recent post on their blog says:

“We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts….” (from ...

I totally agree with Frank Bruni’s account of the Facebook’s IPO. It seems to me that if the current price of FB is pretty close to the offering price, then the bankers were doing their job.

I mean, as I see it, their job is to open the stock at a price that’s as close as possible to it’s true price, that is, what the market will think its worth. And common sense says the only way to find that out (‘what the market will bear’) is to put it on the market and see what the market will bear. If their research is excellent they will be able to somehow figure out what the market will bear, ahead of time, and offer it there.

I think that’s just what happened! Good on them. From Frank Bruni’s Article:

“Instead, virtually everyone who bought Facebook on that first day was making a one-day, get-rich-quick calculation. It didn’t work out. Too bad.” (from Facebook’s Brilliant Disaster – NYT)

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about social networks in preparation for the 2012 edition of my Brandeis University Course, “Web and Social Applications“. This morning I was preparing lecture notes for “Current Issues In Social Networks”. Here are some good current links I have been able to find:

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Social Media’s Small Positive Role in Human Relationships ...

On Facebook you may see something like “George Harrison is watching a video on Socialcam” followed by a video.

Beware because if you watch that video by clicking on it, ALL your friends will now see that you watched it too.

On two occasions in the last few weeks, some pretty embarassing videos were watched by otherwise highly respectable people. Funny.

A friend of mine hates, HATES, the new Facebook timeline. She wants to turn it off, but can’t. I happen to think the timeline is really cool, well designed, useful. On occasion it even gives me goosebumps. But. She. Hates. It. Wants to turn it off. Can’t.

I was thinking, Facebook has something like 700,000,000 users, right? I don’t know the right number or how many are online every day. But there are many.

So imagine you are responsible for the design of this important new Facebook feature called the TimeLine. You need to invent the look and feel of the new Facebook Timeline. You design your little heart out. You have user tests, A/B/C/D/E tests. Hundreds of people and thousands of dollars later you release your baby.

95% of the users love it. Success right?

35 million people still hate the design.

Bummer.

99designs is #1 for Button & Icon Design

Well, it’s been about 5 years with the same (lovely) BlogBridge application icon and as we are redesigning the web site and releasing a major new release of the product, we thought, hey, it’s time to update the icon to something, ahem, a little more modern.

In case you forgot (or never knew),here’s what the BlogBridge app icon looks like today:

I guess, nice, but boring, yes?

So what I am looking for is a beautiful new, 3D rendered, and meaningful application icon. Something that will look really cool in my dock (but equally on a Windows or Linux desktop.)

So far I’ve considered using:

99designs.com crowdspring.com vworker.com (used to be rent-a-coder) guru.com freelancer.com

So far I am liking 99designs.com the best. But if you have suggestions, please send them to me!

A simple question that for some reason does not have a simple answer:

“I want to follow someone’s twitter feed using an RSS reader, where is it?”

Well it seems that for some reason Twitter has quite hidden it but as a public service I will share the results of my research with you.

You will find it at:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=username So, for my twitter feed it is:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=pitosalas Of course, users of BlogBridge have a much easier time and have many more options. With BlogBridge you can subscribe to a person, to a list, or even to a general Twitter query, like “Object Oriented Marketing”.

Watch this brief video to see how you would do it in BlogBridge:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSo5sC3kN3Q]

Do you receive tons of notification emails form your various subscriptions or social sites like Twitter and Facebook and the others? Have you thought about the impact on your productivity all these teasers are?

Well, you might have forgotten (or are you too busy to figure out) how to manage or shutdown the notifications. Check out this handy toy that I just came across: Notification Control.

And in a related story, here’s a similar site if you want to review your security and permissions settings on all these sites. Another chore often put off to our own detriment! My Permissions.

Yeah there’s really very little to these two sites but I think you might find them very useful!

Here’s an interesting article in “The Opinionator” of the New York Times about blogging, scholarly writing and the tension between the two. He says:

“… The digital humanities, it is claimed, can help alter that “monstrous terrain” in at least two ways. The first is to open up the conversation to the public whose support the traditional humanities has lost. If anyone and everyone can join in, if the invitation of open access is widely accepted, appreciation of what humanists do will grow beyond the confines of the university. Familiarity will breed not contempt, but fellowship. â€...

Recently I wanted to get feedback on one of several ideas for the design of the new BlogBridge web site. I had selected 6 product web sites that had a nice look and wanted to somehow visually compare them. Here are two free tools I used:

Papparazzi! is a free Mac utility that does one thing and does it well. It makes a screen shot from a URL of a web site, importantly, including the whole page not just the part that is visible without scrolling. Pintrest is a free web site that facilitates sharing of images of things. Kind of like a delicious for images … or something. It’s kind of hard to describe whic...

You may have noticed that this Blog is now hosted on SquareSpace. I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. While it is kind of a closed system, there are extensive customization features that allow me to get pretty much what I want.

And their support is 24×7 and very responsive. Although not necessarily always helpful. Note that I am not the first to observe this. Joannes Vermorel’s Blog says:

“The feedback from the Squarespace support has always two properties:

Extremely fast, my tickets are addressed within minutes. Extremely useless, canned answers co...

Just one phrase that jumped out of the new missive from Zuck about privacy:

“As a matter of fact, privacy is so deeply embedded in all of the development we do that every day tens of thousands of servers worth of computational resources are consumed checking to make sure that on any webpage we serve, that you have access to see each of the sometimes hundreds or even thousands of individual pieces of information that come together to form a Facebook page.” (fromOur Commitment to the Facebook Community)

When I tell (non computer) people that it takes hundreds or th...

I am a big fan of Facebook. They are doing so many things well. They have become so pervasive that if anyone is doing anything that involves a group of people online the first and biggest question should be, why should we not put this on Facebook? Because it works on so many levels.

But all is not rosy. I wanted to create a presence on Facebook for a place called Windward Harbor. Should I be creating a Place, Page, a Group or a List? I don’t have the time or inclination to try to figure that out. Here’s one example where having more than one way to do the same thing is just not that useful.

If you know better, please illuminate me!

So after some trouble porting the content I am now running my blog on Squarespace. My main motivation is to get out of the server management business and also clean up my messier and messier self-hosted WordPress.

Jury is still out whether this will be a keeper but for the moment I am happy and really like the fresher look of the blog compared to the previous incarnation. I will certainly keep you posted!

I finally got my new blog on WordPress.com working. That should have been the simplest but their automatic spam detector encountered a single post referencing some free iPhone upgrade service I once mentioned. I had no idea that they were not legitimate at the time but anyway, I deleted that mention and all was well again.

So now WordPress.com looks like a good candidate. I know wordpress and I can run my blog, essentially unaltered on their site, for free, and ditch my $25/month server that does almost nothing other than serve up my blog.

Oh but there’s a fly in the ointment. WordPress.com does not allow me to keep m...

Running my own Linux server has lost it’s sex appeal. Now I am going for simplicity and so I am exploring simply not having my own server but using one of the several cloud services. It turns out that there are lots of little bumps in the road to move from one to the other:

I like Tumblr. But there are no good ways to move from WordPress to Tumblr. Worse, when you move from one to the other, you have to deal with images yourself, in other words, Tumblr doesn’t let you upload your embedded images into their service. Hence I would not be able to Kill my old www.salas.com server.

...

Some people are starting to wonder whether Google+will continue to grow and become a major social network. Even for Google, it will be quite an achievement to penetrate the already relatively crowded world of social networks and become a major player.

Indeed they have had an excellent start and in my opinion built quite a nice little service. (By the way, do not underestimate how much they must have spent designing, building and now deploying Google+. I call it a ‘nice little service’ but I know we are talking many millions of dollars.)

Here’s what one pundit said as criticism in a recent article:

“In that respect, is it possible that G+, at the moment, is simply a soc...

Actually it’s about Twitter Support in BlogBridge. If you are a BlogBridge user, please try it out. Just click on BlogBridge Weekly Release and it will just work.

If you aren’t still or yet, please help me spread the word!

“I have exciting news. We have released a new beta build of BlogBridge with IMO awesome new twitter support. This is bringing us another step to being the ultimate personal social media dashboard.” (from me!)

Spread the word!

This article, “Anatomy of a Trending Topic: How Twitter & the crafting community put the smackdown on Urban Outfitters” is interesting for two reasons:

Photographs that show graphically that Urban Outfitters, in at least one case, seems to have totally ripped off an independent jewelry designer.

A case history of how that accusation spread through a relatively small set of twitter users and tweets and seems to have forced Urban Outfitters to pay attention.

There is lots of stuff on the web about ripoffs in general – “You thought we wouldn’t notice”. Also an interesting comment thread on this page: “Did Urban Outfitters rip off an indie designer, yet again?” where you can see a bit of a debate of whether in fact the original design was truly original.

Things are never as simple as they appear…

Qwiki seems to create multi-media presentations on any topic at all. I picked an odd topic, like “BlogBridge”, and it did a half decent job. I don’t know how automatic or human-driven it is, but it’s interesting. Another interesting find is Fotopedia, “The First Collaborative Photo Encyclopedia”. It’s interesting but it suffers from an unclear mission. I think it’s trying to be wikipedia meets flickr, but I am not sure. As you can see from this link, there’s some actual connection to Flickr. Are they using Flickr to prime their pump?

I had the interesting experience this weekend to attend the “Lean Startup Machine” weekend at the Microsoft NERD. It was kind of a hackathon for Lean Startups, which are startups that practice something refererred to as Customer Development, or CustDev. If you’ve not heard about it, here’s a 40 minute lecture about CustDevby one of the top gurus, Eric Ries. Another reference would be essentially the founding document:, “...

Check out The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate Authority Trust Model(from Freedom to Tinker: ** "The bottom line is that the CA Trust Model’s legal architecture inures to the benefit of no one. Neither website operators, certificate authorities, nor end-users can be sure of their rights or exposure. The Model’s legal structure may therefore be just as troubling as its security vulnerabilities." (from: **The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate Authority Trust Model)

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I just returned from my mother’s birthday party with about 300 photos – I would say 70% of them are no good, so I selected about 40 of the best ones and then had to decide how to share them with everyone who cared.

A little bit of research produced the following options which I am sharing with YOU to save you and me some time in the future.

Note that I am on a Mac and thus I use iPhoto to store the pictures, and have an Apple MobileMe account.

Option 1: Create a MobileMe Gallery directly from iPhoto and upload the pictures. This works well but the gallery has many clever features which may confuse some of the inexperienced computer users who want to see the pictures.

Option 2: Send to Fa...

I was experimenting with a little known feature in Facebook, “Download Your Information” which will actually supposedly give you a copy of everything that is ‘yours’ on Facebook. The definition of what is ‘yours’ is fairly tricky of course: is what you posted on someone else’s wall ‘yours’ or ‘theirs’? And so on.

But what interested me was how they made double and triple sure that in fact it was me who was downloading my information.

I had to supply my own password again: ok that makes sense.

But then for ext...

I happen to be reading iWoz, which is Steve Wozniak’s memoir/biography/whatever. It’s a very breezy easy read and fun if you follow this kind of thing. So naturally this caught my eye: “Woz then moved on to the topic of Android saying that Android smartphones, not the iPhone, would become dominant, noting that the Google OS is likely to win the race similarly to the way that Windows ultimately dominated the PC world. Woz stressed that the iPhone, “Has very few weak points. There aren’t any real complaints and problems.” (from “Steve Wozniak: Android will be the dominant smartphone platform“)

Of course Engadget may not have selected the particular headline that Woz would have liked, because he also lavished praise on the iPhone saying it has “”Has very few weak points. There aren’t any real complaints and problems. In terms of quality, the iPhone is leading.”

Check out Apple Begins Accepting Submissions for Mac App Store(from GigaOM: ** "At the Oct. 20 “Back to the Mac” event, the Mac App Store was announced alongside the next iteration of OS X, dubbed Lion (10.7). Apple then revealed that users wouldn’t have to wait until Lion’s summer release window to get their hands on the new distribution channel. Instead, the Mac App Store would be available for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard within 90 days." (from: **Apple Begins Accepting Submissions for Mac App Store)

Suddenly it comes home to roost, directly, for BlogBridge. It would be great to offer it on the Apple App Store. However it is not inconceivable that Apple would ban Java/Swing applications. If anyone has real information about this, please let me know!

This is a weird development. Java is a super well established language, why would Apple decide to stop developing it: “Apple’s announcement that they would be ceasing future development of their version of Java for the Mac has generated concern amongst Java developers.” (from: Steve Jobs Comments on Apple’s Java Discontinuation – Mac Rumors.)

N.B. Apple is not saying they are ceasing support of Java, but development of Java. I guess on other platforms (Windows etc.) the Java support and the Java cod...

Check out 10 Tools for Distributed Developer Teams(from Mashable!: ** "Every developer and every manager will have his or her preferred tools for working with a distributed team. We’ve rounded up 10 that came to us highly recommended, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think of them — good experiences and bad — in the comments. And be sure to enlighten us if we skipped your favorite resource, too." (from: **10 Tools for Distributed Developer Teams)

A bunch of intersting products still trying to crack the collaboration/groupwa...

Check out Introducing the Google Command Line Tool(from Google Open Source Blog: ** "GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs." (from: **Introducing the Google Command Line Tool)

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Check out MySpace Loses a Co-President(from Mashable!: ** "Space has announced that Co-President Jason Hirschorn has decided to leave the company, marking the exit of yet another top-level executive from the declining social network." (from: **MySpace Loses a Co-President)

Don’t we know by now that co-presidents don’t work? We used to call it ‘two in a box’ and it was never a success. By the way, MySpace? They still around?

I was talking with Noah Mendelsohn this morning and we got into a discussion about RDF and it’s role in the world. Noah mentioned something called DBPedia which I had not heard of. DBPedia but it turns out to be a platform that grabs and analyzes Wikipedia content and delivers all that it can as an RDF Service. This sounds a lot like Freebase, another service which I am a fan of too, which has it’s own representations and standards, but among many other things, grabs and analyzes Wikipedia conten...

I guess it’s not surprising that people’s Facebook and twitter accounts are getting compromised. From the New York Times: ...

Check out Premature Evaluation?: Obama Wins Nobel Prize(from The BRAD BLOG: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” (from: Premature Evaluation?: Obama Wins Nobel Prize)

I say, hooray for us! Hooray for the USA. Why can’t we just be proud that our president was given this hono...

Check this excerpt from a post by David Weinberger called Transparency is the new objectivity from Joho the Blog: “A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” […snip…]”

“Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it t...

Editors Note (that’s me, Pito): I’ve decided to change the name of this thing to “Decentralized Data Discovery – DDD” because I learned from more than one person that calling it Data RSS was misleading and confusing. I need to go back and update the papers and blog posts. I’ve just finished writing part 3 of my series about DataRSS. Part 1 gives the background and justification for the concept, and Part 2 worked through a semi-believable scenario where having DataRSS would be a good thing.

In part 3 I try to get into more technical detail. I hope that you take the time to read it beca...

Check out this post If you think stronger regulation is a good answer, heed Buffett: “Warren Buffett gave a three-hour interview in August. Here’s an interesting bit from the transcript:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress,...

Check out this post Meeting24.tv Keeps Online Meetings Simple: "Like Utagoe Live 100, meeting24.tv also has a similar minimalistic feel to it, which is supposed to make it easy for anyone to use – even those with little web experience. The service is based on the assumption that other online meeting solutions such as TokBox (which we covered three times), Cisco’s Webex, Polycom or Skype are just too complex. " (from: from TechCrunch)

I tried it, at least by myself. It seems to work but I am not sure that I am getting the most performance out of my Logitech webcam. Pretty cool.

Check out this post Incommunicado, probably: "I’m working at home today, waiting for the Fios guy. Which means that I’m probably going to drop off the face of the earth for much of today." (from: from Paul Krugman)

🙂

I read in Personal Technology (Wall Street Journal) today that Foxmarks, the handy, free utility that synchronizes my Firefox bookmarks between several computers, now works with Safari as well. Great. I tested it, and it does work just fine. This blog post is being written with another handy firefox plugin called Scribefire, which lets me post to my blog directly from a page in the browser. It works really nicely and I use it frequently. I recommend it. Unfortunately they don’t support Safari yet. So I am staying with Firefox, for now.

By the way, why am I even considering deser...

You might be interested in what BlogBridge is doing about twittering from more than one account: “Sometimes I tweet on my own behalf (’the weather in Curacao is hot’) and sometimes I tweet on BlogBridge’s behalf (’can I help solve your problem?’) This poses a bit of a logistical challenge for me.” (from BlogBridge blog)

Please weigh in!

Hey! If you live in Boston or Cambridge, and you like music, especially Folk music, then you’ve probably been to Club Passim in Cambridge – Harvard Square actually. It’s a lot more than a ‘Coffee House’ – it’s an institution where many of your favorite 70s acts got their start. Passim is a tiny little folk music club in Harvard Square that’s existed years and years and where musicians like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan played at the very beginning of their careers. I am friends with various people at Passim, over the year we have attended lots of shows there.

We have been members for ...

Check out this post Henry Blodget: Should You Really Panic And Sell Everything Like Cramer Says?: "On the Today Show Monday morning, Jim Cramer told investors to sell everything and get out of the stock market. A Wall Street friend described this as the market’s "Munchian scream moment."" (from: from Huffington Post: Front Page)

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The quote below is from this post from ReadWriteWeb While we are certainly seeing more and more examples of products being given away for free, it is not necessarily a good thing. There are different aspects and faces of free. The Flickr free, which Fred Wilson calls freemium, is the model where the basic version is free and the premium one costs money.This model is very different from the GMail model where the entire product, with full features, is completely free. The downside of freeconomics is a monopolistic market, with barriers to entry, and little incentive to inn...

Jason Calcanis has stopped blogging and instead is doing an email only mailing list(yes, how 1999 of him.) I had heard about it but recently got me a copy of his most recent missive. Interesting, opinionated, practical and easy to read. I recommend it!

I’ve never met Jason but I’ve been in his presence as he forcefully (and humorously) debated this or that luminary. Feisty guy, experienced and articulate. Most recently he founded Mahalo.com, which was well covered when it first launched but now I don’t hear that much about it.

Here’s where you sign up for Jason’s mailing list.

Check out the latest summary of amazing featsby BlogBridge. I don’t want to be too cheeky, but there are some pretty cool things that you get from BlogBridge (for free) that you can’t get anywhere else. BlogBridge is definitely a serious tool which is why I bit my tongue and marked this post ‘geeky’ but really it’s also, as you know, my labor of love, so I can’t resist showing it off. Hope you take a moment to try it!

Originally posted on Sep 25, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

I just saw the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car” which makes a pretty compelling case that years ago General Motors had a working and practical electric car which they took off the market under what are portrayed as suspicious circumstances. It’s an interesting movie but part of me, while never underestimating the corruption and incompetence in government and industry, still felt like there must be another side of the story.

Here’s an article in Wikipedia about the film “Who Killed The Electric Car” and evidence in support and opposition to the case made in the movie. While one might quibble similarly with the Wikipedia article, it is replete with references and links to other sites which tell other sides of the story.

Interesting.

Check out these 10 Commandments for Facebook Applications. They are pretty good commandments for software in general. I especially like: “Make it simple. Users DO NOT read.”, from FaceReviews

Yup, I have seen that time and time again with BlogBridge. Hard to believe. But true. Of course there’s the 1 in a thousand who ask for more documentation, but they are very rare.

[if you are interested in Facebook, take a look at BlogBridge’s Guide of Facebook blogs and feeds]

Have you noticed? How frequently I’ve been posting? I am using WordPress’s ‘post in the future’ feature so in one sitting I can rattle off 6 or 7 posts and schedule them for publication in the coming days.

Very efficient 🙂

This is a question I hear all the time. I thought I’d write a bit of an introduction to the topic. Check out “The difference between a web site and a blog”on Squidoo.

Check this post Life Lock’s CEO Identity Stolen from MetaFilter: Life Lock CEO’s Identify Stolen Remember all those commercials recently tell us to steal Life Lock’s CEO Todd Davis’ Identity? Well seems as though someone did.

This is funny to me, because I am a Life Lock customer, and by coincidence I just received their email asking me to renew. Of course I am not sure of the overall significance of this news story. I guess that the fear of idenity theft that superstition takes over and anything that might help even a little is very tempting!

I met with a potential client the other day who was on red alert because there were a lot of nasty things being said about them on blogs, comments and forums. And I thought of the concept of asymmetrical conflict as we have learned about it in recent years. Even without knowing whether the criticism of the client was deserved: for a single act, or a pattern of action, or not at all, it struck me that they were in a very tough and unfair spot. If you look at nasty blog posts or comment streams, it is hard to deny that there’s a piling on, hit them when they are down dynamic.

When hearing the people and effort that this client had deployed to try to respond to this, and how helpless they ...

I just wrote a few brief tutorials that I thought might be of interest to you and, well, everyone. Please check them out – if you find them useful, please pass them on to your friends!

“What’s the difference between a blog and a web site?” – That perennial question that people first discovering blogging often ask. My short and sweet explanation.

“How to put a blog on my web site”– A brief explanation why anyone with a web site might want to consider adding a blog to it, and how you might do that

“What are the best news blogs” – How do you go about finding the best blogs about current events?

I am advising a client who is interested in reaching out to a huge existing community of folks who they, historically and today, can count as their natural constituency.The problem is, they don’t have their names or email addresses and want to connect to them, and them to each other. The question is, how to do that. I explored three options with them: create a Facebook ‘Group’ and/or Application, create a Ning social network, or create a new and beautifully designed new web site to serve as the hub of the effort.

Here are some of my tentative conclusions.

Outreach: No matter what approach is taken, a big part of the effort will be outreach, via email or google ads or something ...

People wonder about Wikipdia and what it’s good for. This is an example from a while back, of Wikipedia at it’s best. Lots of details, edited and co-edited by many people giving you a feeling that there’s less bias: Wikipedia on the Virgina Tech Tragedy

Check this post Three on getting a job from Newmark’s Door. Where Craig turns us on to these three fun links for job hunters (Dan are you listening?):

“Ten Things You Really Shouldn’t Do in a Job Interview“.

“Get That Job At Google“.

“25 Questions to Think About Before Your Next Job Interview“.

Scott Adams as usual is hillarious in this post Doomsday Cult from The Dilbert Blog: "A Russian cult emerged from the cave they were hiding in while waiting for the end of the world.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/04/01/doomsday-cult.html?ref=rss

Allow me to give you some advice: If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday."

I am constantly downloading applications and utilities off the web to try this or that out. I am as paranoid as the next guy so I do think about where this app came from and what havock it may or may not be planning. Still, I often will choose to ignore my most paranoid impulses and go ahead. I came across a story of such a utility which in addition to doing something useful for the user, was stealing passwords.

It is altogether expected that this kind of thing is going on and still, it’s a chilling story.

This is an excerpt this post from ReadWriteWeb:

“…...

Brad Feld, famous Venture Capitalist writes an interesting post about how he might get to the point of telling an entrepreneur “we are passing” in this post from Feld Thoughts: “We always try to be respectful of the entrepreneurs and pass as soon as we hit the “this isn’t going to happen” point. There are different triggers for each company and it’s not predictable. I imagine this can be frustrating for an entrepreneur because it feels like you are making process with us when we suddenly say “we are passing“, but I’d like to think it’s an efficient way for you since...

This is really cool! Check out this post from Autoblog: Filed under: Safety, TechTwo things plague GPS users: being forced to deal with dubious direction vocalizations and the amount of time spent looking at the screen when you should be paying attention to the road. MVS is developing a solution and it’s likely the most revolutionary concept to date.

The system is comprised of a series of mirrors that project a three-dimensional line onto the windshield giving drivers a heads-up display of their intended path of travel.

(from: ...

Sadly we are to the last of the Demo 2008 events. I am writing at the 3/4 point and so far it has been an excellent experience. http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com_altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=4e17ea267c&height=550&width=470

Yesterday was a busy day! I saw lots of excellent products and ideas. I don’t know how useful the Liveblog was for y’all, but it was a handy way to have me take notes and concentrate on what was happening. You wouldn’t think you need help concentrating, but sitting in a big dark room for hours on end can wear out your attention span. http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com_altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=00e21c51b6&height=550&width=470

Getting ready for the next segment, here’s my continued Liveblog of the event, using CoverItLive. http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com_altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=e59d0046db&height=550&width=470

Ok it’s now over. If you want me to liveblog demo again tomorrow, send me an email to tell me that you found it useful or fun or whatever!

Recently there was a comment to one of my post asking the perennial question that non-bloggers ask of bloggers, (and bloggers ask of themselve all the time too 🙂 “Hello, I was wondering if you could answer these 3 simple questions for a school project about blogging. It would be great if you could help me out. THANKS

How did you get into blogging?

What drives you to blog about something?

How has blogging affected you?”

If you search around you will find numerous people who have answered this question over the years, including my own self. So I won’t wax too philosophically but just give you my gut responses to these questions:

“How did you get into bl...

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia. Here’s a new neat hack: Wikipedia Vision. This is a live, animated, world map, showing in real time each edit to the Wikipedia, as it happens. Makes the world feel even smaller, doesn’t it? It’s a cool way to learn about topics in Wikipedia that you may not have known about.

Check out Wikipedia Vision

We just released BlogBridge 6.0. It’s getting really good reviews so you may want to check out what I’ve claimed is the most powerful blog reader out there. One of the cool new things is the “What’s Hot” feature, which is kind of a built-in meme tracker, but based on your own interests. For example, below is my report for today. You can see BlogBridge does a really good job culling the stuff that I care about most. Pretty cool eh?

...

Check out this post! “Vitamins can help with the aging process as well as preventing premature aging. For more information on vitamins , you may want to visit Vitamins Explained. Vitamins A, E, C, and the B complex vitamins How To Approach Anti-Aging Treatments.

BlogBridge release 5.10 now with more vitamins (Pito’s Blog): Over on BlogBridge we just announced that release 5.10 just came out, you should try BlogBridge out! In the post there is also a review and explanation of the difference between our bi-weekly development releases and our full-fledged stable releases which come out every 6 or so months…[snip…]”

(from: Vitamins)

This is from one of my many SmartFeeds caught this in its net…. This purports to be a blog about vitamins, but obviously it’s robot generated and it deemed to pick up my lame joke about BlogBridge, now with more vitamins…

Over on BlogBridge we just announced that release 5.10 just came out, you should try BlogBridge out! In the post there is also a review and explanation of the difference between our bi-weekly development releases and our full-fledged stable releases which come out every 6 or so months. Here is an exhaustive list of new stuff in BlogBridge over the releases. Of special note is the neat new and improved photo album view which brings the fun and pleasure of following photo blogs to a new level. At least I think so! Check it out, tell your friends, digg it, stumble it, and in general, help us get the word out!

Today a major review came out in Robin Good’s influential Master New Media blog. It’s great to see this kind of detailed information about the work we are doing over at BlogBridge. Thanks Robin and Michael! Here is what they say: “The result is a streamlined, easy-to-use, cross-platform feed reader. Now that it has also taken on publishing capabilities Blogbridge is going to save bloggers a lot of time spent copying and pasting data from one post to another. Joining the conversation just got even easier.” (from ...

You might find find this interesting and/or useful. WebsiteGrader does an SEO analysis of your site and gives you ideas on how to make it better. According to their site: “Website Grader is a software tool to help measure the marketing effectiveness of a website.”

Check out this post from BuzzMachine: ...

I sometimes feel like I don’t multi-task quite as well as "everyone else". So I was interested in this post from 43 Folders:

Yesterday’s New York Times front page ran an article pulling together the results of several recent studies looking at how interruptions and attempts to multitask can affect the quality of work as well as the length of recovery time.

[snip…]

My own feelings on the myth of multi-tasking are well-documented, but it’s fascinating to see research interest focused in this area — although it’s certainly not s...

Check out this post from John Edwards ’08 Blog: News: ** "Shortly before midnight (CST) on Monday, February 26, a group of republican Second Life users, some sporting "Bush ’08" tags, vandalized the John Edwards Second Life HQ [snip..]

… I witnessed this event, taking names and photos, including the owners of the pictures."

(from**: John Edwards Second Life HQ vandalized.)

If you blog, you might appreciate: loose wire blog: Bald-headed Britney and the Lost Art of Linking

Here’s an odd but important problem, at least for us here at BlogBridge. When you sign up for a BlogBridge account, we, like many other sites, send you a confirmation email to verify that your email is for real.

Truthfully from a security point of view, I am not even exactly sure what it proves. That at one moment in time the person creating the account also was able to receive emails at an arbitrary email address. So what? It’s so easy to get a temporary free email account, that I am not sure what it does.

So that’s question one: does an activation email really provide any benefit to anyone? Any comments?

Now a question that has come to our attention is that in many cases a person’s ...

Check out this post from Scripting News It’s Dave Winer’s 10th Anniversary writing Scripting News and Blogging.

Hats off Dave!

Some people have such juice (i.e traffic) to their blog that they when they sneeze, the blogsphere gets a cold. In this post from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger: Scoble uses his clout to try and either force or embarass or punish Om Malik for having only partial text RSS feeds, because, as he says "I hate those". "[…]Oh, and Om Malik, I’m putting a lot fewer things from your feeds on my link blog lately after you went to partial text feeds. I hate those. But it’s an effective way to get me to mostly remove you from my link blog.[…]

(from: The link blog effect)

So, what, is it "Link softly but carry a big stick?"

If you keep up, you may have heard abou this. A new search engine coming from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Check out this post from Mashable!for a pretty good update:

“Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is set to launch a search engine early next year in partnership with Amazon – it’s intended to be a rival to Google and Yahoo.

(Read the rest here: Wikiasari: Wikipedia Founder Launching a Google Rival)”

Here’s another pretty good article introducing the idea from TimesOnline.

Check out this post from ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed: 53% of People Prefer Pie Charts [The World’s Fair] Not sure if this is serious or not 🙂 Reminds me of the old joke "94% of all statistics cited are invented ON THE SPOT!

From LifeHacker (one of my new favorite sites) comes a pointer to a site called FeedsThatMatter.

What it seems to do is to look at public subscriptions listed in BlogLines, do a tag analysis, and display a tag cloud. BlogLines is a huge web based aggregator service and so I’d guess that their subscriptions are relatively representative of the whole blogosphere.

[](https://i0.wp.com/s3.m...

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia who later quite the project over differences in vision, just announced a direct competitor to the project: Citizendium Via Modern Dragons, via KurzweilAI.net

Before I discuss this new product idea I am turning over in my mind, I want to say a few things about why I keep working in this area. I mean there are so many people working on aggregators, and after all Microsoft is building it into IE, and it’s been in FireFox for a while. Why bother?

I’ve thought all along, and I still believe, that all these blog readers, or aggregators, or whatever you want to call them are really important but still very primitive.

I’ve also said and still believe that all of them, BlogBridge included, are very much generation zero, and are more or less following the same pattern, in a way set by email readers.

The reason I am very bullish on th...

While I was on vacation I often had an idea pop in my head and feel the urge to write about it my blog. Why, why, why?

I think I’ve been writing this blog for over three years. Here is my very first post. Since then I must have spent innumerable hours writing. It is *almost * like an addiction.

Why? I’ve given this thought over the months and years, and also have had to answer the question more than once. Here’s what I think:

When you work on your own like I do, you miss the usual outlet of popping into someone’s office to tell them or show them or share with them something interesting, cool, funny or great that you experienced or saw. Writing it on my blo...

I just returned from a trip in the American Southwest, starting in St. George Utah, to Bryce Canyon National Park, Capitol Reef Park, Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park and ending in Mesa Verde National Park. A spectacular trip. I am now back, invigorated and ready for action.

http://wikimapia.org/s/#y=38324420&x=-110401611&z=7&l=0&m=a

One of the funny things that happen when I am away is that I get ideas for new blog posts which I can’t actually post. So here’s the backlog that I hope to unleash on you in the coming days and weeks:

Why do I blog, anyway?

...

Check here for the details! This will be an overview of BlogBridge 3.0 and the Feed Library, come one, come all!

Technorati Tags: skype, skypecast

A really great article in The Atlantic about Wikipedia. Very relevant during this Wikimania weekend.

“Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge. ” (from “The Hive“)

Check it out here!

Technorati Tags: wikimania, wikipedia

The Web-2.0, No-Bull-Shiitake Marketing Test by Seth Godin

A good set of ideas about getting your (my) ideas to spread

(tags: ideas sethgodin marketing soflow)

Pito’s Blog: Atlantic Magazine on Wikipedia

(tags: wikimania wikipedia)

BlogBridge: Wikipedia Topic Guide

If you are going to Wikimania you might be interested in this collection of Wikipedia related blogs and feeds.

(tags: wikipedia wikimania guide)

This article: The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web is a very interesting survey of RSS and issues that folks in the Science community have to be aware of.

Just announced over on the BlogBridge site, BlogBridge 3.0. Check it out! I think you’ll like it. It has lots of new goodies, too many to mention here, but see the announcement for the juicy details!

Wikipedia – How to milk the ole cow

A rare glimplse into the spammers mind: how to milk wikipedia for traffic.

(tags: spam wikipedia interesting-soflow)

Micro Persuasion: Attend a Marketing Conference in Second Life

Looks pretty interesting. What will they think of next???

(tags: soflow interesting secondlife)

BloggerCon IV is going on right now, in California. This is Dave Winer’s original ‘UnConference‘. It’s being incredibly well covered, by blog, photo and podcast. I haven’t come close to reading all the stuff being posted, so these are just some semi-random posts to give you a flavor:

Dan Farber: The user complaint session

Dave Winer: Notes from Day 1

Robert Scoble: BigCo employees should listen to this

...

Jaron is a brilliant thinker (and an amazing piano player as well) Anything he writes is interesting. In this case he seems to be worrying about how much credence is being given to knowledge in Wikipedia and related types of sites. I don’t know if I agree with him, but it is a great read!

Jaron worries about: “the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective ...

Guy Kawasaki — Bona tempora volvantu

Guy Kawasaki’s blog always has good stuff!

(tags: feed soflow interesting)

TIME.com Print Page: Nation — Exclusive Book Excerpt: How an Al-Qaeda Cell Planned a Poison-gasAttack on the N.Y. Subway

Pretty amazing! Worth a quick read

(tags: politics terrorism nyc)

Hacking Computers Over USB

Here’s an amazingly simple way to have someone hack your computer. Wow people sure are creative!

(tags: security interesting hacking)

Look Out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers!

How to tap in the world’s brain to get answers to all the questions you’ve been looking for.

(tags: research interesting socialnetwork soflow)

I couldn’t resist, and so who knows why, we (Aleksey and I) have built a new product in the BlogBridge family. We call it BlogBridge: Library. It’s a software application that customers can run on their own servers which provides a nice, flexible, powerful library of RSS Feeds, OPML Reading Lists and Podcasts. The idea is that the customer supplies the content and gets the software from us. Kind of a private iTunes Store for Blogs, Reading Lists and Podcasts.

It’s targeted at any organization who wants to create a library of blog and related information for a certain audience. We were focused on companies or other organizations building a library for their employ...

The other day I complained about comment spam on my two blogs. Comment spam is when fake comments are added to a blog post that include links to some random site. They are supposedly put there by spammers to generate traffic to their sites, as well as try to improve their site’s ratings in Google. Whether it works for them I don’t know, all I know is that it’s a pain in the butt for me.

I am now using a Movable Type plugin called HMPassphrase. It’s very simple and effective. Whenever anyone wants to post a comment they have to read instructions on the web p...

The feature isn’t new, it’s actually pretty old. It’s also very poorly documented. But it’s new to me. I’ve configured del.icio.us to automatically create a post to my blog of all the tags I’ve submitted in the last 24 hours.

If you are a del.icio.us user, look under “settings”, “experimental”, “daily blog posting” for the setting. Then ask me or google for an explanation of what the fields mean.

Combined with the Tagging feature in BlogBridge, it allows me to post to my blog (virtually) with almost no effort. So when I am traveling (like I was the last 2 days) I can still show some semblance of activity on my blog. Very cool.

Will it make me a lazy blogger? What’s a lazy blogger anyway?

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us

Both this blog and the BlogBridge have been getting spammed more and with both comment and trackback spam. It’s becoming a real pain. I’ve poked around my Movable Type settings looking for solutions but I am sure someone who knows MT well could tune my configuration with ease. Anyone out there want to lend a hand? Please email me!

Technorati Tags: movabletype

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia, and of course traditionally (like anyone) have been an admirer of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Recently the highly respected magazine Nature published an article describing a study in which they compared the two and found only slightly fewer inaccuracies in Wikipedia than in Britannica.

“The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” (from “...

glenn has been busy today. A series of very intriguing posts, all made today, a Sunday no less. I can remember when glenn insisted on keeping his Sunday’s clear of anything non-recreational. You should check out his blog, there’s lots of good stuff there.

This one caught my eye – “RSS is not a goal” wherein I encountered this especially meaningful (to me) paragraph:

“And in the meantime, if I were working on any kind of RSS/OPML-related application, I would take a day or two to stop and think about my goals, not in terms of today’s syntaxes but in terms of th...

Amyloo has an interesting post about reading lists. One thing bears expanding on:

“There’s a tendency to think of reading lists as topic-oriented and fairly static — refined and appended to, but keeping most of the same data over time. A slant on reading lists I’ve thought about are specialized lists that change their composition entirely on a periodic basis, a list in which none of the feeds you see today may be there next week.” (from Churning urns of burning funk)

True. And actually there are a lot of very ...

Wikipedia appears to have banned all contributions and edits coming from the US Congress!

“I am opening this RFC in order to centralise discussion concerning actions to be taken against US Congressional staffers who repeatedly revert wars, blank content, engage in libelous behaviour, violate WP:NPOV, WP:CIV. The editors from this IP are rude and abrasive, immature, and show no understanding of Wikipedia policy. The editors also frequently try to whitewash the actions of frequent politicians.

They treat Wikipedia articles about politicians as though they own it, replacing articles with their sanctioned biographies and engaging in revert wars when other users dispute this sudden change. They...

Here’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times about how to get travel information in your your home page, like My Yahoo and others. This all hinges on RSS of course, which means you can bring your travel information into BlogBridge and other aggregators.

“Recently, these sites began allowing consumers to populate their home pages with similar information they’d find in e-mail newsletters, with two added benefits: all the relevant information from multiple sites appears on one page, instead of multiple e-mails, a...

Cori Schiegel convinced me:

“Personally, I want the data the AttentionRecorder is collecting to be used, but I don’t want to freight porting my feeds from one platform to another with those additional 10000+ rows of data.” (from elliptical…“)

Whileit may make sense to use OPML as a foundation for the format for Attention information, they are not one and the same and should not be inexorably bound.

In the ...

There’s been a lot of discussion (follow these links for more links) of late about how to extend OPML, including what I wrote about some common aggregation related OPML attributes. From reading the discussions and thinking about it, I am thinking that a course correction might be better. Much of the discussion has been about an Attention namespace for OPML. I totally ...

Glad to see that Ray is blogging again. Now that he is at Microsoft running the big new initiative this should be a really interesting one to follow!

“A couple of weeks ago, Bill and I brought life to a new initiative that, over the course of the months and years ahead, will catalyze and deliver a number of things that I’m very excited about. At that event, I said that unlike many other stealth projects I’ve/we’ve done, in this case many of our plans and offerings will evolve progressively and in the open, shaped in good measure by a dialog with you.” (from Ray Ozzie’s Blog)

Looks like it will be real...

I assume you know about Wikis and the Wikipedia. If not, click on the links to the left and you’ll both find out and experience it, in one fell swoop.

On BlogBridge we use a Wiki as a very lightweight project collaboration tool. Minimalist eRoom if you like. That’s the kind that most often occurs to me.

But if you think about Wikipedia articles work, they are actually meant to properly describe or define something that exists and has a name. In other words, they specifically are meant to be ...

We all love Wikipedia – I know I do. I’ve sung it’s praises to lots of people and have personally often looked stuff up in it and been satisfied. Still I can’t help but be impressed with an article I came across written by Robert McHenry former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

He’s sick and tired of it and not going to take it any more:

“The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What h...

Over the last week or so I’ve been working around the clock preparing for BlogBridge’sappearance at the BlogOn 2005 conference in New York City.

Contemplating this at the end of the first day, I have to say it’s been a blast although quite different from what I’ve done in the past.

This morning, before 7:00am I left my hotel on 23d Street for the half hour walk to the Copacabana.

In my backpack was a computer, power supply, 250 1 page “sales sheets” (color fliers) and a bunch of business cards. I was headed for a 2 day conference where BlogBridge is being highlighted as one of Chris Shipley’s BlogOn 2005 In...

His conundrum is that he loves both Web services (browser based applications) and Windows applications and can’t seem to pick a one-size-fits-all preference. Apparently some of his readers noticed that and are calling him to task on it.

“Some see my condundrum as being one brought upon by where I work. OK, it certainly is a possibility that I’m drinking the Redmond Koolaid,” (from Scobelizer)

Read Scoble’s whole post, it has a very good perspective, and actually I totally agree with the dilemma. Maybe it’s not a dilemma at all. Maybe it’s not being religious and just picking the best tool for the job, balancing all fact...

If you are interested in the Intelligent Design debate, this is an fascinating and somewhat surprising article about a survey done by the Pew Research Center for the People. As usual with this kind of thing it is useful to know the bias of the folks doing the survey, which I have not looked into at all.

“Despite these fundamental differences, most Americans (64%) say they are open to the idea of teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools, and a substantial minority (38%) favors replacing evolution with creationism in public school curricula.” (from “Religion: A Strength and Weakness for Both Parties“)

Interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: intelligentdesign, science

As you might have seen over at our BlogBridge blog, we are experimenting with a new visualization of blog postings, right inside BlogBridge. I’ve taken to calling this the Kleppner Widget as it was invented by Paul and Andrew Kleppner who have been contributing some cool stuff of late.

This is a snippet from a pre-release build of BlogBridge:

What you are looking at is a display of 4 Feeds (Dan Gillmor, Joho the Blog, ...

I was talking about search engines the other day. I guess Findory includes a search engine, but in my mind it’s a lot more. Here’s how they describe it:

“Our patent-pending technology personalizes the homepage for each reader, recommending content based on what they’ve read and what new content is being published. We crawl through thousands of news and blogs articles so you don’t have to.” (from About Findory)

You have to play with it to get the idea. For me it’s especially handy to uncover other information that is somehow related to what I am writing about in my own blog.

For example, ...

BlogOn is a conference being organized by the inimitable Chris Shipley.

The full name is “BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit”.

And yes, **yours truly is on the advisory board FWIW.

The conference is in New York City, on October 17 and 18.

Look here for more information.

You probably know Chris Shipley from the ...

Dave Sifry of Technorati has an interesting analysis of the current dynamics in the Blogosphere:

“Summary:

Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005

The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months

A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily

About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year

About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly” (from Sifry’s Alerts)”

Read the whole thing for lots of other interesting tidbits!

Technorati Tags: blog, technorati

Check this out: Microsoft Announces Plans to Acquire FrontBridge… Is BlogBridge next?

(ok, you know I am only joking, right ;->)

Technorati Tags: funny, microsoft

Scoble has been really picking on Technorati recently, and I can’t figure out why. Given the megaphone that Robert has it has got to be really hurting Technorati. There has been a lot of detailed commentary about this, some of it quite good, for example David Berlind and Dan Farber on ZDNet and Padawan.info.

My modest contribution to the debate is this: Why does it shock anyone that the number of links reported by T...

Scripting News: 7/15/2005: Dave points to the New York Times article by Rich Meslin, Blogs 101. It’s a very nice collection of Blogs of general interest as a good introduction to the world of Blogs.

“If you want to get the feel of Web logs and blogging, visit some of these sites. Most blogs carry links to other blogs on related topics or that the author likes. This page is under development; feel free to suggest your own finds. Business and sports suggestions are particularly welcome.” (from New York Times)

It’s a really nice starter list, but Rich, how about providing your list as OPML as well?

Technorati Tags: blog, OPML

I encounter more and more organizations or people who are collecting lists of feeds or blogs for one purpose or another. With BlogBridge we have the BlogBridge Topic Experts. Global Voices have their collection of international blogs (very cool!) And of course, anyone using a feed reader or aggregator has their own list of subscriptions.

Anyone who is making a list of blogs or feeds (or I suppose, URLs of any kind) that is not secret or private, would do well to record that in a simple OPML list. And the ‘handle’ to that list or collection is a URL.

Lets see. Instead of telling people, you can find my list of best restaurant blogs as a BlogLines list, or as this html page, or as a BlogBrid...

All software has bugs, no doubt. So pulling out one story to make a point isn’t really fair. (Especially recalling the story about stones and glass houses.)

But if I looked I know I could find story after story, including some that I could write from first hand experience, about the terrible rough edges on all the software on which our much beloved blogosphere runs. And from that observation and those stories comes the premise of this post. Here’s one of the stories:

“It all started two weeks ago when I undertook the “drop-in” upgrade from Movable Type 3.14 to 3.17. Well, “drop-in” is not really the word. I had made some changes to my server configuration that I thought...

Aren’t you glad, since every other blogger is blah-blah-blah’ing about it? But here is a linkwith some really insightful posts about it.

Just in the unlikely event that you didn’t pick it up, a couple of days ago we released BlogBridge 1.8 as a weekly release. The major new thing is SmartFeeds, which I describe at length (or ad nauseam) here, here and here. Check it out!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, del.icio.us, feedster, findory, RSS, technorati

Just a final follow up on this interesting story (actually more of an event than a story because it was over so quickly:)

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine has an interesting view on why the Wikitorial experiment (seems to have) failed, and how to do it differently:

“The LA Times didn’t understand what it was doing and made three criticial mistakes. […] 1. Collaboration vs. argument […], 2. Care and feeding […], 3. Newspaper ego […]” (from Buzzmachine)

Technorati Tags: wiki, wikipedia

I wrote a few days ago about the coming LA Times initiative to create something they are calling “Wikitorials.” Well they’ve done it, and the results are quite interesting:

Someone going by the name Hank Ramey (a real name?) does a complete ‘rewrite’ of the LA Times Editorial. A really provocative idea. However it’s not at all clear what was rewritten though, so the effort is kind of loss.

For the more sophisticated Wiki user, a little digging reveals ...

Francois, reacting to something written by Jason Calcanis, makes a very good point in this discussion about feed and blog aggregators needing to have a way to make money:

Jason:

“A number of people have asked me how I handle folks lifting our RSS Feeds and putting advertising against them. The first step I take is sending an email like the one below letting people know what we allow and what we don’t allow. I always CC our legal counsel and include a screen shot.”

...

A couple of interesting related articles on facts and non-facts:

“Wikipedia is one of the Web’s most popular sites. I asked a teenager if he understood that it carries a disclaimer; Wikipedia “can’t guarantee the validity of the information found here.” “That’s just so that no one will sue them,” he shrugged. As to the content: “It’s all true, mostly.” (from: New York Times)

And in a related story, the LA Times is turning their editorial page into a wiki. As Jon Stewart would say: “Huuh?”:

“• Watch next week for the introduction of “wikitorials” — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editor...

If you are interested and fascinated with the Wikipedia, how it came to be, why it is the way it is, there’s an absolutely gripping account of the history and origins on Slashdot:

“An impassioned debate has been raging, particularly since about the summer of 2004, about the merits of Wikipedia and the future of free online encyclopedias. This discussion has not benefitted by much detailed, accurate consideration of the origins of Wikipedia and of its parent project, Nupedia.

But it seems to me that those origins are very important — crucial, even — to forming a proper judgment of the current state and best future direction o...

We’ve been experimenting with a switcharoo of the BlogBridge web site – a major overhaul conceived and prototyped by Francois. (Thanks!) The new site will be going to production tomorrow, but you get to take a look while we are putting the finishing touches on it.

What kind of a switcharoo? Well, instead of a conventional site that happened to contain a blog, we jokingly call this a ‘bloeb‘ (blog+web) site.

You’ve seen web sites with blogs in them, and you’ve seen blogs with non blog content attached to them, right? Well here we have a full hybrid, with a traditional navigation tree on the left and a bloggis...

Interesting article about counting blogs makes a good point right off the bat:

“First, let’s step back and consider why we’re counting blogs at all. You no longer see articles that attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Web by stating how many Web pages there are.

But blogs are still in the process of entering mainstream consciousness, so numerical credibility is important; bloggers themselves cite the statistics a lot.” (from Wall Street Journal Online)

Technorati Tags: blog

The latest weekly build has been posted, BlogBridge 1.6. Check it out! There are lots of bug fixes but the major new functionality is Phase 1 of SmartFeeds. Read our blog for more details, and download it here.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, RSS

Just a quick note of the very nice mention of BlogBridge by almost-famous Dowbrigade blog by the incredibly prolific Michael Feldman.

(Emphasis mine, throughout)

Blog Bridge is the amazing new RSS reader and aggregator from Pito Salas. Sure, it makes it easy to subscribe, arrange, view and blog from anything with an RSS feed.

But what really sets it apart is that it is written completely in Java, which means that it is platform-independent, works on any computer connected to the interenet, and it remembers not only what you are subscribed to, but which articles you have already read, or saved, or filed to read later. From anywher...

One of the cool things about BlogBridge’s (free) companion service, is that keeps track for you what you have and have not read, *even if you are using BlogBridge on more than one computer! *

In other words, please sign up for the service, and set your synchronization options the way you want them (daily, each time you run BlogBridge, or manually.) Each time you synchronize, not only will your subscription lists be kept in synch, but also which articles you have or have not read.

Important note on new BlogBridge 1.5. For those of you who are running our ‘weekly’ release of BlogBridge, you are now experiencing a faster, smaller architecture. One of the known consequences of this is that when upgrading to 1.5 from a previous version in many cases articles unread state may be lost. Don’t worry, this is a once only, known occurrence! Thank you for your patience!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

Check out the BlogBridge blog and site for the latest weekly release.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

Richard MacManus made a statement in a post last week which elicited a lot of very interesting responses:

“Competition for Bloglines: We’re nearly halfway through 2005 and there’s still no heavyweight competition to Bloglines, in the web based RSS aggregator stakes.”

The comment thread on the post is excellent and interesting, so I won’t parrot all that stuff all over again. If you are interested, take a look there. (I especially recommend this response from Michal Migurski.)

But here’s my question: isn’t it ...

A really interesting article about Blog Comment Spam. This is one person’s attempt to really follow all clues to their sources. It doesn’t end all that satisfactorily but it’s a good read. Coincidentally I just opened up comments on this blog and got hit with 80 bits of spam (and 6 real comments.)

For some crazy reason the comment spammers attack a single post. In my case, it was“Hacking the Papal Election” which alone got hit with the 80 comments.

Technorati Tags: blog, spam, puppy

Good morning sports-fans. We recently totally revamped the BlogBridge web site. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

Importantly, it now includes a group blog where the BlogBridge team posts bits of interest to anyone interested in the project.

We have started a new series of posts there called: “Did you know”where every day we (try to) post a short article describing a feature or capability of interest to users.

Check it out!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, UI

Long time readers of this blog (yes, I can say that now, it’s been 2 years or so 🙂 know that I am a Dave Winer fan and a daily reader of Scripting News. In yesterday’s posts, ...

In the continuing series of “this blog things is really getting big”, the most recent issue of BusinessWeek has a whole section all about blogging. Not only that, but they’ve started their own meta-blog.

It’s here! We are officially declaring BlogBridge as a 1.0 product! The site is updated, the features are solid and we are off to the races. Here are some personal tidbits about where we are now and what happens next:

Actually 1.0 has been done for about a week now, and really over the last 4 weeks we’ve been much more focused on fixing bugs than anything else. And if by now you don’t know – you can read all about BlogBridge hereand download 1.0 here.

Meanwhile we are well on the way to the design and planning of BlogBridge 2.0. Yes, this isn’t the end of the line, actually it’s the very ...

Doctor Scoble poses a provocative question: “Which aggregator do you like best”? Quite an amazing variety of aggregators are mentioned.It might be the most crowded space I’ve seen in a long time.

Gee, and my own project, BlogBridge is in the space. Of course, we are willing to take on all comers because we feel that we’ve got a better mousetrap, and that we’ve pushed the envelope in some really important areas. But you know, I bet all of them feel the same way.

Robert, if you read this: check out BlogBridge won’t ya?

Steve Gilmor muses about the history of the Attention.xml spec in his blog. Steve thought up Atttention. xml as way to capture what feeds and items people do and don’t spend time (their attention) on, collecting, aggregating and then mining this information for all kinds of purposes. (This is my interpretation, but I think it’s pretty accurate.)

BlogBridge is a feed reader with a primary goal to save the reader’s time by collecting and using any information possible to help the user focus on what will be useful to them and...

Here’s a really interesting article by Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe about Web Radio, reminding us that there’s a whole other world out there that is related to but quite different from PodCasting.

“Thousands of others share a similar affliction, thanks to Internet technology that lets anybody with a little money set up an online ”radio station.” The term isn’t quite right, since the Internet uses wires, not radio waves, to transmit music and chat. But Internet broadcasting has grown in popularity to the point where it’s become a significant alternative to traditional radio, and an appealing venue for major advertisers.”

Blogads has conducted a survey of people who read blogs. The results are quite interesting. One thing that stood out to me was that 72% don’t use RSS (i.e. an aggregator) to read blogs. This is consistent with another finding, which is that people who read blogs typically read about 10 of them every day. When reading “only” 10, using a web browser is more than fine.

Check it out, there are lots of other interesting tidbits!

There’s been a lot of talk about tags, folksonomies, taxonomies, etc. Trying to make sense out of this can be confusing. At the recent ETech conference there was more than one presentation on the topic, each of which helped me understand the subtleties a little better, and organize them in my mind. [What follows is fairly inside-baseball so if you are not particularly into this topic it will probably be somewhat obscure and likely not very interesting, so you are warned!]

What are we to do with this term ‘Tags’? It is used in many different places, sometimes to mean the same thing and sometimes something subtly different. This is not surprising about a set of ideas that are morphi...

If you are a blog aficionado then you’ve followed this debate, ad something. I don’t have any pearls of wisdom to add, but did come across this quite good article discussing the issues (via MacNetJournal)

“Or in Walsh’s words, in trying to tell if a blog is serious journalism or the rant of a pajama-clad windbag, “It’s kind of like art. You know it when you see it.”

Hmm. I thought that was pornography 🙂

There are two very brief audio-visual overviews of ‘cool’ BlogBridge features.

BlogStarz feature:in this brief screencast I introduce and explain a handy way to rate which feeds you find most useful, and at the same time benefit from the experience of other users. Automatic highlighting in articles: In this brief screencast,I show how BlogBridge will highlight words and phrases in green (link to a feed I am already following), red (link to a feed that is new to me) or blue (specific words or phrases which are interesting to me.)

Let me know what you think. Useful? Does it work with your browser on your platform?

From News.com, about Kaboodle BrightAds RSS **On Monday, the company introduced a self-service system that lets online publishers pair advertising with their RSS feeds. Called BrightAds RSS (after the technology format known as Really Simple Syndication), the service takes advantage of Kanoodle’s keyword advertising system to match Web content to relevant ads. Once a publisher signs up, an advertising link will piggyback on its syndicated feed sent to third-party news readers.

Echo’s of the Google Toolbar debate? It sounds like Kanoodle BrightAds RSS will create and host RSS feeds for their customers, and intersperse Ads in the feeds. I am not sure this is a good idea, but I suppose it was inevitable**.

The question is, will the inserted ads be distinguishable so that an aggregator could strip them out?

Just a quick note that we’ve updated the weekly build to 0.11. Given that we are wrapping things up for our 1.0 Release, which is imminent, changes are going to be mostly on internals – bug fixes and performance. Still there are a few goodies here for you:

Right clicking on an Article offers a “Copy Link to Clipboard” command. There is a preference to cause the text on the clipboard to actually contain the HREF notation to allow easy pasting into your blog. For Mac users, we have tweaked the color scheme to be even more OS X compliant. Drag and Drop of shortcuts onto BlogBridge automatically try to subscribe to them as a new Feed. There are various other, even smaller items, not worth listing here.

Enjoy!

Dear users, ex-users, and future users of BlogBridge, As we are approaching our 1.0 release, we are starting to plan what comes next! It is a good time to take the pulse of people using BlogBridge regularly and tap into your collective wisdom! Before getting into that, there are a few preliminaries…

We just released our 0.9 Beta, and 0.10 Weekly build. Check out the Weekly at http://www.blogbridge.com/install/weekly/blogbridge.jnlp. It is quite wonderful on all platforms 🙂 People say it’s extremely fast and responsive. I regularly run it with 400 Feeds and it’s snappy as anything. (I don’t read 400 Feeds, it’s more to stress test the app.)

Also, have you seen these new features?

BlogBridg...

If you are interested in blogging you certainly have come across Robert Scoble’s blog, the most prominent blog written by a Microsoft employee. Recently The Economist wrote a story about Robert Scoble at Microsoft. Nice article. Tip o’ the hat to Robert Scoble for his response to this column:

Finally, I really don’t deserve the credit for humanizing Microsoft. There were about 100 bloggers already doing that work when I got to Microsoft. In particular, Joshua Allen deserves that title more than anyone. He is our Jackie Robinson of blog...

We just put up a new weekly build of BlogBridge with many new features. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

Community Fields. Right click on a Feed, and choose Feed Properties. Click on the community tab, where you will see our initial pair of fields, Country and Tags. What’s interesting is that whatever you set for these two fields will be seen by all other users. If you know the country where this feed originates you can set it. And if you feel like tagging (classifying) this feed you can do it too.

Discover Other Feeds (on the Tools menu) is greatly enhanced (and there is more to come!) First of all, some people are not sure what this discovery business is about, so a qu...

Dave Winer says that there’s a bit of buzz about social networks and RSS aggregators. I haven’t seen it myself, but I am glad to see it brought up, because it’s one of the things that’s evolving nicely in BlogBridge and will be available in the next weekly build. What do I mean by “Social Networks and RSS Aggregators”? Briefly, here’s what we are doing with in in BlogBridge:

Any Feed being accessed through BlogBridge can be given a rating (one through five stars) by a user. Also, the user can attach one or more Tags to the Feed. Also, the user...

Dave Winer makes a point which I totally agree with: it is important to learn from what has come before – or more more provocatively – to steal good ideas wherever you can find them. And secondly that the only way to do that is to make it a point of being very familiar with other products, other approaches. As a designer of software I certainly believe in that. In fact,I have lived that over and over again: Improv learned from 1-2-3, eRoom learned from Lotus Notes, etc. And similarly, BlogBridge has...

It’s one thing to be interested in blogs so you can read and learn and become aware of new ideas. But when it comes to joining into the discussions, watch out! No it’s more than the well known problem of following discussion threads across blogs. It’s just the ridiculous amount of stuff that gets written on any hot topic (like Folksonomies, for example.) If you want to contribute a half-intelligent idea to the debate, the number of links to follow and essays to read is very intimidating, and certainly the odds of uttering an original thought approach zero. So I’ll stop here.

(If you are not a BlogBridge you will not find this very interesting) We notice many of you have requested a BlogBridge account but not activated it. Here’s the thing: once you ask for the account, you will receive an email with a link in it that you have to click. Until you click, your account will not be ready to us. (Our instructions need to be improved!)

Why activate? Because until you do, the wonderful benefits of the BlogBridge service will not be available to you!

Did you know that BlogBridge has ‘themes’ ? Well today there are only two, but soon there will be many. A Theme is just way to set all the fonts and colors and other UI settings in one fell swoop. For example, the “Big Theme” uses larger fonts making them easier to read. Enjoy!

I got many comments from people about my postingsrecently about Lotus Improv. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a pretty accurate description of Improv and its history in the WikiPedia. By the way, I had absolutely nothing to do with writing it. Actually I am quite curious who did write it, because he or she was pretty well informed so I suspect it’s someone who was on the team from the early days, or knew someone who was. (Of course there are a few inaccuracies, but what the heck!) Cool

(Non-users of BlogBridge, this wil not be interesting to you. But you have to ask yourself, why are you not using it?) As most everyone who uses BlogBridge seems to be subscribed to my Blog I thought posting a tip or news every so often might be a way to expose some thinking about BlogBridge to you all, so starting today I will be posting a regular item that I think would be of interest.

We very recently added a command to the Help menu, “Send Feedback” which we encourage you to use if you have any thought, complaint, bug report, or whatever that you would like to share with us. Just enter your text in the box and that’s all there is to it.

Note that we have plenty of users who are regular...

Peggy Noonan is a great, albeit a little on the conservative side, columnist that I read whenever I can. Here’s a good article she wrote on the Main Stream Media. Blogs and Dan Rather.

There has been a lot of traffic on this new meme “Folksonomies”. This Slashdot bithas many of the important links in it, and I can’t say that I’ve read all of it, so what I am describing below may be old hat. I am thinking that while Folksonomies is a kind of catchy, although hard to say or spell word, it is too narrow. Folksonomies, as I understand, refers to a community based way of arriving at a taxonomy of information, basically subjective judgements on what the information is “about.” We’ve seen this in http://del.icio.us and in http://www.flickr.com.

It seems to me that there are all kinds of meta data, some subjective, and s...

Recently in a conversation I was asked to comment on what really was the big difference between a blog and a newsgroup. After all they are both a reverse chronological list of postings, right?

My answer, maybe obvious, is this: a newsgroup is (typically) focused on a certain subject matter, and has many different people posting their comments and questions on that topic. So you follow a newsgroup because you are interested in a specific subject matter.

A blog is (typically) focused on a certain author’s voice, and often covers many different topics, of interest to the author. So you follow a blog because you are interested in a particular author’s point of view.

Of course in reality it’s not quite that black and white, and there are shades of grey in between.

On her site, World On Fire, Sarah McLachlanhas an interesting video, which reminded me what Video podcasting or Video blogging can become.

Picking up on a theme of minefrom a few days ago, one of the important characteristics of the blogging phenomenon is that people who otherwise would have no access to broadcasting are able t...

We all love reading blogs (right?), and some of us even use their valuable time writing blogs. In my evangelism of blogging, a common question is “Why?.” Why would you spend your time writing, for a small (for most of us) mostly anonymous audience, for free? Well I have a (lower-case “t”) theory that many bloggers (like me) work alone, at home, or as a consultant, or perhaps wor in a company but not among like minded people.

In this scenario, the blog becomes an outlet for casual little thoughts, insights and discoveries (like this one), which usually would be shared around the office coffee machine, by popping into someone else’s office, or when running into them at lunch or on the elevator. When none of these outlets are available, a solo worker becomes a blogger and shares those nuggets with “the world.”

I don’t know if this rings true to other bloggers, but it does to me.

Yesterday I was interviewed about BlogBridge by ClientJava.com, a very useful Web site for us Java desktop developers. Check it out.. In the comment section I was asked to elaborate on my provocative statements about Java Web Start. Here’s what I said.

Here are two interesting bits that look at all the aggregators and have some interesting comments about capabilities and futures.

Waiting for Aggie by Jack Vinson

Winer on right and wrong ways to use RSS

[Via Portals and KM]

I just came across a good summary on one of our favorite topics from KM Magazine. It was written by Bill Ives of Portals and KM fame: “Blogs are both a technology and a way of communicating. On the one hand, they are nothing more than simple Web sites, often published in the form of a journal, that provide original content, links to other relevant content, simple editing features, comment capability, archiving, search, and security options. This ease of use provides a vehicle for the writer’s unedited personal voice, which is considered a defining aspect of blogs. While many uses beyond personal journalism have emerged, the individual voice remains a central characteristic, even in the corporate setting.”

I’ll forgive Bill for not mentioning BlogBridge🙂

My answer to the question: “What is a Blog”, which I get asked often, goes something like this: “A blog is a just a web site with articles or notes that get posted there, generally by a single person. There’s nothing especially new or complex about the technology of blogs. What’s new and compelling is the blogging phenomenon: For whatever reason, individuals with unique and important points of view are choosing to publish those in blogs.”

Actually the point of this post is to point you this great and I would almost say moving account by Kevin Sites, keeper of ...

Hey, sorry if you aren’t a BlogBridge user yet, but I just can’t resist some news here. First of all, we’ve released a new Alpha, just today.You can get it here. The way we work it is that if after a week or so of use there are no show stopped bugs, we will promote the Alpha to a Beta. The general release model is described here.

This new version has a ton of new feature stuff, plus major stability and performance improvements. I dare say, we are getting close to having a Release 1.0 product. Here are some highlights:

The BlogBridge Service gets a major new capability, which i...

This is pretty cool: BlogBridge was picked up by Sun’s monthly ‘Swing Sightings’online column where they periodically highlight cool application that, I guess, are good examples of what can be done with Java on the desktop. Thanks!

If you haven’t heard about Wikipedia, you should check it out. It’s a grass roots encyclopedia. It has a huge number of articles, contributed in general by anyone who feels like writing an article, presumably because they know something about it. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of Wikipedia. It’s quite an amazing thing, amazing because of how it has grown, how it was built, who built it and what it was built on.

One often mentioned question is how accurate is Wikipedia anyway?. It’s an important question in that Wikipedia is developing quite a reputation, not only among Technorati, but also among civ...

In response to a query from Andrew Watt and Danny Ayers about what they called next-generation infromation aggregators, I wrote this, and I thought I’d share it here too. Dear Andrew and Danny,

Still in early beta, but certainly not secret is BlogBridge, www.blogbridge.com, an app I’ve been working on, that I’ve been describing as a next generation blog aggregator.

In fact I am moving away from the term ‘blog’ as being too limited, and I think embracing the term ‘feed’. Why? Because I kind of suspect that one of the early values of something like BlogBridge to people outside the hard-core blog fanatics (I am one) will be as an alternative way to email to receive notifications (like from UP...

Believe me when I say that this will only be interesting to you if you are curious about the thinking about the Starz rating system that we’ve built into BlogBridge. If you don’t have a burning curiosity, trust me, it will put you to sleep 🙂 The basic idea for the BlogStarz! mechanism is simple but the UI at this point is still confusing practically everyone. I will explain it here and describe changes we are planning.

The idea is that the BlogStarz! are generated by BlogBridge and are meant to be a summary rating that ought to match how interesting this particular blog would be to the user, based on several factors.

Currently 4 factors are implemented: your personal rating...

Hey, this is really cool. BlogBridge made a “Top 10 Java Web Start Apps” list. I ran across it on “Cardsharp on Software”, a blog written by Kurt Williams. “7. BlogBridge. Wicked cool RSS Client”

That alone led to lots of downloads and hits on the site. And then it got picked up by Java Desktop as a Featured Blog, which led to even more traction.

Wicked cool, as they say!

There’s a site called IT Conversations that has a collection of interviews, recorded on mp3s with some very interesting people. Also included are lectures, debates and panels. It is an excellent site, I recommend it. For a while now, I’ve been, manually, downloading those onto my PC and transferring them to my iPod for listening while I work out. Very useful and very manual.

It turns out that there’s a new term floating around, PodCasting, that describes the 21st century version of what I’ve been doing. Conceptually, you pick the interviews you are interested in from a list, and they get automatically get downloaded to your iPod. ...

Here’s a really cool idea (via Boing Boing– see their story) – Creating a web site, identical to an existing one, except that certain words have been changed to links. A very powerful idea. Read the articleand see the site. In BlogBridgewe already have automatic highlights of keywords. That is, you can specify a set of words or phrases y...

We just got a totally cool new BlogBridge feature working, which actually was suggested by a user a few months ago: keyword highlighting. It’s quite simple: The user supplies a set of keywords they care about (in my case: “Bush Kerry Microsoft eRoom Curacao and Pito”)

In turn, whenever blogs are displayed, wgere hose keywords occur, they are highlighted, like so:

Click on the image to enlarge it and note how the words Kerry and Bush are highlighted.

That’s not all. Keyword matches also figure in the scoring of feeds, so when you want to look only at your highest rated feeds, those with matches will be rated more highly (actually this is configurable.)

WDYT?

Here’s a cool idea: using the web services of Google and Technorati together to find other, related blogs. Here’s the idea: One of the things I am trying to do with BlogBridgeis to help users discover new blogs that they would be interested in. Let’s say I am interested in finding other blogs which are related to or similar to one of my favorites, Scripting News.

First we ask Google for other sites ‘related to’ Scripting news (click here to see result.)

Starting at the second entry, we ask Technorati whether the re...

We are looking for a few people who would be willing to give verbal feedback on BlogBridge usability. I think it would take at most 1/2 hour of your time, and you’d have a chance to have a very direct impact on the direction of the product. Please call Pito or email me at pitoatblogbridge.com and I will fill you in. When we have T-Shirts, you will get one, gratis!

BlogBridge is going “Great Guns” as I told my friend David in answer to “What’s going on with BlogBridge?” Well I don’t really know what the heck that means except that I am pumped to see the progress we’ve been making. More and more every day. And now there’s a way for you to see it too! We just made a beta release (0.5.6)Betas have been coming about once a month.

Beta releases are tested (to a certain extent) on multiple platforms, include a web site update, emails and so on. We also snapshot the source code to SourceForge for the open source community.

Well, we realized that we have useful running code more often tha...

Ok, guys, we have another beta release with lots of great new goodies! It will be up on the web site tomorrow hopefully. It sports lots of new features, which I will be describing when I have some more time to do it. For now, please go to the BlogBridge web site and look around. Some links of interest:

New feature list describing beta 4 (version 0.5.6) Download new beta once it’s up by clicking here.

[](https://i0.wp.com/s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1075723/12829350/web...

I am often asked what’s so special about blogging. I always answer, technically it’s pretty simple, so that’s not it. It’s that there are people in the world, who for their own reasons have chosen to write down their thoughts and opinion. I learn things that I would never have learned otherwise from blogs. Here’s the latest example. Now I am not a Bushie – by any stretch of the imagination, and I haven’t bothered checking the credibility of this post.

But I find it a fascinating discussion of the analysis that is leading some to question the authenticity of certain documents that are purportedly showing that Bush had problems with his superiors in the National Guard back in 1972.

I had not heard or seen this before. An interesting perspective. That’s why blogs are great!

Here are two very interesting posts on the question of Feed Readers:

Glassdog asks “What’s wrong with Feed Readers” Rasterweb talks about “More aggregator maddness” Info Freako

This is of more than passing interest to me of course, as it relates to the design ofmy Blog Reader: BlogBridge. Some of the ideas mentioned here are already planned for BlogBridge, but there are lots of good tidbits to insipre further work!

Finally. Ever since we started working on BlogBridge, I’ve been talking about helping a user slice and dice and sort through a ton of blogs and other channels, finding the good from the bad, the interesting from the boring. Remember the catch phrase “… the ability to follow hundreds of blogs without loosing your mind” which is sprinkled all over our web site. In our next beta you will see the initial instantiation of this idea.

Channels (Blogs and other feeds) in BlogBridge are rated with from one to five stars (unique, isn’t it?) These stars will tell you how interesting these Channels are to you.

...

So, some day we will consider BlogBridgecomplete enough to actually be worth a few bucks. But the question is, how much? I’ve said many times, that even if every single cool idea I have is perfectly realized that the most one could expect is maybe $20 or $30 per copy. But even that is a lot. So, here’s a thought. Let the market decide.

What we plan to do is to offer a limited number (say 10) of perpetual BlogBridge licenses on eBay with an opening bid of $1 and no reserve. And see what happens. Depending on how it goes we could offer twice that number of licenses an opening bid equal to the average price the first batch went for. And so ...

We just put up BlogBridge Beta 3. Check it out. It’s got many neat new features, most particularly the BlogBridge Service which I wrote about recently. Here are the key links of interest:

BlogBridge Beta Download BlogBridge Website BlogBridge Feature List Stories about the BlogBridge Service

BlogBridge has reached the functionality now that it is my main Blog Reader. It’s more buggy than I would like, but that’s the nature of a beta, I guess.

Finally the foundation is there for us to build some of the neat new ideas we’ve been talking about, like “Show only good articles”. Hmmmm. Clever trick!

And let me know what you think!

This puzzled me. Once we released the BlogBridgesource code under the LGPL, it was out in the open, and published to the world. Had we forfeited the right to change the license? The answer depends on who owns and holds the Copyright to the code. As it is, all the code was either personally written by me (90%) or written by others who have agreed to transfer ownership to me. In other words, I hold a clear copyright to all the code, and that is the key. This makes it legitimate and legal to reissue the same source code under a new license.

What existed before (i.e. everything up to 0.5.3) under LGPLwill ...

I’ve done a little research about what the Open Source really means, legally, when it comes to BlogBridge. I wrote about this question a few months ago, and now, having consulted with people who know, here’s an update. First of all, start with the goals.

BlogBridge should be available, in source code form and executable form to everyone who wants to look at it and use it. It should be a bona fida open source project. Reasoning: We will be able to recruit others to help us build it; It is a significant differentiator among the other blog readers out there; And we can legitimately use services such as Source Forge to manage the project and its source code. If ...

Jon (and many others) really like Bloglines a lot; I recommend his article – there’s a lot to learn there. I want to address just one point, which is Jon’s prediction of the coming world domination by web apps. There’s an interesting paradox, inconsistency or contradiction here, if you look at the following qoutes from his piece:

“Web applications such as Gmail and Bloglines are already hard to beat. With a touch of alchemy they just might become unstoppable. “ “… that Bloglines, like Zope, handles foldering about as well as you can in a Web UI — which is to say, well enough. With an intelligent local cache it could be...

Here’s a sneak preview of something a little bit different. As of the next beta, we will be running a BlogBridge service off our BlogBridge.com site. Initially all it will do for you is keep things in synch as you use BlogBridge on different computers. Keeping in synch means making sure that you have the same ‘favorites’ configured and that your unread information is kept consistent.

It does require you to register, by giving us an email address and password to authenticate you. So that whenever you run BlogBridge it will pick up your favorites and not someone elses.
...

Hey, check out our new and improved web site. There is lots of new content, particulary a bunch of screen shotsand a greatly augmented FAQ. Also if you want to try BlogBridge Beta 2 (0.5.3) just click here.

Well we’ve been busy little beavers and are getting ready to release BlogBridge Beta 2. It has quite a few nifty new features! I will write a little more about it tomorrow or Monday. We’ve done a total overhaul of the content of the web site (the look/design is unchanged.) Take a look at our Brand New Web Site

An important change in opening the kimono a bit more is that you will find a direct link from our web site to install and run the beta. You are of course invited to join the beta group, but if you just want to play, go for it. Click here to download and run BlogBridge.

In tracking down a ‘bug’ in BlogBridge I discovered that my RSS feed for this blog has abbreviated items, that is, without html and limited to a certain number of words. That’s not what I wanted so with this new posting I should have full items. To test this, this line is bold

And this line is bulletted

I am away from home, at my home in Curacao for a reunion of Salas folks from around the world. I saw an childhood friend of mine, Raul, who asked me ‘So what’s a blog, anyway’? I was taken aback, because, what would Raul be doing, reading my blog, and especially with the rather ‘odd’ image that I left as the top entry before I headed down here? So, this is just a reminder of what I already knew, of course, that anyone around the world can read this. And secondly, that anyone with the name Salas might be tempted to see what’s to be seen on www.salas.com, so be careful what shows up on the front page!

A blog is a contraction of the word “Web Log”, as in web diary or web journal. A blog is a w...

I shoulda known… There’s cross-platform and then there’s cross-platform.

A week later, about 20 testers later, we’ve done 2 more sub-releases (up to 0.5.2 now) to shake out various platformy problems. It’s one thing to get it to run and another thing to get it to run right.

**Java WebStart:No picnic! ** While the promise is great, it doesn’t live up to it. And to think that this has been a feature of Java for years and years (I think 4) and it still is full of problems. Still the notion that in one fell swoop we get intallation and on-the-fly updating is pretty powerful, so we’ll just keep on struggling w...

Here’s the beta invite email that just went out… Wow, this is exciting! 🙂 “Thanks again for participating in this first beta of BlogBridge. A few comments before getting going:

This is an early beta. There are features missing and there are bugs. Please bear with us! One of our expectations of you as beta testers is that you will give us feedback with enough detail that we can do something about it, and a chance to correct problems that you find. We are very interested in your feedback on the feature set and usability of BlogBridge. You can have a lot of influence on the direction we take this application. Any and all suggestions are welcome. Please send your questions and comments to the y...

We are busy getting BlogBridgeready for beta (send email if you want to participate.) I hope we are only days away. But in doing that, and updating the web site, I thought this might be of interest…

Java really works! Here are three screen shots of BlogBridge, on Linux, Windows XP and Mac OSX. We didn’t write any platform specific code, and yet, other than some minor font goop, it looks quite nice, IMHO.

Here’s Linux: [](https://i0.wp.com/s3.media.squarespace.com/production/1075723/12829350/weblogs/archives/linux-wit...

BlogBridgeis getting ready to go into a limited beta test. The purpose is to get some early feedback on the basic User Interface model and the overall product vision. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to email@blogbridge.com. Doing a beta when you are operating a, shall we say, boutique software shop, is a different experience. The number of loose ends, bugs, procedural and process things that need to be nailed down are overwhelming.

The Web Site is being revised to reflect this new phase of work. The totally out in the open Functional Specification has been moved to a private area, a Wiki in fact. The thinking is that now that thin...

The beta test is almost ready to go. The plan is that it will start very small, with only a few users, and then based on feedback and results we will expand it as we release revisions and updates. If you are interested in joining up, send me email at beta@blogbridge.com.

As I continue to make rapid progress on BlogBridge, now with a significant amount of help, I am asking myself some tricky questions about licensing, which I thought I’d try out here. (By the way, BlogBridge is the blog reader that I’ve been working on and which is soon going to be available in beta form.)

BlogBridge is an open source application. The source code is all available on www.sourceforge.netfor any and all to look at and play with. It’s open source also because of the license that you’ll see in each source file, the so-called “...

Scoblebemoans the fact that folks aren’t all using the XML Icon, and he cites Random Bytes.

(Lucky Random Bytes for being mentioned by Scoble. As they say in Holleywood, you can say anything you like about me, just as long as you spell my name right.)

While I have always felt that XML icons, RSS, RSS Versions, and other geeky things should be hidden from regular users, for this point in time, Scoble is right.

Until we have nice 1-click subscribing with user meaningful gestures rather than rss.xml, some elementary standardization around a name and an icon is highly desirable.

Now to add insult to injury, using ...

One of the core goals of BlogBridgeis to give a newbie a quick and delicious taste of the world of blogs. One of the very first steps of course is to decide what feeds to follow. Other blog readers come with an initial set of feeds built in or offer the user to pick from a bunch of them. (I hear that the authors of those readers, once they become at all well known, are inundated with bloggers who would like their particular blog to be in the built-in initial list. Here’s a different approach. In BlogBridge I want allow a user to use someone else’s subscription list as a base for their own. In other words, give me a subscription list that matches Jon Udell’s. Or ...

This is getting interesting. In the last few weeks we’ve added a bunch of new features and we are now in the final stabilization of this release to make it suitable as a beta. While it is still way less featurefull than for example FeedDemon, we do have some very neat wrinkles that others don’t have. Try it!

Various peopleare saying that Opera, with it’s new release, is the first email client to integrate RSS access. Not true. Oddpost, a very nice and unique web-based mail client has had this for a while. I recommend it.

I’ve seen some discussionon the issues related to changingblog infrastructure from one system to another. In my case, I moved from Radio to Movable Type. My experience is that is was pretty easy to move the data (no data lock in) but the problem was the urls. Even if you take steps to make sure that the root url doesn’t change, the individual post and archive urls will probably change which means that anyone linked to your blog before will stay linked to your old blog and so you will experience a disruption in your traffic.

As you know we are developing BlogBridge, “a new kind of blog reader.” As you may know, BlogBridge is open source(see https://sourceforge.net/projects/blogbridge/.) With all our recent progress, I feel that pretty soon BlogBridge will be functional enough that it will actually be usable, and suitable for a beta. And after a successful beta, we plan to start charging for it, in some form or another.

The $64,000 question is: “How does it make sense to charge for a product, when all the source code is available for anyone to download for free?” Our theory right now, is that people who would be willing to ...

It’s been quiet but we’ve been busy. We are getting ready to put up a major new revision of BlogBridgewith goodies such as drag and drop of Channels, Collapse/Expand groups of articles, based on age, Next Unread processing, a bunch of new User Preferences. Also we are doing a bit of a reorganization of this site. The ‘Tasks’ page has become a nuisance to maintain and really not that useful, so it’s gone. And the Specs page is being totally revised to be more useful. Expect lots of additions to the Specs page as we move into another phase of development. Keep those cards and letters coming in!

It’s been quiet but we’ve been busy. We are getting ready to put up a major new revision of BlogBridge with goodies such as drag and drop of Channels, Collapse/Expand groups of articles, based on age, Next Unread processing, a bunch of new User Preferences. Also we are doing a bit of a reorganization of this site. The ‘Tasks’ page has become a nuisance to maintain and really not that useful, so it’s gone. And the Specs page is being totally revised to be more useful. Expect lots of additions to the Specs page as we move into another phase of development.

If I did things correctly, you should not have noticed too much different. But today, with the help of Dennis Doughty, I’ve switched to using Movable Typeas my blogging software. It’s no picknick, let me say that. My only reason to switch really was to make it easy for me to post from different computers. Other than that, I was happy with Radio Userland, and in fact I will miss certain things I’ve gotten used to in Radio. We’ll see how it goes. Please let me know if anything breaks!

The beat goes on. Now that we have Unread working, the time was ripe to add several new commands to the user interface. With the help of Everaldo, I am now using the Crystal Icon Set, which has provided a wonderful face lift for BlogBridge. Feedback welcome! Also with the help of one of our offshore developers (in the Ukraine) there are major improvements (and more coming) in the rendering of the Blog Aricles, which now include support for a larger subset of html, including images and soon links.

We made some major new progress since the last update. Unread Management. The persistent RSS layer (Informa) has been updated to support Unread management. This has been carried through the rest of BlogBridge, using Bold in the Channel Guide and in the Article list in the usual way to show read and uread. A set of new commands, Mark Read, Mark All Read have been added as well. Some of the other variations still need to be implemented.

Refined background processing. The various background processes have been moved into their own subsystem making it easier to manage them. Also a simple activity indicator has been added to the status bar so the user can see that there’s background activity...

Just a quick note about what’s up with BlogBridge. My time has been severely drained by a new consulting project, so progress has slowed down more than I would like. The last while I was knee-deep in installation, deployment, upgrade facilities. I looked at a bunch of possible ways of distributing,installing and then upgrading the application, evaluating 3 of them in detail. What a mess! In the end I settled on Java Web Start. I used to think of this as a bit of a kludge, but it seems to be well suited to deployment and installation of Java apps, and with each release Sun seems to make it a little nicer. So that’s what I am going with.

I’ve learned far more than I ever wanted to know about ...

Working on installation and deployment features. We will be using Java Web Start for this. We have not yet decided how open to make this yet. Most likely initially it will be via ‘secret URL’. You have to ask to get it.

Happy Valentines Day. As you can see, there is a new web site design. This one was created by a designer in China. I just thought I wanted something a little more professional. As for the software, there are several new developments. We are diving into the questions of unread handling. This is leading to new designs in several areas: there is now a BlogBridge Preferences dialog. Included here will be settings allowing Articles to be automatically set to unread under certain conditions. Also there will be some changes required in the low level persistence handling to track unread.