September 2007

OpenID not all happyness and light?

I don’t follow the Identify world that closely and like everyone I’ve now come across services who suggest that you log into them with an [tag]OpenId[/tag] account. So I have one now too. It’s free. It’s decentralized. What’s not to love? Well apparently it isn’t 100% love. Rea...

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State department has a blog team

Apparently the US State Department has a team of bloggers who get into discussions on boards and blogs around the world, taking an interesting alternative approach to the usual formal, high level diplomacy: > “…The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting….” This is pretty interesting, and yet another sign of how blogs are infiltrating all aspects of life. Read the whole article: “At State Dept. Blog Team Joins Debate”, from the New York Times.

[geeky] Google Groups missing key functionality

I’ve been living inside a couple of [tag]Google groups[/tag] lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and [tag]Active Scaffold[/tag]: Ruby on Rails plugin) Much to my surprise and [tag]productivity-loss[/tag], it’s not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this 🙂

Interesting pointer from Francois on the marketing potential of Facebook et al

Check out this post from Emergence Marketing: ** "Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself – many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group’s conversation." (from**: What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace)

Scott Adams is still funny: Suing God

Scott Adams of course is the evil genius behind Dilbert, which as you know I am a big fan of. Scott also has a really funny blog. As proof, this is from the latest post from The Dilbert Blog: > Lawyer: “Where were you on the night of the tornado?” God: “Um, everywhere. Same as always. Go to Hell. Seriously.” (from: Suing God)

Is a book’s cover art copyrighted?

I’m not trying to start anything. I just thought this was amusing. Two totally different business books, published years apart, with practically the same cover. Funny?

[GEEKY] Gshell, the web’s own command line

You remember back in the stone ages we all interacted with computers by typing [tag]command lines[/tag] at a prompt. Then in the bronze age, the [tag]GUI[/tag] was invented and we used mice, menus and windows? (Oh some of us still preserve the old traditions of course using the ancient language ...

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Is Facebook used or blocked in businesses?

It’s hard to get good data on this, and I keep get wildly varying opinions. I haven’t fully formed my own yet, but here’s another data point: > “In contrast, 50 percent of respondents said that their company did not block access to [tag]Facebook[/tag], with eight percent specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash.” (from Sophos) What do you think?

Barcoding the planet

picture-1.pngSemapedia is a quirky project that wants to get us to put these special little barcodes on everything on the planet. The idea is that you walk up to something, say the Eiffel Tower, or my house, point your cell phone camera at it and a click or so later, you get a nice article on the screen of your phone, describing it. I first read about it in Jeremy Wagstaff’s ‘Loose Wire’ series. Quirky, in a Don Quixote kind of way.

Top Ruby Books

toprubybooks1.jpg Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been actually able to carve out some quality time to get my head around Ruby and Ruby on Rails. My play project is something called myscum.org, which is a lightweight scrum tracking tool. Basically it’s modeled after what I’ve been using for BlogBridge, working with Aleksey. So a pretty simple case, makes a decent play project. But of course, that’s how BlogBridge started. A decent play project…

August 2007

What is the relationship between Technorati tags and Google search results?

Bill Ives of the [tag]Portals and KM[/tag] blog did an interesting bit of analysis about how tagging with Technorati may or may not affect rankings in Google. It’s something I’ve been paying attention to as well. Recently I found this really nice WordPress plug in that makes it dead easy to tag content in Technorati. It’s called ‘[tag]SimpleTags[/tag]‘ and it allows me to simply mark up the text I am writing inline and certain words will automagically become Technorati tags.

Vitamins

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 Treatm...

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