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  • 2 min read

Social Networks and RSS Aggregators

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 can indicate, if they happen to know, where the country of origin for that feed is.

The companion (free) BlogBridge Service receives this information, and collates and aggregates it in useful ways:

  • For example, the Country of Origin set by one user is visible (wiki- like) by all other users, the assumption being simply that people won't hack this, but if they happen to know that the blog comes for example from Iran, they can share that with the rest. This is a useful way to share factual, but not easily ascertained information.

  • The tags users assign to a certain feed are also shared (del.icio.us- like) with all other users. The natural way of slicing and dicing will allow a user to see for example all feeds that the BlogBridge community has assigned the 'International' tag or the 'Secuirity' tag. This is a useful way to discover feeds that you would be interested in.

  • Finally the stars rating of a feed will be used to help users figure out (c ollaborative-filtering-like) which feeds are good and not so good.

We're not pretending we are curing cancer here, but there are some cool ideas that we are experimenting with which may or may not lead to something really useful. FWIW.

  • 2 min read

Switcher’s Log, Part 3: What I miss from my PC Days

In the continuing saga of the switch from Windows XP to Mac OS X, here is where we find our hero…. I have more or less gotten all the applications I use over onto the Mac. Almost all of them. I will be forced to leave behind Microsoft Money, X1 and Plaxo. Of all the stuff I ran on the PC, those are the only three that I miss. And in each case I can get by. Microsoft Money - well there's Quicken for Mac, which is analogous. But transferring the data over seems like it will be a huge mess costing time, frustration and in the end producing an unsatisfactory result. X1 - My wonderful desktop search. I already miss it. My only consolation is that the next release of OS X will include something called "SpotLight" which is supposed to be totally amazing and will change my life. Plaxo - Who would have thunk? But this business of typing and maintaining people's contact information by hand can become pretty tiresome. I'd settle for a Mac version of GetAnagram.com, but that of course doesn't exist. Thinking about what software exists and doesn't exist on Mac, and why, can be sobering. I don't know the figures, but let's say that Mac accounts for 5 or so percent of the PC Installed base. Put that way, it makes you feel like your brandy new shiny new computer has moved you to a small, underpopulated corner of the computing universe where the buses don't run. Will GetAnagram or Plaxo ever have a Mac OS X version? Not likely. What computer will I be using 10 years from now?

  • 1 min read

I used to have comments enabled on this blog until I got overrun by link spam. With comments my readers could post responses to my Blog musings. I've since turned of commenting on this site. What is link spam? Suddenly one day you realize that some of your Blog articles have a very long list of random comments attached to them, each including a link to some random site. Who does this? Link Spammers. Why do they do it? To drive up the page rank of PPR Sites. (PPR? Pills, Porn and Casinos). Here is one link spammers story.

  • 1 min read

Too much information!

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.

  • 1 min read

Tags, Meta Tags, Meta Data, Yada Yada

It is of course impossible to keep up with the avalanche of discussion about the topic of tags, folksonomies , tagonomies. David Weinberger points to a (beautifully designed : love those pictures!) essay on the topic from burningbird with lots of good quotes and pointers to other essays. Wow, a lot to read! In my mind the crucial thing about this new approach classification is that it gets around the achilles heel of the traditional approach of meta tagging or controlled vocabularies, which is, that most people just don 't do it. There are some special circumstances when a fixed list (or hierarchy) of categories or topics or tags will work for most people. But in the majority of cases, a fixed list of categories to apply to some item of information just causes frustration ("the category I am looking for isn't there") or confusion ("What does tag X even mean?") The end result is that information just gets mis-tagged or is left un-tagged. This is where so called folksonomies are so superior. Yes, often information will get misclassified. Whether this is so often as to render the whole system useless is an open question, which Technorati Tags, Del.icio.us and others will help us discover. p.s: One of the dangers to commenting on this discussion is that it is basically impossible to read all the essays and follow all the links and so you risk repeating what was already said. I believe that Clay Shirky has made essentially the same point. At least I am in good company.

  • 1 min read

Do Mac users have eye problems – Switcher’s Log – Part 2

It seems to me that all text and other Mac OS X user interface elements are a little bit bigger than their counterparts on the PC. Why is that? It seems like the same size screen fits less stuff when attached to a Mac OS X system than to a Win XP system. It's annoying - it makes you feel less productive. I am hunting for some tweak software to adjust this but I am starting to think it doesn't exist. Why?

  • 1 min read

[BlogBridge Tip] Activate your BlogBridge service account

(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!

  • 1 min read

[BlogBridge Tip] Themes

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!