tech ronin

TweetClouds for Twitter are here

The more I use Twitter as a microblogging tool, the more I want features that I've come to take for granted in the blogging realm. One of those is tag clouds. TweetClouds to the rescue.

If you use Twitter as a microblogging platform rather than a shared virtual space among close friends, you might want your own tweet cloud.

Just go over to tweetclouds.com and enter your twitter account name and press go. As you can see above, it took 111 seconds to calculate my cloud. That's how long it took with 150 tweets to process. Tweetclouds have taken off in the Twittersphere this week so going is a little slow if you have a lot of tweets. But, how cool?

After it is done, you see your tweetcloud and get your own page and URL. Here's the tokerud cloud URL.

The next step from my point of view is to have links in each of those cloud words so I/you can click on a word and see the tweets. I'm thinking everyone on Twitter needs a dynamic cloud that is connected to search.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter is above all fun. But, part of using Twitter as an information aggregation tool is building a good list of people to follow.

I am following about 100 people right now. I spend a bit of time each day browsing for new people to follow. These tweet clouds would be a boon to this endeavor.

If every tweeter had his or her own searchable cloud, I could tweetscan for people based on my interests and some resourceful twitter developer could match my cloud to other tweeters' clouds and give me friend recommendations. Wouldn't that be fun?

I'm tokerud on FriendFeed.com

Friendfeed.com launched today. It's been in Beta for a while. Very cool at least on first blush. It aggregates a whole bunch of posts according to your settings. I set my Friendfeed to show del.icio.us, flickr, tech ronin and twitter posts for openers.

The people behind this are from but not currently of Google. This is moving towards what will be better when OpenID gains adoption. Check it out!

Enjoying Facebook's Second Wave

Facebook keeps showing up on my radar screen lately. So I signed up for a page. I am an absolute beginner trying to find my way around.

After being an early adopter of Ryze, Flickr, Orkut and more, I lost interest. Except for Flickr which is a more focused app. I had lots of high hopes for these early efforts, but not much came of them. After a while, I gave up on the possibility these SNS's had and in the mean time there has gotten to be so many that it is kind of crazy.

But now, the digerati has spoken. Facebook with its shiny new open API is the one. It exceeds my old expectations and hopes in many ways and seems to have boatloads of potential.

First impression, Facebook is waaay easier than the other social networking services I've tried before. Way easier in a kind of Macintosh way. You get more in return for your trouble. And the trouble is minimal actually. There are all these canned little pieces you can add to your page by clicking an Add button. I wish Typepad would be so easy!

Being a big non-fiction reader, I like the little books app and it is now a part of my page. By the way, remember I am a beginner, so my advice as to the best things may be a bit limited. But I know when I'm having fun and when I experience value.

The coolest thing about the books app for me is that I can select a book and see facebook member's comments on the book. It is kind of neat, because the book becomes this selector finding people who (1) read the book and (2) were willing to take the trouble to write a comment.

The other cool thing I am enjoying is that you can see what your friends are doing on facebook. You can see what applications they've added and what applications they've removed. That's a great way for me to see what applications to try. I can also go see the applications in use on their profiles.

I'm thinking that if facebook can gain a big enough audience beyond just the college set, it could be a great tool for keeping up with your friends. I really like it. But then, I'm a bit of an introvert, so I like this easy way to learn about things my friends are doing. Once you give me a scrap of information, then I have something to talk with you about.

Also, I admit that I like the college kids dna as the start of facebook. I've got two master's degrees myself, so these are my kind of people, if a bit young. I suppose I shouldn't be surpised if something even better comes along, but right now facebook is the best of class and I'm enjoying it.

iPhone Story Keeps Getting Better

Last week, Apple re-did their entire website. It is way improved with tons of motion. Things pop-up, slide, roll up and down and play. The iPhone section has 2-minute QuickTours. In the Internet in your Pocket section, there are 5 QuickTours.

As of Monday, the iPhone got an optical glass top layer instead of plastic. It also got a much improved battery life going from 5 to 8 hours of talk time. And, one more thing, you can buy your iPhone on Apple's online store, eliminating long waits in line.

Today, it got YouTube. All the technorati have been wondering what the missing 12th button might be. In at least one demo, there was a 12th button but you couldn't see what it was. You can not only watch YouTube videos, you can instantly send links to your friends by email.

Now we know. Maybe Apple is done with surprises. But, I doubt it. My guess is the story will continue to get better right up to launch day. I wonder what is next?

User-Generated Info Going Gangbusters

At first, everyone was amazed by blogging and thought it would change the world and drive traditional news media out of business. Then the original passionate bloggers started quitting or slowing down their output and predictions were made that blogging was just a fad that was going away. Now new sets of legs have emerged underneath the blogging phenomenon. Many, many legs.

We now have massive numbers of casual, personal and even professional bloggers. And it is not just bloggers. Blogging and lots of other user-generated information-sharing vehicles are here to stay. And then some.

This prediction may be coming a little late by some lights. If this is just a wild ride and a temporary Web 2.0 fad, it is at the beginning stages, not the ending ones. We are just getting out of the starting gates.

This is wonderful news for those of us who have gravitated to the opinionated blogger, Amazon or ePinions review and web or forum commenter as a proxy for advice from our own friends.

I have always preferred the small, amateur opinion, unsullied by commercial considerations or the subtle or not-so-subtle influences of corporate greed. The little website put up by a fanatic. The little engine that could. David and Goliath. That archetypal story.

I would rather a typo and an occasional error in reporting from an online friend to a polished, professional piece from a real journalist. OK, I do enjoy the New York times, but that is the exception. And, I would not be happy if that was my only source of information.

The powers of web 2.0 are finally beginning to impress me. A critical mass has been reached that I think is now unstoppable. Advances in technology and unbridled ambition will continue to inject better and better technology into connected environments. Here are some of the things that will keep getting better:

Social Networking Places. The social networking service is merging and morphing with various kinds of services and software and these trends will continue in different combinations and mutations. This is an organic, viral phenomenon that will be very fruitful as we go forward. MySpace has many limitations but it has been a phenomenal success. These places and spaces online will flourish like hit restaurants, clubs and neighborhoods do. Empowered and discriminating users will keep driving the next hot locale.

Annotation. Remember the cool and still-innovative micro-notes on photos that Flickr has? That is the idea. First, the photographer can add little notes. Then, when it is posted to Flickr for public access, everyone else, including passionate and gifted amateurs, can go in and add annotations to the photo.

Mashing. This phenomenon started in force around 1990 in the UK rave scene. This was even before music went digital. Digitizing art, music and text gives everyone (including tons of unrepentent pirates) access to high-quality ingredients from which to concoct their own unique variants. Nine-inch-Nails' Trent Reznor has just released another one of their album tracks in Garageband format with the original content intact (nin.com). They say they are going to release every track of their album this way. Wow!

Blogging Everywhere. Take blogging further. For example, when you post a photo in Flickr, you can essentially create a blog post when you do so. That post has a permanent URL. It has plenty of room for a long text accompaniment. It allows for comments and annotation of the photo. That photo (read blog post) can be added to various interest groups for whom it may be relevant.

Digital Photos/Videos Everywhere. Flickr, youTube and MySpace are fertile places for viral exposure. Part of this is the incredibly cheap availability of digital cameras in phones and separately. Phones and cameras can shoot video with decent fidelity too. We live in a media saturated world. News organizations are now actively soliciting user-generated photos. They know their limitations. They have small professional staffs who are dwarfed by the sea of user photographers and reporters out and about today.

I have made my living as an expert and expect to continue doing that for many years to come. All this rich information is incredibly appealing to me. How do experts thrive in a world where the amateur en masse has so much information to offer? That will emerge and evolve. Staying in the swim of all that is going on seems the only wise course.

Here is where experts may be able to add value. Think of all this user-generated information and the software and services that support it as gold fields. Think of those who help people take advantage of all that value and adapt to the changes and opportunities therein as the ones selling picks, maps and jeans to the gold miners.

There will be big players leveraging this, since these phenomena can get really big like MySpace and YouTube. There will be huge numbers of individuals and small players in that granular mix as well. Blending, mixing, observing, articulating and surfing the waves.

Technorati Tags: web2

NetNewsWire 3 Alpha Rocks

Ooh! I hardly ever even think about using alpha software, but I wanted to see what NNW 3 had going. Brent Simmons was so enthusiastic about his new baby that I had to see why. Really slick.

Note the right column of tiny screen shots. That is so much more fun that the typical list of tabs showing pages you have clicked on. Makes it easier to navigate too.

No problems so far. I did take his advice to backup my netnewswire folders first because I may need to go back to 2.1 if problems arise.

UPDATE: March 7. Eight days later I am happily using NNW3a and do not plan to turn back. It has crashed a couple times and misbaved once or twice, but no data was lost and I just did a force quit and restarted the app. No problem. If you enjoy NNW, you may want to try this out after backing up a couple files that you will be advised to backup.

I also use Google Reader sometimes. But, since moving up to NNW3, I have been using NNW more and GR less.

Digg Tech News: delicious meets slashdot

I ran into Digg for the first time today. I'm already an Engadget junkie but I don't track delicious or slashdot all the time like a lot of folks (which is probably what took me so long to find out about it).

Digg 2.0 launched July 10th. It started in December of 2004. It seems to be functional and useable. Registered users submit stories like slashdot but the stories go into a big pot. Users can comment and vote for these stories and after 15 or so votes in a certain amount of time, the story get promoted to the top of the Digg home page. At some point when additional votes slow down enough, the story drops off the page. Something like that.

You can subscribe to your friends' votes and comments.

I like the friends stuff, the democratic flavor and the simplicity. I'm guessing it will either improve a lot if there's improving to do (which there always is) or similar sites will pop up and do it - this thing - better.

I'm not real crazy about their categories. You can submit stories only under these categories: apple, deals, design, gaming, hardware, links, linux/unix, mods, movies, music, programming, robots, science, security, software, technology.

No handheld, no smartphones. Tell me why robots would be a category? No tagging here. That stops me a bit in terms of submitting my own stories. But I'll probably do it soon anyway to see if this is a way I can get wider readership. Tech bloggers are likely to do the same.

Right now I'm listening to the first of the 8 podcasts they've got under the name diggnation. It's on iTunes. They've got video and audio versions of most episodes. I tried to download it unsuccessfully. But the audio version is pretty entertaining and funny. I'm not 100% sold based on episode 1 but I'm subscribed and am hoping the content will get better. Engadget seems far superior because Ryan Block and Peter Rojas are in the know big time. Diggnation feels a little like having entertainers presenting the news.

Get a little more information on Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: digg.com, RSS, socialsoftware

ecto 2.3.4 Rocks with more Automator actions

I must say, I love the way things have been going with ecto, the most powerful desktop blogging tool on the planet. Adriaan Tijsseling is the ultimate creative, hard-working programmer.

His latest is major support for Automator actions. He's got a ton of them and I applaud the effort. Excellent decision because it strengthens ecto's hand as the geek's choice for blogging. And, it doesn't hurt user friendliness one bit for the non-geek.

ecto has moved out in front of Marsedit again. For me, that means Marsedit will be sitting in the dock neglected but not too far away if I need it.

Another cool thing with ecto is Adriaan's implementation of tagging. He's got it going. He grabs your tags from del.icio.us and Flickr and shows them in a handy side bar as an option to showing your categories. Also, if you have your focus in the tags sub-area, you can start typing and it will go to an existing tag or create a new one if nothing starts with those letters.

ecto has it's own personality that reflects Adriaan's passion for developing the best possible blogging app. Great stuff!

Another of many examples is the Add Link dialog in ecto. The thing is amazing. Right from the dialog, you can subscribe to the link you are creating with either NetNewsWire or PulpFiction. And you can post the link to del.icio.us!

It would be so easy for Adriaan to settle for making the best possible cross-platform blogging tool -- mostly limiting innovation to areas that work on both Windows and OS X. He so doesn't do this. His work on Automator actions is just one example.

Marsedit lags behind in Mac functionality such as Automator Actions, even though it is a Mac-only app. In a way, Marsedit's role is to take advantage of ecto's bleeding edge work, delivering the *best of ecto* from a minimalist and easy UI point of view. And, I would have to say that the extra time taken on Marsedit does give you more bugfree, stability sometimes. Being the early adopter, though, I love to play in Adriaan's sand box. I have a choice. If I just need to get something out and don't want the bells and whistles, I'll use Marsedit. Otherwise, right now it's ecto.

Technorati Tags: knowledgesharing, blogging, socialsoftware, tagging, Automator, ecto, Macintosh

Del.icio.us fills the gap in my knowledge sharing toolkit

I'm a late-adopter when it comes to Del.icio.us. Actually, today is the first day I've really used it correctly. It's not all my fault, I've never seen a decent Del.icio.us tutorial that made it accessible to people like me who don't have time or patience to futz around indefinitely or even for a few extra minutes.

Also, probably one reason it took me a while is that I didn't particularly appreciate the plain-jane del.icio.us UI. But, yesterday I found Cocoalicious and, other than the fact that it too has no documentation to speak of, it looked cocoa-good. So I futzed with it long enough to figure out how to post the pages I like and appreciate to del.icio.us - simply and easily. Yay!

Cocoalicious also functions as a webpage viewer for all my Del.icio.us links. And I've selected Cocoalicious as my NetNewsWire weblog. This is working.

This is a breakthrough. Up till now I had two choices when I ran across a cool post: (1) copy it into my own personal knowledge-stash in DEVONthink or (2) blog about it. Since I don't have the time to blog about every cool post I find, I've been opting for the solitary, hoarding route of putting the full content of each article I like into DT, telling myself I might use the info in a blog piece some time in the future.

But now I have a fantastic third option. I can share what I find by posting annotated links to del.icio.us. And I can still collect it in DT if I must -- I love to use multiple colored highlighters in DT as I read stuff.

Del.icio.us provides the ultimate light way of sharing. Cocoalicious, by the way, makes it a snap to do. So, I can now say that, if you like tech ronin, you might well want to subscribe to my delicious feed or just take a look once in a while because I find a lot of cool stuff and am tagging and bagging it to share - starting today.

Technorati Tags: cocoalicious, del.icio.us, DEVONthink, knowledgesharing, sharing, socialsoftware, tagging

37Signals' Backpack Breaks New Ground

After reading lots of favorable commentary, I signed up for a free Backpack account. Backpack is one of the very few web apps that achieves a responsiveness that is similar to what I expect from the desktop. It's the most responsive web app I've ever used. And, as a result, my Backpack main page is now my Safari 2 home page.

The 37Signals folks are using a new and better approach called AJAX which produces an unprecedented level of responsiveness. That's huge, but, equally important, 37Signals is religious about simplicity, minimalism and end-user control. Here's what they say in their manifesto:

You should make the rules. Most information management tools are riddled with mandatory fields, complex multi-step processes, and specialized "buckets" for data. ... Backpack adjusts to organize things your way. It's a blank slate that offers you less structure and more space....

Clear, Simple, and Fast. At the heart of Backpack is simplicity and clarity. Things work the way you'd expect them to work. Everything complex has been tossed so the tool is simple to the core. In fact, nothing takes more than a few seconds. Our "Ajaxed" interface elements eliminate reloading hassles. Backpack gives you the benefit of the web (centralized access, no install, no IT nightmares) without the downsides of the web (reloads, slowdowns, poor interfaces). - 37Signals

Up till now, we haven't been able to do some things that Backpack makes possible:

Create web pages without HTML. Backpack has got to be the quickest, simplest way I've ever seen to put up good-looking, modifiable webpages.

Share daily life/work information without extra fuss. You create a little list and notes for yourself in a couple minutes, but that list is an editable webpage that you can share with specific friends, family, co-workers or clients or the general public.

37Signals is pitching Backpack as a PIM that happens to be online. It lets you create lists, notes and reminders and add images and files as you like. The idea seems to be that we've never had the flexibility to share these kinds of things at will so we won't really know what value that represents until we start just using the tool. Then we'll run into places we want to share stuff.

I don't have immediate and obvious needs to share my lists and what not. After all, I've already got a blog where I can do most of that. So I've been evaluating whether I want an online PIM rather than or in addition to the great desktop tools I already have.

Besides the aforementioned exceptional look, feel and responsiveness, what I'm liking so far:

The List Checkboxes are slick. First, you get them with every list item automatically. Then, when you check off an item, it goes to the bottom in gray and smaller and checked off. And there's a little trashcan there if you want to delete it.

Notes are cool too. Each note has a subject which appears in a nice bold and then the separate body of the note. You can put bulleted and numbered lists in your notes along with images and links to web pages.

No synching!!! Great for people like me who use two computers regularly. The first time I went to my PowerMac, it was sure great that my Backpack stuff was right there and I could edit or add things knowing they would be synched without synching on my Powerbook when I started using it again later.

You are backed up. OK. I backup my really important work-related stuff pretty religiously, but not the rest. You’ve got a built-in, automatic and trouble-free backup all the time.

It's got tags. At the moment, tagging is hot. So, I'm glad it's here in this 1.0 release. Haven't tagged a thing yet, but hey, I'm just getting started.

This might work. Adequate. Now, add the benefits of sharing:

Sharing is the new killer app. A tool/environment that is selectively shareable. You are in an instantly shareable and invite-your-friends-to-edit environment all the time. D. Keith Robinson says it: “You can send or share pages with people, thus allowing them into a bit of your world as needed.”

It’s like a wiki but better. Simple syntax to accomplish bullets, numbered lists, links, blockquotes, bold, italics and such.

In place editing. Unlike a wiki page where you edit the whole page or not at all, this little guy has sub-areas that you edit. The edit link appears in bright orange when you hover over something editable. Cool!

What O'Reilly Radar calls "round-trip format for Backpack content: Backpack → Email → Backpack is a breakthrough. I can email Backpack pages to myself or others and they look like they did online. Then, while offline perhaps, I can edit the email and email it back to update the page when I'm back online. Yeah.

Sending reminders to your cell phone and mobile access isn't half bad either.

Downsides:

If you haven't planned ahead and can't get online at the moment, you don't have access to your stuff. Most of us still have offline moments. Backpack works better when you are online at will. And, god forbid, the service could be down.

There's a small privacy risk when I work on stuff that is just for me and that I don’t want others to see. Yes, if everything goes right, it is protected. But, ever heard of chaos theory? Things don't always go according to plan.

A wysiwyg desktop tool would still be easier to use if you want any formatting. Backpack's markup language is great, but can't beat wysiwyg. Geeks will love Backpack, but will everyone else?

Less is more and all that, but I've still got feature requests. And, the more features added, the harder it is for 37Signals to keep things dead simple. I need:

A way to reorder my notes. Right now, unless I'm missing something, there's no reorder feature and my most recent notes go to the bottom of the list. Couldn't you just add the reorder buttons that work so well in lists to notes?

To be able to drag photos in. You too Flickr! This works on the desktop, so I want it here too. I'm afraid this feature requires excessive back flips but it sure would be nice.

To be able to move my content from one page to another easily. To refactor as a I figure out what I want to share. Once again, drag and drop would be perfect.

Lower prices. OK, I'm spoiled by Flickr pricing, but it sure would be nice if the highest level Backpack account was $5 a month instead of $19 and that the second from the top level was $24.95 a year. I know these are good deals for commercial users, but in order for this place to be the ideal play pen, we need plenty of elbow room to experiment. Raise the rates later if you must but not while we are still getting our feet wet. How about a 2-month trial period at Flickr prices?

As I've said before (Collaborative Environments), as a tech-enabled free agent (ronin), I need to be able to work and collaborate virtually. And I don't want a lot of corporate crap and control layered on top. Backpack feels like the perfect next step in this direction.

Update May 17, 2005: I just upgraded to the $9 a month package with 100 pages. Couldn't wait.

My Public Backpack Page

Technorati Tags: Backpack | Collaborate | Virtual | Ajax | 37Signals | PIMs | wiki | Social Software | folksonomy | tagging |