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?

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.

Mailtags 1.2 lets you create iCal to do items from Mail

This new version of Mailtags is so cool. Most of my work comes into my email box. Finally, I can make these work emails into to do list items quickly, easily and with keywords even. With one click I can see it in my iCal to do list. You can set the priority on the to do. You can assign it to a particular calendar - all in a little pop-out side panel that doesn't get in your way.

You get this fantastic two-way link. When you are in iCal looking at your to do list, you have a URL in the standard pop-out info panel that takes you to the email. Slick! Mailtags is donationware.

Technorati Tags: email, GTD, Macintosh, 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 |

Tags aren't Category Names

Technorati explains tags as being pretty much the same as categories. If you are a blogger tagging your posts, tags are not categories. I don't want to have a gigantic list of categories. I want a realatively short list of major topics. In order to assign a category to a post, I have to add it as a category on my category list. So, I'm limited and don't assign a new category to an individual post unless I really think I'll use it often.

Tags are Different. There's no tag list - at least not yet*. When I tag my posts, I can use anything on a one-time only basis and not worry about it. I can tag for SXSW even though it's not an on-going category. Big difference. [*If there's going to be a tag list, the infrequently used tags will be tiny in my tag list and the frequently used ones will be big, so more tags can be in the list without making it unwieldy.]

Tag Language. Because this is folksonomy territory, though, speaking in the language of tags, you may want to use words that others and their software/services understand. I may want to keep a copy of Technorati's tag page handy so I can see whether to tag this as blog, blogs or blogging or tags or tagging or all of these. Since this is a bottom-up thing, I get to decide whether to (a) be casual and just tag the first thing that comes to mind or (b) go with the majority so I can affiliate my post with more posts or (3) think about it and then put the best tag on it that I can think of, not considering anyone else's nomenclature or (d) *vote* for the tag I would like to add juice to. It's very fun and interesting.

Tag Tip #1. If you put your tags into your post at the beginning, you can jump to those Technorati tags for more related info by clicking on them in your post preview.

Tag Tip #2. I like to illustrate my posts and decorate my post/feed with a graphic for each post. Technorati tag-surfing may help you quickly locate that little graphic for your post. That's how I got the graphic for this post which I copped from a Flickr photo of Peter Morville's great slide.

By the way, I much prefer to newsread, browse, search or tag-surf blogs than the bigger webspace. Googling floods me with low signal-to-noise ratio info-stuff. Sorting through all that feels too time-consuming now that I have better alternatives. Sometimes I need to search in that big noisy space, but not all that often. With that in mind, I've added the Technorati Searchlet to this blog page.

Technorati Tags: tagging, social software, technorati, technorati tags, folksonomy, blogging

Loving Technorati Tags

I really like Technorati tags. Maybe it's the addition of the photos from Flickr. I don't know. I like the layout.

Another thing I'm attracted to that I first enjoyed in 43 Things, are the lists of tags whose sizes vary depending how often they are used. I want one of those lists on my own blog page and wish they were on every blog. Hoping that Marsedit will jump on this an make it easier for me to tag and that TypePad will make it easy to summarize all my tags as a multi-sized tag list. If this meme gained adoption, you could grok a blog's nature in a single glance.

Today I started putting some tags into my latest few posts. Once they were there, I could click on them and instantly get to the Technorati page for that tag. I like that. It feels like a great expansion of the connectedness my posts have to the rest of the web. Of course, it would be handy to write the tags into someplace in Marsedit and be able to immediately link to those Technorati tag pages. It would help me write the post.

I like trying various words as tags to see which one has the most tag-juice. I'm really enjoying this tagging trend right now. And... I created a category called Tagging which was the most popular tag about tags and tagging.

It seems to me that any blogger would want to tag their posts. In the overall scheme of the work associated with creating a post, putting tags in is a small part that would almost surely pay for itself in increased readership. Tags hook you into the blogspace in a wonderful way. Looks like a no-brainer to me.

Even if I'm the only one who clicks the tags, I like it. I like to treat me blog as a homepage of sorts anyway. It's one of my launchpads. Tags add a whole new dimension to my homepage.

Technorati Tags: tagging, social software, technorati, technorati tags, folksonomy, blogging