tech ronin

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

The Future of Flickr Daily Zeitgeist

I saw the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist photo display-thingy over at Preoccupations yesterday and really liked it. Very nice way of telling people you are on Flickr and showing them a few of you and your friends' pix. I just clicked the get your own link at the bottom to, well, get my own. So there it is over below my own picture. Definitely cool because I don't know most of these folks coming up on the screen but, if I want to know, I just click the miniature photo to see a bigger version and find out who it is.

Once I clicked the get your own link, I could choose among these options for what would appear on my dz: Everyone's photos, Your photos, Your contacts' photos or You and your contacts' photos. When you click a choice, some code appears in a little box that you can copy and paste into your blog or website. I copied that stuff and pasted it into my TypePad left sidebar html. Published. Done. I supposed you have to have a Pro level TypePad account for this right now. Hopefully, if that's true, you'll have the option to get it into the basic and plus levels soon. I would love it to see TypePad getting more connected to Flickr. Repeat after me. Cooperation is good. Cooperation is good.

Flickr says this is just their initial release of daily zeitgeist and more features will be added. Wouldn't it be great to be able to more finely control what shows up on that little guy? Here's what I would do. First, I'm probably going to put up enough photos on Flickr to have it show only my photos - which would be one cool thing. Pick a photo set and it displays a rotating and random sampling from that. That would be cool for visitors.

But I would like to include pix of my Flickr friends as well. I have my dz set to show my photos plus the photos of my contacts. I would like to be able to deselect certain contacts or even better rate them or something so I can have more of one contacts photos than another maybe.

And I would also like to get photos from a group perhaps. Now I don't want three dz's on my blog, but can I rotate between maybe - my photos, my contact photos and then selected groups' photos?

If you had a little more granularity here, you could do other interesting things that I can only begin to imagine. All sorts of little creative presentations perhaps. Anyway, this things is cool and now all I wish is that I could change the white background to match the green in my sidebar.

After my brief flirtation with Flickr last Winter, I've been away from it. But I wanted some more contacts so that I could see different photos coming up on my 1001. Geek motivation, that. But I'm kind of introverted, so hey, whatever it takes. So I just started surfing my favorite bloggers' pages and seeing if they had a Flickr link. Many did and I went to their Flickr pages and added them as contacts. Easy.

Technorati Tags: Flickr | Daily Zeitgeist | photo streams | photos | photography | 1001 |

Free Podcast Guided Tours Starting Up

PodGuides.net is starting up a podcasting site featuring free spoken tour guides. Here's what they say:

You can enjoy detailed spoken descriptions of what you see while visiting the city (museum, ...) of your choice. A PodGuide is basically like a downloadable audio tour.

OK, so there is only one podcast so far. Still. This is a great new venue for wannabe podcasters. You know, citizen podcasters. You take a trip and record some audio about the places you see.

The site has a great little free tool called PodGuide Generator - a metal app, so you better take your iBook or Powerbook (or hopefully soon an iBook mini) with you while you travel (there's a version for Windows too). Record on your iPod or cell phone and write a few notes in your moleskine or sidekick while you travel and put it all together with the PodGuide Generator. Yay!

This is clearly a hybrid podcasting app. It helps a lot if there's a map, photos, addresses AND an audio track. Apparently iTunes can show the photos or the iPod photo. Great idea! At minimum, I look forward to downloading some fun tour guides. Make it easy enough and even I'll do one. Better bookmark these folks.

Oh, and if you are one of the many tour guides. How cool would it be to sell mini podcasts of your tours as loss leaders or as souvenirs for your tour participants?

Technorati Tags: podcasting, annotation, guides, maps, community, location, city, tours, tour guides

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

Blog-related Careers Will Flourish

Today I've been mucking about in the tagging space. Kicking the tires. Exploring. As I was wandering around, I noticed that Flickr announced that they have indeed been acquired by Yahoo! A few more millionaires for the world's economy, that. Russ Beattie going to Yahoo! should have tipped us off to expect great things from Yahoo! in the next couple of years.

At one point, I was over at Kottke.org and found myself sending an email to Jason to see whether he would like cash or a gift of Studio Manager 7. If I, a light user of Kottke.org, am contributing, lots of money must be flowing in Jason's direction.

These two things plus many more drove me to the conclusion that lots of careers will sprout up in this portion of the electronic universe. I'm sure blogging will be an important node in this careerspace, but maybe tagging will be a node and who knows what else? Somewhere today I read that a key feature of the web starting now is collaboration. This is a rich area of possibility. Not a flash in the pan.

So, bloggers, all that time you are putting into this blogging stuff. All that reading, blogging, commenting, emailing, flickring and tagging might just amount to something. Maybe all these things you are doing passionately have something to do with the career you are inadvertently building for yourself.

What I'm seeing is that besides the amazing and many small and large benefits bloggers get from raising their own profiles in cyberspace, real meaty careers may be starting to sprout. Of course, Kottke can support himself with blogging. I'm not saying we'll be blogging for a living, necessarily. Though, I'm sure many will. I think we'll be working in this emerging field - creating new products, organizations and services, consulting, researching, negotiating, marketing, developing software and contributing our experience and knowledge to in-house projects that haven't been invented yet.

There's a lot going on and we are in a great place to find our own preferred spots in the action.

Technorati Tags: blogging, career, trends

Apple Maybe Not So Anti-Blogger Afterall

I may have spoken out of turn the other day in my marginally articulate rant: Apple's Anti-Blogger Suit Sucks. Apparently, the blogger vs. journalist issue was not what Apple was hot about. The judgement in Apple's favor was about violation of trade-secret law. John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame set me straight.

it is illegal to induce someone to spill the beans on a trade secret they are legally obligated not to reveal. It is also illegal to publish or share information which you know to be a trade secret, regardless how you learned about it. It’s not a question of whether Think Secret’s reporters are “journalists”, or if they are, whether they are good or bad journalists. It doesn’t matter because there are no special exemptions under trade secret law for journalists.

However, danah boyd posted a compelling analysis with a different take on the whole thing today that raises another important issue:

they ruled that no one (digital or paper) journalists have the privilege to protect their sources when trade secrets are involved. In other words, the rights of companies trump the First...the reason that the First exists is to protect powerful systems from oppressing the people under their structure. In other words, it's OK when information from inside the government is leaked because it's a matter of checks and balances. But there are no checks and balances for corporations right?

Both of these posts are well worth checking out.

Technorati Tags: Apple, law, first amendment

Apple's Anti-Blogger Suit Sucks

I am fervently hoping that Apple's action against Think Secret and two other blogs will blow up in its face. They deserve it. Steve deserves it. Hard ball tactics like this don't work anymore - or at least, I hope they don't.

The Apple faithful like me are hard pressed to stay faithful when stuff like this happens. Of course, I'm a blogger and I am offended by the argument Apple made last Friday that bloggers are not legitimate members of the press. Screw that!

I'm hoping that Apple and Steve are going to get a first-hand education in the power of the blogging community. Don't mess with us. Bloggers are members of Apple's *Think Different* target group. We are your community and we are an extremely vocal group. If marketing is relationship and conversation, Apple is really harming their brand.

No one has ever accused Steve Jobs of modesty. Is Apple's success of late going to it's head? Arrogance is one thing, but this is getting self-destructive.

I love that the bloggers in question struck back this week with the request to have the whole thing thrown out as a violation of first amendment rights. Go bloggers!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Steve Jobs, law, first amendment

Great News: Six Apart Acquiring LiveJournal

Fantastic news! Mena Trott of Six Apart has announced via a very detailed blog post, natch, that Six Apart has acquired LiveJournal. This is excellent news because now that we've got huge players like Google (Blogger) and Microsoft (MSN Spaces) in the blogging mix, ultra cool little blogging companies like Six Apart need to bulk-up to avoid being run-over.

Six Apart has posted a shorter FAQ about all this for people who want a quick fix on what's happening. One reassurance I appreciate is that Six Apart promises to keep the LiveJournal quality in tact and avoid things like "removing the free level", "plastering the sites with ads" and "owning user content". Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal (a Portland, Oregon firm), posted to his blog to express LJ's view on this deal:

The most immediate changes will be that we'll start to get prettier... more styles, themes, etc. Six Apart is really good at that and we're not. - Brad Fitzpatrick, LiveJournal

Technologies and other assets can now be swapped (and comingled when it makes sense) between the 2 services and perhaps lines of communication will be opened between them reducing the SNS island problem mentioned in my last post.

I love it that the friends and family journal blogging that is LiveJournal's hallmark will be combined with TypePad's less diary -link, opinion, hobby and news blogging. Each side will be expanded in good ways. Hopefully, some of the viral community feeling that makes LiveJournal such a success will rub off on TypePad.

Check it out!

Wonderful Year-End Post from Scout

If you would like to read something inspiring, personal and authentic today, check out Scout's post on Becoming Sage. It's about her experience and recovery after a near-fatal brain aneurysm. The writing is excellent as usual. Check it out!

May I Introduce: Scout Tomyris

One of my closest friends started blogging today. Scout Tomyris has been following my blog and decided to take the plunge. I gave her a gift of a year of TypePad Plus for Christmas and coached from the side while she got two blogs up and running today. Her new personal blog is called Becoming Sage and her other new blog is called WGC Netkeeper (WGC is short for Wilderness Guides Council).

Scout is a Vision Quest guide and starts as Netkeeper for WGC January 1st. They've never had a blog, but she wants to bring blogging to their party and to the vision quest community at large.

Scout is a gifted writer and her first post, Welcome to Becoming Sage, is a taste of lovely things to come. Please give a warm welcome to Scout Tomyris!