Blog before you Think!

SimilarThings is a pretty fresh (not even beta) and free webservice (running on Rails),

where you can create web pages, add content and organize it using tags. Discover "Similar Things" people are writing about when they use tags related to yours.

It's (somehow) like a Wiki, with tags replacing the WikiWords as navigational mechanism; the AdSense ads could be less obtrusive though (well, I'm not someone, who should be giving any advice on AdSense).


[tagging] [webapps] - trackback

The Web 2.0 is knocking at our doors, the read/write cake is currently being divided, the gatekeeper of our future experience of the web are taking position, and Yahoo is developing a Technorati Killer?

If so, Technorati is joyfully observing its own deconstruction:




and Yahoo is pretty cynical in sending its very own users to Technorati first:




[technorati] [yahoo] [web2.0] [misc] - trackback

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society provides a tag-aware project called H20 Playlist:

An H20 Playlist is a shared list of readings and other content about a topic of intellectual interest.

I'm a little upset about this intellectual interest thing, but tagged lists are doomed to be useful. H20 has got all features one might expect (feeds, CreativeCommons license, is open source, will provide an API) and some more: a built-in reputation system, the ability to clone lists or to build a library of items of interest.

(via Ruminate)


Also, Peter Cooper releases Snippets 0.3, a framework rolling on Ruby on Rails, which lets you tag snippets of text.


[tagging] [webapps] [rails] - trackback

If an entry starts with

There are taggers and then there are tag voyeurs.

it must be good. William Blaze has written two excellent ramblings about tagging (Tagging - an introduction into tagging from a user perspective - and Tagging/Meta Voyeurism - an outline of an info-economical critique of tagging) that are well worth reading.


[tagging] [infoeconomy] - trackback

To paraphrase Jon Udell: Tag-enabled applications open the door to new opportunities for bookmark management. del.icio.us is still the blueprint of all social and taggable bookmarking systems, but in the spirit of mimesis and alterity a decent number of alternatives have emerged.

(Inspired by Douglas Johnston's Beginner’s Mind and Robert Daeley's Zen Pockets I'm currently trying to clean up my del.icio.us bookmarks, but fail miserably in letting go of some applications...)

Here is a rundown of some other social bookmarking applications, I'll just highlight the differences to del.icio.us, the list of features is not exhaustive.



BlogMarks - enlarge your bookmarks

* BlogMarks has thumbnailed preview of URLs
* you can mark bookmarks as private
* tags are clouded by default; if you browse a tag, a subcloud of related tags appears
* you can sort by popularity
* you can search within the titles and descriptions of all users (not only your own)



Furl

* see A del.icio.us furl Workflow. Regarding tags Furl takes a hybrid approach: both topics (categories) and keywords (tags) are used.



Jots

* it also caches the resources making them accessible even if the original has gone
* it's written in Ruby (which usually is an indicator that it's a work of love...)
* it has got a view called Link Leaders (who was the first to bookmark a popular URL)
* and a built-in post to blog feature
* and a jotted? bookmarklet (has an URL been jotted by other members?)
* you also can create groups for restricting bookmarks to distinguished persons only
* and browse your archive by date added



Yahoo's My Web 2.0

* see my previous posting



Netvouz - your bookmarks online

* you can mark bookmarks as private
* it has got hotpicks (prefered spots for links you visit often)
* and link validation
* popular links are computed as aggregated hotpicks



Shadows - tag comment rate search

* Shadows has the look and feel of a forum (users can add comments to bookmarks and rate them)
* uses UberTags. UberTags go where no tag has gone before - basically by combining freshness and popularity



Simpy

* besides bookmarks you can add (and tag) notes
* you can mark bookmarks as private
* Simpy indexes the pages you bookmark so you can also search within the content (I'm not sure, if Simpy is also storing a cached copy)
* you get boolean search!! for an arbitrary combination of search fields - see the documentation (this makes Simpy my undisclosed favorite)
* you can add a search field for your simpyfied links to your blog
* you can access your bookmarks programmatically via a REST api.



Spurl

* Spurl is a lot like Furl. You can not create a local backup of your archive, though.
* has groovy publishing features (for adding categories to your blog,..)



StumbleUpon

* a collaborative bookmarking / rating / discovery system
* you can define interests, StumbleUpon will find a community with interests similiar to yours
* you can rate links (thumbs up or down)


Happy Tagging!


[delicious] [socialsoftware] [tagging] [webapps] - trackback

Yahoo's My Web 2.0 is now open to the public (it was introduced in June for a limited set of people) (anyone noticed that Yahoo! 360° is no longer invitation only?), and it has nice features:

* you can save pages (bookmarking and/or saving a cached copy)
* tags have replaced folders
* control who should be allowed to see a page (you and you alone, you and your friends, everyone)
* social search based on your actual preferences using superadvanced MyRank algorithms

Links:
My Web 2.0 FAQ
Search, with a little help from your friends


[yahoo] [search] [tagging] - trackback

Chances are good that you have read Scott Berkun's How to learn from your mistakes already, but if you haven't, you should go there and check it out.


[lifehacks] [transit] - trackback

On our path to enlightenment in productivity, a reasonable time management is key.

Two of the essential skills in time management is (1) being able to make educated guesses on how much time various tasks might take (boy you can be wrong here) and (2) keeping an overall track on how you actually did spend your time during the day (grrrl you can be wrong here, too).

Active Timer and ClockWork are two free tools which jump in to help - at least for measuring how you spend your time at your computer:

Active Timer is a small, lightweight application timer for OS X. It keeps track (in increments of five seconds) how long you spend in each application.

ClockWork is a webbased application, which allows you the flexibility to start, pause and resume an unlimited amount of task timers making it easy to switch between tasks without delay.

Combined, they give you a pretty fine grained status report of your current behaviour. Have them running in the background for a day or two, you might be surprised.


[webapps] [osx] [productivity] [timemanagement] - trackback

A few quickies:



digg - a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. Stories are submitted, users provide relevance feedback via diggs.



GreaseMonkeyed - a tagged repository of Greasemonkey user scripts. Hail to the monkey.



TagSite v2 - abstract Ajax magic for tags.


[tagging] [webapps] [greasemonkey] - trackback

Celebrating the 36th anniversary of man's first landing on the moon, Google launches Google Moon (and reveals one of the best kept secrets of all times; zoom in to find out).

[google] [misc] - trackback

It's common knowledge that blogging is great fun and highly addictive. A single blog can't satisfy this yearning to blog, so many bloggers run 10 or more blogs. But these blogs want to be fed with quality content every day, and this turns out to be a lot of work, especially if you don't have anything to say.

Multi-blogger Dan Hollings carefully thought about this dilemma and developed Blog-zilla, a tool which might solve all your content needs:

Blog-zilla is a web-based program that works tirelessly to help you reach your internet marketing, blogging, and revenue goals. It multiplies your capabilities so you may create lots of quality content. As your assistant, it makes publishing highly targeted content for your readership easy. It automates all posting and with your help creates 'intelligent' non-duplicate content.

A supplementary tool (Ping Kong) will notify many search engines and aggregators to ensure a high level of visibility of your freshly squeezed content.


[blogging] [infoeconomy] - trackback

Vienna from Steve Palmer just rocks. It's s freeware RSS/Atom newsreader for Mac OSX, and it does what a newsreader is supposed to do (read all reasonable formats, import from and export to OPML, search within your subscriptions,...) but it adds a killer feature: Smart Groups for creating customized and rule based views on the entries.

Here is a (non exhaustive) list of some rules Vienna lets you play with:

Read (yes/no)
Flagged (yes/no)
Subject (is/is not/contains/contains not/...)
Folder (is/is not/within a given folder/subfolder)
Date (is/before/after/...)
Author (is/is not/contains/...)
Link (is/is not/contains/...)
Text (is/is not/contains/...)

Smart Folders can be created via File - New Smart Folder - the interfaces resembles the one for creating Smart Playlists in iTunes, no surprises there. The only feature I miss, is an or operator for combining the rules for a Smart Folder, but overall Vienna is just fantastic, and really really fast.

[disclaimer: I'm from Vienna (Austria), so my judgement might be blurred.]


[atom] [rss] [osx] - trackback

What a brilliant idea: del.icio.us-style file tagging.

Stephen Hahn has written a perl script tag(1) which lets you associate tags with your files and query them later. The syntax is easy to remember:

$ tag -a <tagname> <filename> - for adding a tag to a file
$ tag -d <tagname> <filename> - for removing a tag from a file
$ tag -q <tagname> - for listing all files associated with a tag
$ tag <filename> - for listing all tags associated with a file


[tagging] [cli] - trackback

Recently, and thanks to GTD / 43 Folders my inbox in Gmail is empty (and yawning in utter boredom). That's good. But I also use GTD-action contexts as tags for my bookmarks in del.icio.us (@inbox, @toread, @toevaluate, @someday,...), and those are just bursting.

I guess what's good for emails is also good for bookmarks, so I wrote a Greasemonkey script to support me in my link sweeping efforts. All it does is to highlight posts with certain tags in del.icio.us (like @inbox or @toread, this is configurable) to give a little visual reminder that they require some sort of action or attention (read, install, archive, tag). At the end of the day, all colors should be gone (read and/or labeled ond/or deleted).



If you want to try it you can grab it here. I hope it's rather self explanatory. Mark Pilgrim has a great primer on Greasemonkey, if you don't know it yet or you've never installed a Greasemonkey script. Let me know, if you have any questions or suggestions.


[gtd] [delicious] [greasemonkey] - trackback

Jeremy Ruston's absolutely fabulous TiddlyWiki triggered quite a few interventions recently. Here is a list of wikis I stumbled upon that adapt/extend/enhance/build upon it:




ZiddlyWiki by Tim Morgan

[ZiddlyWiki] provides server-side storage of the wiki (tiddler) content by combining the power of TiddlyWiki with Zope.

ZiddlyWiki is unique from other TW adaptations (I think) since it doesn't modify any of the TiddlyWiki code; it just overrides specific JavaScript functions to achieve the desired result. All the overridden code is provided in a separate JavaScript file, and the original TiddlyWiki empty.html file is uploaded into Zope unmodified. This makes tracking TW enhancements and bug fixes easier, because ZiddlyWiki is less like a project fork and more like a pluggable backend. Kinda.

Zope is an open source content management framework based on Python, so an average dummy webhost might not support it (mine doesn't), but if yours does: ZiddlyWiki has a some more cool features:

OnDemandLoading - Tiddlers are only fetched on demand rather than all-at-once
TiddlerRevisions - the last 15 revisions of the tiddler can be restored
ImportExport - ZiddlyWiki can be exported to and imported from a TiddlyWiki file (hybrid online/offline setup)




TiddlyWikiRemote by Dan Phiffer

this one adds:
ServerSide saving of Tiddlers (via RSS)
SaveHistory - previous revisions of the tiddlers can be restored




Qwiki Web by AlanHecht

The purpose of this adaptation is to improve the look and feel of TiddlyWiki when used as the basis for a public web site.

this one adds:
LanguageOverlay - for setting your own text and language for all buttons and messages
ColorThemes - which make customizing the look QwikiWeb very easy
UserMode - to set the level of difficulty for the display interface
EditMode - e.g. to hide the 'edit' button from the Wiki
ExcludeFromSearch - allows you to block specific tiddlers from showing up in the search results
HidingTiddlers - to hide special tiddlers




TagglyWiki and GTDTagglyWiki by Jody

The modification adds non-hierarchical organisation of Tiddlers through tags.

(tags have been integrated in TiddlyWiki now though)




TiddlyTagWiki by Jonny LeRoy

The main functional change from the original TiddlyWiki is the introduction of TiddlyTags - allowing you to categorise your Tiddlers in an ad hoc manner.

I've also updated the LookAndFeel and layout to suit my Flickr obsessed taste.

Other small changes include the automatic saving of the current layout to the OptionsCookie rather than using the DefaultTiddlers. Though they are still used if no layout is set in the OptionsCookie.

You can now also select to view the TimeLine filtered to just show Tiddlers that you've modified. This has been commented out for now since it isn't configurable and if you haven't edited anything then nothing will appear in the timeline. If you UseTheSource then you can put this filter back in ;-)

I've also changed the backup logic so it saves to a sub-directory called "backup" - this just keeps the main directory cleaner and makes it simpler to zip up your backups to reduce space.

MyWiki by Henrik Aasted Sorensen

This extension contains a server-side component, which allows for easy saving and deletion of entries.

The Wiki is stored in plain text on the server, so no database is reqired.




PHPTiddlyWiki by Patrick Curry

PhpTiddlyWiki is a brand new kind of Wiki. It combines the awesome front-end of TiddlyWiki with a new PhP/MySql backend.

DirtyWaterWiki by Roberto DeFeo

Now you can add check boxes to your tiddlers to allow support for a TodoList. Items can be checked and unchecked directly or by editing the tiddler and making the appropriate changes.

YATWA by Steve Rumsby

this one adds Folding (collapse the body of a tiddler but still display the title) and a JavaScript calendar




GTDTiddlyWiki by Nathan Bowers

this one adds a GTD structure.



Mini-TiddlyWiki-hacks:

GTDTWcal creates code fragments for calendars to add to your tiddlers.
Blue Mist Style or Zeldman Orange Style - StyleSheet tiddlers for TiddlyWiki 1.2.22



UPDATE: 9/18/2005


ServerSideWiki by Josh Goebel

The ServerSideWiki is a hosted TiddlyWiki service running on Ruby on Rails, so you don't have to worry about saving your tiddlers anymore. There are various pricing plans available, the free one gives you 10 pages or tiddlers, maybe enough to get you hooked.

It also has nicely animated ToDo tiddlers, so it's a great way to start playing around with TiddlyWikis, especially if you don't have any webspace of your own.



TiddlyWiki-SE (Student Edition) by Clint Checketts

this one adds easy note-taking capabilities for students (there is a tab for classes, and a special tagspace for notes associated with each class.)

Clint has some more good hacks exploring and pushing the limits of the TiddlyWiki, like adding Adsense, or giving them a blog-like look and feel. Check out his HomeTiddly.



[microcontent] [webapps] [wiki] - trackback

Can you trust your tags?

HonorTags help readers find content they can trust, and help journalists, bloggers, podcasters and other creators build that trust within their communities. As a creator, you can tag the postings on your own blog or other site to indicate your intentions.

The idea is promising: add a controlled set of (meta-)tags to your content to state your intention, perspective, or disposition. At some point tools or networks will make use of them (as another filter, building networks of trust,...).

(via Bubble Generation)


[tagging] - trackback

This really would be interesting, if it wouldn't be so sad: the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam monitors the moods in recent Livejournal posts:











(via Google Blogoscoped)


[blogging] [news] - trackback

If you have Instiki installed you might want to take a look at Pimki, which adds a few features like an integrated blog, a glossary page, and ToDo lists (check the homepage for a full list of features).

Todo items can be added anywhere in your wikis using the keyword todo (todo: buy cheese) and Pimki will list all todos in a special page. Pimki is smart and even picks up dates contained in todo items highlighting late todos.

But it gets better: you can assign one or more contexts to the todos (todo@blog: add many ads). Pimki lets you browse your todos by due date or filter them by context. So if you are into Getting Things Done, just use your contexts, and you are done (with collecting at least).


[wiki] [productivity] [gtd] - trackback

How lovely II: David Lynch has a Daily Weather Report.


[misc] [weather] - trackback