Blog before you Think!

Mediamatic's Physical Metadata project frees tags from their restriction of being attached to online objects, and takes them into the real world.

55 words were printed on cards (tags, really) and could be attached to real objects in the physical world. More examples of what happened can be seen on http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/physicalmetadata.

(via angermann)

(related: Semapedia)


[tagging] [metatagging] [realworld] - trackback

Nivi announced/launched Slawesome!, a free service for recording voice-mails from within your browser (requires Flash) and sending them to any email address.

Slawesome is in alpha and we are really excited about upcoming features. The fact that you can make any slawmail public should give you a hint of some of the road ahead. The service is free but we will probably have to charge for pro accounts (more storage, more slawmails) soon.

Synchronous VoIP (Skype, GTalk) and asynchronous podcasting are great. I wonder how voice will evolve when we can really funk it up on the internet.

[webapps] [voip] - trackback

Well, this (Happy Discardia: Feeds [1]) was easy, at least for now - and I really feel stupid for making silly and pretty obvious mistakes. Here are the most striking ones:

* I was subscribed to some feeds multiple times (redundancy). There really should be some mechanism for synchronizing feeds between various clients.

* I didn't have one OPML file covering all my subscriptions (reference). I was adding one set of feeds in Bloglines, and another one in NetNewsWire. Feeds providing full text I subscribed in Vienna, and so on.

* I was processing feeds like emails, they absorbed way too much attention. You probably know the Email 101 a la GTD, and this is brilliant for emails, but it becomes a sisyphean challenge when you try to empty your inbox in Bloglines. I also didn't differentiate between various feed reading modes (see below). This actually was my biggest mistake.

* I had no filter between stumbling across an interesting posting and subscribing to the feed.

So I just made a few minor technical adjustments, which made me feel much better already:

* if in doubt: unsubscribe;

* I made Bloglines my master-repository for all feeds (and erased all other accounts),

* set up a folder for each of my major use cases for feeds (reading blogs, scrolling linklogs, being notified of progress in projects or calendar events, scanning the tagweb for topics,...), defined a reading mode for each of them (some feeds are important and might trigger an action, others make an enjoyable read on rainy weekends, some feeds I want to check daily but no headache if I won't, and so on),

* and moved all remaining feeds to their corresponding new homes.

Actually I should have stopped there, but I also resubscribed some of those folders at other services like Rojo, NewsGator, or SearchFox RSS again, if they provide a significant advantage for the corresponding reading mode, still need to fiddle around here.

Only one thing was missing to kick off fresh again: clicking Mark All Read.


[rss] [infoeconomy] [superegoblogging] - trackback

Merlin Mann recently mentioned that these days might be nicely vibed for Happy Discardia, a perfect time for getting rid of stuff, and while I'm actually pretty good at tossing physical items (with some exceptions), I really really suck at getting rid of data I'm harvesting on the web. One area has been bugging me for quite a while, so this might be a chance to attack it: everything RSS.

Now, when it comes to physical stuff, I do have a collector mentality - just to give a figure: I own 2500 LPs (coming down from over 3000 one year ago), or about 1200 books - and that's fine, they are nicely displayed or well containerized, and they don't eat any mental RAM, but with RSS mediated access to information, things just have gone out of control. I'm subscribed to a few hundred feed sources which generate a few thousand new items each day, and I spend a significant time processing those. I also love to check out new tools, gadgets, webapps, and so on, so things are really a mess, since all my feeds are rhizomatically spread around various places, but more on that later.

This is no uncommon phenomenon, of course, many people find themselves overwhelmed with data (think ADD, Information Overload, or Continuous Partial Attention). For me the time is 11:55, so for the next few days, I dedicate this blog to journaling my effords in stepping back to rethink my current behaviour, and to define a decent set of strategies and come up with reasonable practices for dealing with RSS, and to eliminate the rest.

I'll blog the progress as I go, and I have no clue whether this is leading anywhere, so bear with me, but feel free to share any tips you have got, I'll need them.


[rss] [infoeconomy] [superegoblogging] - trackback

Tag Central

Apropos Guten Tag, I just spotted another tag aggregator: Tag Central, which also aggregates various sources, and builds one convenient page containing the most recent entries.

Tag Central scans:

• Flickr
• Smugmug
• Wists
• Technorati
• BlogMarks
• 43 Things
• del.icio.us
• Tagsurf
• Furl
• Upcoming.org
• Jots
• de.lirio.us
• Consumating

[tagging] [search] - trackback

Gunja

I thought hard about this, but there definitively is no way for a Wiki to be any more minimalistic than Ben Nolan's Gunja. Like TiddlyWikis Gunja lives in a single HTML-file, but forget about all fancy fading effects, all you get is:

* a square box for entering text
* a button for creating a link from selected text
* a button for going to your start page

And this is where the magic happens: that's basically all you need (for many use cases). Check it out, it's focused and fun (you probably need Firefox, it doesn't seem to be working in Safari or Opera).



[wiki] [webapps] [minimalism] - trackback

Guten Tag is yet another tag-based search engine, but it has a unique flavor:

* it aggregates the results of other search engines/social systems
* it scans various media: blog posts (via Technorati, IceRocket, and 43 Things); links (via del.icio.us, Wists, and BlogMarks); photos (via flickr); podcasts (via del.icio.us and odeo); and videos (via Vimeo and Pooxi).
* it has the look and feel of a blog and you get RSS-feeds for your searches (of course), but you can't page back in time.

So, it's a convenient one stop shop for many taggy needs.


On a sidenote: Guten Tag roughly translates to What's up? in German. That's probably the reason, why it is highly popular with German bloggers.


[tagging] [search] - trackback

The Lessons learned while building Basecamp session from O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference 2005 with Jason Fried is available at IT Conversations now.

Jason is the founder of everybody's darling postcontemporary web company 37signals, well known for their smash hit web apps Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da List.

Fasten your seatbelt and take a ride, this is a great peek into the processes, strategies, and philosophies of web-development for some years to come.

(via Nivi, who gives a nice rundown of the secret marketing tricks.)


[podcast] [development] - trackback

Writely (The Web Word Processor) recieved quite some buzz lately, but had suspended the sign-up of new users. Now it has opened it's doors again. Take the Tour, Writely is amazing.


And Netvibes launched. It's like MyYahoo without the Yahoo, or Personalized Google without the Google. It's a minimalistic little place for aggregating free floating content of any kind (given a RSS or Atom feed is provided). See the announcement and an exhaustive review.


[quickies] [webapps] - trackback

You've seen it before, and you'll see it again: Google's Blog Search.


First impressions:

* it's Google, so it's fast.

* Besides the one mentioned above, the Blog Search also comes in a Blogger flavor.

* the References feature for finding out which other sites link to a page (link:bla.bla) - which is somehow broken in Google - seems to work better here.

* you can subscribe to Atom or RSS feeds for your searches

* (and you need to provide an Atom or RSS feed, otherwise your blog won't be picked up)

* if you want to check which entries of your blog have been picked up by Blog Search yet (this actually is a good indicator for finding out when Google decided to roll Blog Search, they seem to have started scanning the feeds on April 14th), just search for blogurl:your.blog.url

* the Advanced Blog Search gives you fine grained control on what to search (you can restrict the search to a period of time or a specific language amongst others).


Nice. But I'm still scratching my head, why they didn't throw in a search for tags, though.


[google] [search] - trackback

I love stuff like that:

Semapedia combine[s] the physical annotation technology of http://semacode.org with the availability of high quality information using the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org and thus provide[s] free relevant ad-hoc high quality information to mobile users in the real world.

(a semacode is an optical barcode that contains a URL internet address, e.g.:
)

With Semapedia technology you can connect physical entities with their wikipedish representation via attaching semipedia printouts to those physical entities - a reentry of the symbolic into the real. Details of how to do it and the soft- and hardware requirements are given here.


[wikipedia] [reentry] [metatagging] - trackback

More fun with paper:


Douglas Johnston gave his D*I*Y Planner a new home:

DIYPlanner.com is a community site whose focus is on paper-based productivity, planning, journalling and creative techniques. Here you will able to find not only the official D*I*Y Planner kits, but daily articles, scores of useful templates, handbooks and how-to's, forums for discussing productivity in its many forms, images to clad your planners or inspire you, and so much more.

And the PocketMod launched (and became a del.icio.us smash hit with more than 1500 bookmarks in 4 days), which lets you create micro-productivity booklets from a single sheet of paper. The folding technique is just brilliant.


I hope there will be some sort of joint venture (D*I*Y Planner PocketMod Edition or so) soon.


[paper] [productivity] - trackback

Well, I'm back from my minitrip to the beach - two weeks without internet, tv, or hurricans are a highly recommended experience. Italy is just a blessed country.

Time to catch up a little bit...


Technorati introduced Blog Finder, which lets you search for blogs for a given tag. Technorati seems to be working on an automated classification, but blog authors also can claim their blogs for up to 20 tags.

This could become a pretty effective antidote against the lameness of top 100 (or 500) lists, since it filters the blogs by subject/concept/tag and creates a better visibility for micro-blogospheres covering various niches.

(btw: Technorati seems to be ignoring this blog, the last entry was picked up about 3 months ago. If anyone was experiencing similar problems and found a solution, please let me know.)

(via TechCrunch)


Amazon introduced concordance - a kind of tag cloud listing the 100 most frequently occurring words in a book, e.g. for Getting Things Done:

action  actually  anything  best  calendar  call  categories  chapter  come  computer  control  create  day  decision  done  down  even  everything  feel  file  first  focus  folders  get  getting  go  going  good  happen  ideas  information  items  keep  key  kind  know  least  let  level  life  list  lot  material  may  meeting  might  mind  model  must  need  new  next  notes  now  office  often  organization  organizing  outcome  own  paper  part  people  personal  phone  physical  planning  practicing  probably  process  processing  productivity  projects  put  really  reference  reminders  required  review  right  see  should  something  steps  still  stuff  system  take  things  think  thinking  three  time  tools  two  use  want  work  world  yourself 

To get the concordance for any book (and some other text statistics like the Fog Index or the Flesch-Kincaid Index) just browse the detailed view, locate the section labeled Inside This Book, and click Concordance.

(via Linda Zimmer)


Or if you want to tag (and catalog) your books yourself, check out LibraryThing from Tim Spalding.


And Nils Windisch's flickrTagFight takes the usefulness of tags to a new level.


[amazon] [tagging] [technorati] - trackback