Blog before you Think!

Rough Underbelly – a cute productivity application. You can create tasks, assign a level of worth-doingness (based on the Printible CEO) and check tasks as done. And that’s about it.

Evoca – Flickr for your voice (or other audio chunks) – check out the FAQ.

del.icio.us – fight:

It’s a bad time to start a company (105 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (35 users)

update 3/27/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (151 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (138 users)

update 3/28/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (162 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (158 users)

update 3/29/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (170 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (169 users)

update 3/31/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (172 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (180 users)

Through out her writing danah constantly invokes a bottom up defense of youth culture. Essentially that the kids are alright they just need space and privacy to develop their own identities. It’s an argument I’m totally sympathetic to, but it becomes completely problematic when one realizes that something like MySpace just isn’t a traditional bottom-up youth culture situation at all. Rather it’s something more like an engine, a structure to contain the bottom up energy and transform it into something else entirely…

MySpace knows their users basic info, name, email, age, etc. Then it also knows their friends, their friends data, their favorite bands, the way they speak, who they like, who they don’t…

Not only does MySpace have an absurd amount of personal data on people, the sort of stuff traditional demographics companies have been collecting for decades. But it also has something perhaps far more valuable, a wealth of data on the relationships between all those people…

Abe Burmeister on the abstract dynamics of MySpace

Joshua Schachter announced the possibility to mark bookmarks as private in del.icio.us today.

(log in, click settings, click private saving, click allow private saving of bookmarks; once you’re done, you can toggle the visibility via edit after you bookmarked them.)

This is probably around forever, but I just spotted it: you can setup one account at Gmail as your master email client for all other email accounts you may have got.

There are two steps that need to be performed:

• you need to tell Gmail which email accounts you want to use: 1. in Gmail go to Settings – Accounts ; 2. click Add another email address and fill out the details; 3. click Reply from the same address the message was sent to to ensure Gmail replies with the corresponding address. Step 2. needs to be repeated for any email address you want to use.

• you need to verify your ownership of each email address by clicking the verification link Gmail has sent to them; and you need to set up each account to forward all messages to your Gmail account (not every email provider will let you do this, but most do).

Once you’re done you’ll get all the sweetness and benefits of Gmail (search, tagging, spam filtering, ...) and still be in control of the addresses you want to use. (You will also be one step closer fulfilling Google’s mission of managing your digital body, of course.)

Publi.sh is a nice and easy way to genarate a feed for whatever purposes.

You can manage your feeds via a webbased interface or if you want to syndicate websites via a bookmarklet.

(Similar services are FeedXS or RapidFeeds Feed Manager amongst others.)

Come on. 2.0 is about the firm being unbundled. It is deeply anti “corporate” in it’s essence. Yesterday’s bureauracy is fast disappearing because 2.0 models are far more efficient (outsourcing, Innocentive, NineSigma, etc). Isn’t the point for marketers to help firms adjust to a world where they can’t exert total control the conversation anymore (a la Fox News/CNN/etc)?

(again) Umair Haque

Both Google and Writely announced the acquisition of Writely by Google.

Google Writer would be my first guess as the new name for Writely.
Wriiiiiiitely or Googely also are likely canditates.

del.icio.us just added inline editing of your bookmarks (click edit to the right of the title):

This might be a small feature, but it comes incredible handy if you tag a lot of bookmarks for later reading (2read, ...), since this allows you to process (read, delete, retag) those far more efficient.

Sketch Swap is a fun little app which lets you draw sketches and displays/redraws a random sketch in return.

Recently launched, minimalistic, and highly focused:

BrainStorm is an interesting tool written in Rails for web based collaboration. You can create Conversations and invite others to participate. It’s still a little bit buggy but quite interesting, since you can add a variety of content fragments – appointments, checklists, ideas, quotes, reminders, tasks, and so on -:

Pixoh is an online photo editor. Currently it lets you resize, crop and rotate photos, but more features are on the roll.

ShortText lets you publish microchunks of text on the web. Each fragment gets its own (short) URL. Nice.

Last not least FeedSifter lets you create filtered feeds which only let pass items containing specified keywords. This is handy if you want to scan many feeds for specific topics only (see also Atiki in my previous posting).

Recently launched:

FeedShow is a new web based feed reader. No pills, no thrills, but there are two really nice features:

besides printing and emailing items, you also can tag them at del.icio.us or save a copy to your computer right from within FeedShow. I like this a lot, because I can comfortably save items I want to read sometimes/when I’m offline without tagging them at del.icio.us before I’ve actually read them. (There are hacks and workarounds accomplishing this for other feed readers available, of course, but FeedShow offers a one click solution.)

After a decent period of running in private beta Newsvine – a social news aggregator fed by stories from the AP – launched today.

Registered users can discuss and vote for stories (and can write their own columns), but the most delightful feature is that it’s looking great and has very much the look and feel of a blog.

Atiki is another feed mixer with a social flavor: you can tag the mixes you create, others can clone your mixes, and popular mixes are promoted.

One cool (potentially highly useful) feature is the possibility to filter the mix by words or phrases.

I guess everyone has seen this by now, but it’s freakingly awesome.

Somehow related: Ask also have maps now.