I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).
Are there other sources?
I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.
I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.
Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…
I just want my skepticism to be smart.
Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.
The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.
Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?
You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.
Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?
This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!
If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew
Oh damn, it hurts! I’m still mourning the death of Oink! Please, please, please, if you’re reading this and you can hook me up with the latest thing… [waffles?] …I’m dying over here!
Anyhow, back to the blogging.
I usually start off with a ScrapeTorrent search. It’s a meta-search that searches several of the top trackers like The Pirate Bay etc… There’s also YouTorrent.com, which is also a meta-search, but I have found that ScrapeTorrent.com has the better results… At least that’s how it seems to me.
Here’s my dilemma. I have a ton of bookmarks on my Del.icio.us account. I love using an online bookmarking system. But still, Delicious and others’ systems for organizing bookmarks don’t really help with a need I bet most users have: Tag-Optimization.
What we need are tools for analyzing and perfecting the organizing of bookmarks. Every one of these systems like Delicious, Furl, StumbleUpon etc, have the same problem: user-submitted tags are bug-y!!! The engine of the platform needs to guide the users toward better tagging! Basically, we need built-in systems for finding the types of redundancies and other tag-errors that we all have. We need debugging software, so our bookmarks can become good, clean representations of how web-users feel about various web resources. ”Suggested Tags” and “Popular Tags” are great time-saving features but I’d like to also have a tool for correcting tag-cancer.
These software offerings, if/when they finally exist, are going to make it increasingly more easy to harmonize user-submitted value from folksonomies with the ‘Semantic Web,’ which is right around the corner.
Some examples of areas where I think a robot could help users to clean up tags are:
Redundant Tags. Usually just alternate tenses of the same word (like the plural and singular form) but also synonyms. Example: Image, Images, Picture, Pictures, Pix
Arbitrary Capitalization. HTML vs html etc.
Vagueness. Like los or awesome (wouldn’t it be safe to assume that all the things you bookmark are ‘awesome’ to you?’).
This is a screen-shot of my tagging screen from Delicious. I added the red scribbling to point out just a few of the problems my tags have.
Del.Icio.Us Tags Gone Wild
On several occasions, I’ve set out to clean up my tags manually, but I’ve never made it very far. It’s just too much work.
I’ve heard of the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) Project, and perhaps this could save us, but like many other ‘Semantic Web’ projects, I haven’t found a way, as a lay person, to utilize it. At some point down te road, maybe someone will make a Delicious-MOAT-erizer Web-App that will clean-up-shop-by-proxy and make the metadata available to the Semantic Web.
Starting August or September, depending on the comments I get on this blog entry, I will begin ridding the street I live on of trash, Watertrough Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472. I imagine it will take me about a week of going out every day, for 2-4 hours on foot, and even occasionally picking some pieces of junk up with my minivan and hauling it to the dump or finding a way to recycle it. I want to clean Watertrough Rd completely of every last candy-wrapper and cigarette butt.
I would like to make a “movement” out of this. Let’s start here in West County, and the rest of the world can copy us.
I want to set up an infrastructure for helping other people do similar cleanup work along our country roads. Now that we have the internet, let’s put it to some good!
Please be interested in this. If you’re interested in helping in any way, please send an email to
For years, my good friend Chris Phillips has dazzled me with his countless stories about his adventures. He is Bipolar and/or Schizoaffective since his first psychotic break in his early twenties or so. Because of this, his stories are nicely sprinkled with demons and divinity, loonie-bins, jails, vagrancy, magic, intuition and desperation, but through his pleasant approach to looking at his life, and the down-to-earth, articulate and even comical approach to his story-telling, there is always a sense of hope or connection in his stories, sometimes directly, and sometimes through his observations about people and the forgiveness he has had to maintain (for himself as well as the world around him), I suspect in order to survive.
I’m bringing this up because he called me the other night and told me that he has begun to write his own life story. He’s blogging about the events of his life over at ChrisThomasPhillips.WordPress.com.
This stuff is so fun to read! One of the first ones he posted is about trying to have sex with his mother’s house plants. Really. It’s interesting stuff–strange, but also very funny and very relatable. You should go check it out.
I met Chris ten or more years ago at the beginning of one of his most recent manic episodes. He wasn’t fun to be around because he would never shut up about the shamanism he was pursuing and a bunch of other really annoying and over-done, overzealous baloney. I didn’t know at the time that I was seeing him in a manic state. I thought he was just an extremely high-energy person. He disappeared from our house for a while during during the peak of his mania and soon after, I observed the severe depression he went through on the other side of his cycle. He was sleeping on a couch in our garage, barely getting up to eat or shit, and having no desire to even talk to anyone for I guess, what must have been about a month.
Over time, I got to know him in his “normal” stage, in between the depression and mania he had been going through in 1-year cycles.
A year or two later, I reconnected with him at a “bad time,” and suffered through his unwanted presence in my life as his illness was beginning to take him over the edge. Truthfully, at the time, I was glad to see him go once his mania finally carried him off on some random adventure, leading ultimately to a mental hospital (rinse, repeat).
But a few years later, after he finally got put on an effective combination of prescriptions, I built a great friendship with him. I’ve learned a lot about him and his Illness and enjoyed his company and his beautiful songs and especially his stories. He has become one of my dearest friends and I wouldn’t trade him for anything. I regret that there was ever a time when I wanted him to disappear. If only I had known then what I know now, maybe I could have helped him. But at least we got more amazing stories out of him going nuts back then.
Plaxo has some really compelling address book synchronization offerings. Really, for me, Plaxo was sort of a mini dream come true as far as my personal data is concerned.
But I thought about it and I just don’t trust Comcast. They are limiting my access to competing media distribution channels, and they have a reputation for fighting against consumer interests, and perhaps even human interests, if you’re willing to step back and see the implications of the non-neutrality they are in favor of with regard to the Internet.
Comcast, you have an uphill PR battle in front of you. People like me will continue to think of your brand as representing pure evil until you start to prove us wrong. I don’t know how you’re going to do this, but making acquisitions that appear to consumers to be privacy concerns, given your already soiled trust with the public, isn’t the best thing to do right now. I’m all for socially curated media, and I’m glad if Comcast is working in that direction, but frankly, you’re in a position where you could really start to seem like the orwellian “Big Brother” Nightmare everyone is terrified of. Perhaps you should point all your guns at bringing IPTV into reality, or better yet, let’s see the real convergence between TV and Web that we all know is coming one way or another. Do that first. And why don’t you also try getting all the dark spots in the Net lit up! The South, you know? Let’s get those people online and you can sell them programming later. I know there’s not really a bandwidth problem, not when there’s 100 channels of “HD” programming streaming into all your cable customers homes 24/7. C’mon. Quit lying and cheating and stealing and start making some progress toward our common good. Or on the other hand, why don’t you announce the acquisition of an arms manufacturer. That’d help your company’s image.
I’ve deleted Plaxo’s software from my machine, and I closed my Plaxo account. Goodbye Plaxo. Really, an open-source version of the same type of thing would be better anyhow.
Got the rumor tip from Scoble (there’s no real info there so don’t bother)
Plaxo? Are you listening? Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps. You’re better than them! Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more! Don’t turn to the dark side!
Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough… Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.
Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this. Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.
In the suggested reading section of the page for the DIY Rel=”Me” project over at dataportability.org’s wiki, There’s a link to this blog post, which is an attempt to explore the usefulness of rel=”me” to the regular old web user. The article is slightly tunnel-visioned at what you can or can’t do with your browser to exploit MicroFormats. Of course, being able to detect locations or personal contact info thru a browser extension is useful and I’m all for it, but beyond a few obvious exceptions like those, The Semantic Web, MicroFormats included, wont be much use to us at the level of the browser. We will still need Web based portals or “Libraries” or “repositories” or “Catalogs” or what have you, to connect to, in order to really take advantage of this stuff. Semantic markup on pages is great. RSS is an example of how a little bit of semantics can go a long way. But what’s of greater significance is the idea of the Web Of Data, where resources are “semantically” interconnected, by leveraging information that’s mapped to the domain of knowledge where it’s useful and the relationships between resources are also specified in a machine-understandable way.
Rel=”me” is the equivalent of saying “The person represented by this URL is the same person as the person represented by this other URL.” Taking that into consideration, imagine how this would effect the experience of searching the “Web of Documents.” I argue that if enough of us implement rel=”me” (or other microformats or RDFa) in our HTML pages, we will empower the Googles and Yahoos to take advantage to knowledge expressed by this markup. So let’s do it!
“…So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don’t think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN, I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven’t looked for it and if it is there, it isn’t immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable…”
“…At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support…”
I commented there and when I take the time to write a long comment out, that isn’t something I’ve already written in so many words here, I like to steal my own comment and put it here for anyone who reads my blog. My response:
I felt like I had to chime in and point out that the point of MicroFormats or RDFa isn’t really to make an overnight change in how we use the Web. It’s to create a backbone of linked data so that as Search Engines and other “Libraries” begin to have stores of these relationships between documents and other resources available to work with, they can begin to improve their services. It will be nice when Search is only partly based on scanning for text-strings or combinations of words.
If you were looking for Andrew in Sebastopol, CA, how would you do it? Perhaps you’d google “Andrew Sebastopol CA…”
But what if you could specify that you are looking for a person?
What if you could specify geocoding info or otherwise specify that Sebastopol is a town in Northern California?
What if you could filter your results by the time web-pages were created or filter by domain specifications (like show me wiki articles first or show me all MySpace profiles) or filter by type of site like say, show me blogs only, and finally, and this is where rel=”me” comes in, what if you could specify in your search results that you want to see every other document that is an expression of the same person, once you have selected from your query, a person named Andrew who lives in Sebastopol, CA? This is what it’s all about. It works because links work backward. In other words, you can already say “show me all the pages that link to this thing…” but what about being able to say “show me all the pages linking to this Twitter page that link using rel=”me” or better yet, show me all the pages linked to with rel=”me” from any page that links to this twitter page with rel=”me” …And so on…
The Web is becoming a library. By adding microformats and other semantic markup to our documents, we are making it possible for decent “card-catalogues” to be built, whether they’re being built by google, yahoo! or the guy down the street.
I’ve mentioned before how increasingly the ‘Live Web’ or ‘Blogosphere’ (or whatever you want to call this thing) is being infiltrated by Robot Blogs. What they appear to be doing is crawling the web and scraping excerpts of blog posts and reposting the excerpts, linking back to where it came from. They usually say:
“[KeyWord] wrote an interesting post today”
Since they link back to the blog post they scraped, they show up as a trackback in the comments area of the original post. This way, the unsuspecting blogger is linking to the fake blog. The fake blogs seem to be set up in an attempt at monetizing traffic via adsense ads.
I googled the phrase “wrote an interesting post today” and the top hit was (I probably am the top hit now) some blogger talking about filtering any comment that contains the phrase “wrote an interesting post today.”
I had decided to change my little tagline thingy to this exact phrase as a sort of inside joke for bloggers, but found myself wondering if being associated with that phrase will adversely effect my findability. Perhaps Search Engines or Spam Filters will begin to look out for that phrase?
Already, I bet there are tons of bloggers who filter out comments containing words like “viagra” or “casino,” assuming that there is absolutely no context in which these words could be used in a legitimate discussion. The fact that I am using those words here is proof that there is such a thing as a legitimate discussion which contains them.
Filtering for a word or phrase seems to me to be a slippery slope, especially if we’re talking about Search Engines, since they act as our main interface to the Web.
Google: Please don’t hate me because I said Viagra. I’m not a spammer.
UPDATE: It’s also available as a Torrent via The Pirate Bay. Please consider seeding this. It’s a tiny, tiny file.
Here’s the Read Me info I just put together to go with it:
“LOGIN_EMAIL”
and
“PASSWORD”
and change those.
LEAVE THE QUOTES IN PLACE
Save the file.
Upload these two files to your server.
point your web browser to http://where-you-put-the-file-on-your-server/ms_test.php
and what will result is a CSV file of all your MySpace friends and their demographic information. Also included is the URLs to “send message” etc, and some other useful things.
View the source of the page and copy it into a PlainText text file
Name the text file with the extension .csv
Now you should be able to work with your myspace friends in Excel
There is nothing malicious about this simple application. No viruses, spyware etc. It only does what it’s supposed to do: scrape your friends so you can more easily work with your social network data.
If you are of the camp that feels that people scraping their own myspace contacts is unethical, I suggest that you consider that all the pages are already available and the data they contain is rendered in HTML which can be freely accessed already. This is just a tool to make it easier to get the useful data separated from the clutter.
Finally, this is possibly against MySpace’s Terms Of Service, so use at your own risk.
I wish it wasn’t necessary for developer to build their own APIs for these social sites like myspace. I wish there was just a comprehensive API to begin with.
I’m going to miss the cute frog I’ve gotten so used to relying on.
But what I’m not going to miss is VUZE or VUSE or whatever, the media portal that Azureus started making me look at a while back. There hasn’t been any settings for making it so Azureus launches into “advanced” view, so every freaking time I launch Azureus, I end up having to deal with that Vuze shit.
Goodbye Azureus. Hello Transmission!
Transmission is light-weight, user-friendly, smart, Open-Source… Do I need to go on? It’s just way better.
Sorry, cute, shiny frog. Goodbye. I doubt I’ll ever look back. But I will miss the froggy.
After some experimentation, I found this is a good, quick, cheap way to get your audio levels for spoken word material up to snuff in a jiffy, without needing to understand much of anything about the technical aspect. Only requirement: a Mac.
Of course, all sources should be processed this way individually if possible.
If you’re recording Skype calls with CallRecorder, you should use Ecamm’s free tool (zip file download) for extracting the individual tracks from the saved Quicktime movie and import each side of the conversation into GarageBand on its own track.
Volume should be optimized for -0.5 db. Personally, I wouldn’t rely on an automatic process like Levelator for this. Maybe I’m old-school. I think it’s best to process each instrument/track with the following, in this order:
A. EQ (mainly to reduce rumble, plosives (’P’ sound blasts), if there are any)
B. Compressor (Lessens the dynamic range of the material, allowing you to increase the volume with less clipping (overloading))
C. Limiter (takes care of the occasional clipping that occurs once you compress and boost the volume)
Then, put an additional Limiter on a Master Track, just in case.
Here’s how you could approach this using GarageBand:
Since GarageBand only has two open-ended plugin slots per instrument/track, you can take care of the EQ and Compression in one step (more or less), by using Apple’s built-in “AUMultibandCompressor” plugin (comes standard with every Mac). Assign the first plugin slot to “AUMultibandCompressor,” and the second slot to “AUPeakLimiter.” (pic)
A good place to start for setting up the Compression is the “Gentle” preset. Then, to get to the settings so you can fine-tune, click the little pencil button. First turn up the pre-gain volume until you have plenty of compression happening. You’ll know because all four of the meters on the bottom will be active almost all the time there is sound coming from that track (pic below).
Then, turn up the post-gain volume until the track’s meter (pic below) in the main GarageBand window is hitting the top on all the louder syllables, like the ones that start with P’s or K’s.
Do all this with the Tracks’ volume settings at their default positions. Only use the compression’s post-gain setting to increase the volume of the tracks, that way the Peak Limiter’s default settings will be in the right place. If the Limiter was set to stop the volume from going over -0.5db and you increased the tracks volume to +3db, the result would be that the audio could reach +2.5db, which is too loud. So leave the track volumes alone and only work with the gain controls in the settings for the Compressor plugin so that the Limiter’s -0.5 is the same as the Track Volume’s -0.5… (sorry if that’s confusing)
The goal is for the track volumes to get as high as possible without ever triggering the little virtual clip indicator lights (pic). If they do get set off, they reset by clicking on them.
If a track’s audio is hitting the red in the meter, but never tripping the clip indicators (pic), you’ve achieved the sweet spot of plenty loud, but not too loud).
Your podcast will seem as loud as everything else out there. Hurray!
NOTE:
If there is a lot of rumble from breath or microphone handling, or ‘Pops’ from P sounds (plosives), you can cut the Low-EQ of the track by reducing the “EQ 1″ setting of the compression plugin.
ANOTHER NOTE: If the sound starts to seem too artificial-sounding (squashed), back off on the pre-gain a little and compensate with the post-gain to get it back up to an adequate level (hitting the orange and red fairly frequently while never setting off the clip indicators)
I have a job interview for a job I actually want to get tomorrow. I need to bite the bullet and work like a normal person for a while. There’s too many things I need to buy in order to remain productive in the long run, a new machine for instance. If I get this job, I will surely have practically no time to participate in the Web like I have been. I’ll be back though, some day. Don’t you cry.
In related news, look what happens when I stop blogging every day:
That’s my traffic. And the interesting thing is that this isn’t because of subscriptions as in more people subscribed so fewer posts equals fewer hits… It’s because of
the Live-Web search engines like Technorati and WordPress’ back-end,
traffic from TrackBacks when I blog about other people’s blog posts,
and how Google seems to give higher status to sites that update more regularly.
There are a good deal of searches that I used to come up on the first page for that I’m already falling off of, just because I went on a road trip and wasn’t really blogging for about a week.
Social Currency on the Web requires participation.
Now that I have NetNewsWire going, and can finally really manage as many feeds as I want in a totally efficient way, I’m realizing that I need more specific focus for my information gathering.
Engadget, one of the best consumer electronics blogs out there (the other is probably CNET’s) is getting laid off. It’s just not relevant enough to me.
It’s Monday afternoon even after spending my usual hour or so reading and scanning, I still have 2988 headlines I have not even glanced at yet.
224 of those are from Engadget. Sorry Engadget. I’m just not, on a daily basis, that interested in
digital picture frames,
handsets
bigscreen TVs
every little detail about all gaming related products
the vast world of portable media players
Gotta trim the fat sometimes… Another likely candidate for the chopping block is digg.com’s technology feed…
I can’t help but think of Digg as more of a pastime than a news source, although nearly every time I get bored enough to actually spend any time there, I find something really interesting to me.
Part One - Some Background. Long Tail, Net Neutrality & Free Culture
First, let me apologize for how long this damn thing is. Unfortunately, I need to make sure I get everyone on the same page more or less as far as what I see as the important ideas/themes to consider when looking at the current condition of Music (and all other Media). If the set-up is old news to you, bare with me while I school everyone else for a second.
Second, if you’re interested in what is going on with all this stuff, you really ought to check out the book: The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution by Dave Kusek. The first six chapters are available as a podcast in the iTunes Store HERE (iTunes URL Link). And a variety of links to where you can purchase the entire Audiobook can be found HERE.
This is where I got the idea of “Music Like Water.” In the first chapter of the book, Kusek talks about how in the future, music will flow like water without the constant interruptions we experience now when we have to buy or download it or move it from one drive to another. Music will just be there waiting. Like water through a faucet, it will pour. It will be as abundant and as varied as we like. I believe, as long as the Net remains neutral, this is inevitable.
Right now of course, that’s not at all how it works. But if you’ve got your ear to the tracks you can hear it coming. Digital Media, The Web, Search, Recommendation Systems, Social Software, RSS/Atom feeds, P2P technology, increasing connection speeds, accelerating processing power, the cheapening of storage - We are clearly on the threshold of a paradigm change. This is a particular moment in time when some very exciting things are happening with regard to how media is curated, discovered and distributed, not to mention how it’s created.
This stuff is much bigger than just music too. Of course all of these concepts carry over into Film, News, Literature, instructional products, the list goes on, but even beyond all that, this is a profound moment in history because the very process by which Human Culture grows, changes and spreads is changing because of the Internet and the invention of digital product. Anyone with access to blue-collar amounts of money can create media. Since increasingly anyone can participate in the cultural dialog, people are. This phenomenon is causing the few companies and institutions that have had most of the control over Culture in its many forms for all of living memory to lose market share as they increasingly find themselves in competition with Everyone and Everything else.
The “Everything Else” is also called the Long Tail and is examined by Chris Anderson in his book, “The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” This is a good book to read or listen to because it brings to light an important fact: There is more value in the sum of all the less-popular and niche products than there is in just the “Top Hits” we’ve grown up with.
The “Everyone Else” is me and you. What we are participating in here is what Lawrence Lessig calls the Read/Write Web. Rather than a one-way, or Read-Only form of media, digital media and the Web are very conducive to dialog. One example of this dialog is sampling in music. Another is the blogosphere. And there are many, many more. The Hands-On, Read/Write, Two-Way “remix-culture” that we are finding ourselves in suddenly makes you and me part of the “Everything Else” I mentioned a moment ago.
In this way, we are taking market share from corporate media and so corporate media is losing influence over our Culture and losing Money as the value they can offer advertisers is falling. And guess what. They want to stop it. That’s exactly what the Net Neutrality debate is about. If the Net becomes un-neutral, it will be like handing the freedom to participate that we now enjoy over to companies that stand to gain from preventing our participation in Media, and our access to a variety of media products.
Almost everyone I know uses illegal means to access media products at leas some of the time. Often it’s just too inconvenient to get media the legal way. Actually it’s often not even an option.
The traditional purveyers of Culture are losing money because of this. Media have been selling eyes and ears to the advertisers that fund them since before your parents were born. It’s not paranoid conspiracy-theory-speak when I say that the corporate media want to maintain control over the Culture Markets.
MORE ON THIS TO COME. In the meantime, check these out:
UPDATE: I’ve had to change this post. I learned after posting this that WebKit is merely the rendering engine that Safari uses. Although Safari updates will eventually include the latest ’stable’ version of the WebKit engine, by running an instance of Safari using the latest ‘beta’ version of WebKit you can take advantage of improvements being made to the engine now, but at the risk of encountering bugs etc, which so far I have not.
Anyways, I’ve had a hard time completely abandoning Safari for Flock. It turns out, while Flock has some features I really like and use on a daily basis, as well as the ability to run FireFox Extensions, it is a little clunky compared to Safari. I found myself still using Safari because it’s FAST. It’s just a more efficient App.
And I just recently learned about WebKit. Running Safari this way seems even faster than normal. They update WebKit on a nearly daily basis -seems like about every other day.
Anyways I’ve found that I’m using different browsers for different things. This is nice for two reasons. First, I’m taking advantage of each browser’s strengths, choosing which one to use depending on what I’m doing. Second, I’m addicted to Keyboard shortcuts and I love being able to Apple+Tab between the various things I’m doing.
One thing that would make doing things this way a lot better would be to have an aggregate view of my browsing history from across all the Browsers I use, Safari, Flock, NetNewsWire & FireFox. Then when I look at my history, it could be in chronological order regardless of the browser I used, but returning to an item in my history could open it in the same browser I opened it in the first time. Alternately, maybe a contextual (right-click/Control+click) menu could let me choose amongst them. I bet there’s a way to set this up using Automator, or maybe someone has thought of this and there’s an app out there somewhere. We’ll see.
Here’s what I use the various Browsers for as of today:
Safari w/ latest WebKit release
System’s Default Browser… The articles that come in on the feeds in NetNewsWire usually get opened with this.
Extended research sessions. I can’t stand waiting for Flock when I’m really trying to get some learning done or whatever.
Quickly grabbing links and such while I’m blogging in Flock
NetNewsWire
RSS/Atom Feeds for News, Blogs, continual queries of certain sites like craigslist
Flock
My “HomePages.” Flock is set with three tabbed homepages, My WordPress Dashboard, FaceBook and MySpace. I don’t go too far from home with Flock
Quick Web Searches via the add-on capable search thingy. I have stuff like dogpile, wikipedia and del.icio.us in there (and a ton more) (I wish pipl and definr would work in it)
Generally I blog using Flock, Apple+Tabbing over to reading materials open in NetNewsWire, and the two instances of Safari I’ve been running at the same time (with and without the latest WebKit release).
Flock’s blog editor comes in handy for quickly editing lite HTML while blogging, commenting or doing things like updating my MySpace (I’m such a dork).
FireFox
I use FireFox for all the Extensions I don’t need to have in my face and clogging things up during normal operation. Stuff like the Google Toolbar, The Web Developer Toolbar, Etc Etc Etc… Ugh! Disgusting. I hate all the toolbars. So much clutter.
Safari
I still find myself opening the normal version of Safari to have two history paths, or to be able to have one more space to Apple-Tab over to… But basically right now I’m mostly content with the “WebKit version.”
Anyways, I wish there was an automated way to always get the latest stable or near stable version of WebKit automatically…. It’s getting annoying constantly downloading disk images, mounting them, dragging the app, ejecting the image… An automator script maybe?
Some steps I’m taking to get all my contacts in order:
Syncing my phone with my Desktop Address Book using iSync. (Unfortunately, my phone, a Nokia 6126 isn’t supported by iSync so I had to find a hack to make it work)
Installing Plaxo’s extension for AddressBook on my computer so I can take advantage of Plaxo’s syncing service
Setting up Plaxo to retrieve as much info about the people I know as possible from the various online services on which we are connected.
Manually attempting to find redundancies in this master-list of connections and fix them. I have multiple incomplete address cards for many people, often with each one containing different pieces of the puzzle. Also, I wanto to include MySpace URL’s and Blogs that aren’t discoverable using Plaxo or any of the other tools I have at my disposal. I guess I have to do this more or less manually.
Re-Syncing with Plaxo then Re-Syncing with my phone.
With a few exceptions, I’m not going to include people who I’ve only met online thru Social Networks Etc.
Publishing this data, Minus Private information like emails addresses and phone numbers in Semantic Formats like FOAF, XFN Etc. I wonder about how other people would fee about the ethics of this. I’ve decided that since I’m not revealing anything that isn’t already findable on the public web, via a MySpace search etc, it isn’t unethical even though many of the people I know might haven’t thought through what the implications are of participating in the Social Web. I am going to take special care to not reveal blog sites and other things that people I know are doing anonymously.
This will probably take me a few days at least and I’m not looking forward to the work.
Originally, I saw this on Vimeo, which is a pretty awesome alternative to YouTube. Video quality is usually way better anyways. I was gonna embed the vimeo version but WordPress is pretty limited with respect to embedded content. So here’s the youtube version.
In case you missed it and you probably did if you’re the type of folk that will read this, I wanted to steer you toward the last episode of the PRI show, To The Best Of Our Knowledge.
Part one, is about apocalyptic settings in fiction… I really thought the last part was interesting. An author named Jonathan LethemScott Westerfeldwrote a novel, apparently for teens, about a scenario in the future where Social Currency via the Web is everything (or something to that effect) - a sort of Social Software Hell. The interview touches on some ideas about privacy and technology and also why Teens may relate so well to dystopian settings. All very interesting to me.
It’s amusing to me that I would find it strange that both of these topics, Intellectual Property and Privacy, be touched on by a radio program in the context of being completely unrelated. I’m so used to thinking about these two topics as parts of the big can of worms that is the Digital Age we’re just starting to come to grips with.
Posted by Andrew A. Peterson
