RSS feeds provide a means to extract topical information from a website. Often there are subtopics within a site that hold particular value or interest to me that I want to track. Instead of subscribing to the site as a whole, I often add select feeds to my reader. This can be extremely useful in research of any kind.
A good number of sites make the topical feeds option very obvious. Sites such as:
Other sites are not as obvious in however in providing topical feeds, but can be utilized nonetheless. Sites such as:
YouTube.com. Perhaps you want to collect media along by a certain search string. I thought it interesting to monitor what was published for CSS and HTML. I added the feed – http://youtube.com/rss/tag/css+html.rss to my reader. The search "css+html" is the query string that returns those videos. You can add your own string of words. For instance you could put "jimmy+buffett" to track one of my favorite musicians.
Flickr.com. For online publication it is helpful to keep an eye on photos along certain topics. Living in Austin, I’m curious what photos are being taken from my hometown. I added the feed – http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?
q=austin+texas&format=rss_200 to my reader. Again, you can replace the string "austin+texas" with your query string of choice.
Blog topics. Lastly, if you want to follow a specific topic for a WordPress blog such as the ever useful productivity tips on thoughtsparks.net, you can subscribe to http://www.thoughtsparks.net/category/productivity/feed in your feed reader. That way if you would like to by-pass my meandering thoughts on other topics, you’ll get just the meat you are wanting to extract.
As you begin to explore other sites and blog platforms you’ll discover similar hacks for getting the select information in your grid of interest.
If you float around in the micro-blogging world of Pownce, Twitter or Jaiku, you will most likely have heard today of the recent acquisition of Jaiku by Google. This news has my engines gunned, so much so that I wrote a short post on it at TechFires.com as well.
Now, before you think of me as one who just loves to jump on the bandwagon, you should know I don’t care that it was Google who did the purchase or that Jaiku was the one acquired. I have nothing against either entity, I’m just glad to hear of a major email provider snatching-up a micro-blogging solution such as Jaiku.
Google may change the name, tweak the features and do who knows what with the service. All of that is of little concern for me. What I’m most delighted about is the move towards mainstream micro-blogging. This one announcement sets off a new chain of events that will evolve our communication mores up yet another notch. Email, the all-in-compassing, run-your-life blob has got to be wrangled-in and limited to its most sublime functions. As I wrote in my recent post "13 Good Alternatives to Email", there are many great options to communication besides our over-used communication through email. Today is a landmark day.
So who gets dibs on Twitter? maybe Yahoo? What about Pownce? perhaps Microsoft? What do you think about this announcement? How significant is it for you?
Doing the job of webmaster for a business-to-business website has trained me to be a web stats fiend. I daily check Google Analytics for the latest trends across all the sites that I publish or manage. The proof is in the pudding and stats give you some great feedback for decision making in what to publish, how to manage the layout of the site, what content to feature and generally how to focus ones energy.
The stats for the last 30 days have revealed some interesting trends and decision points for thoughtsparks.net. The report from Google Analytics is very telling in the traffic flow as the site has seen a whopping 100% increase from the previous 30 days.
StumbleUpon rocks. Do you see those major peaks in the graph? Those are Stumble surges. A full 688 visits to the site during this period came from stumbleupon. Stumble traffic average time on the site was 1:25 compared to pownce.com being 9:01, so there is some question of quality of traffic. The shear numbers however are compelling.
Blogrush doesn’t rock. Blogrush sounds like a great idea but the implementation seems to be a bit lacking with only 8 visits for this entire time period. I think at least for now their free advertising on my site is a goner. Let me know if you have better luck statistically with their widget.
Pownce rocks. Everyday I’m finding Pownce to be more of an asset, with great folks offering engaging conversation.
TechFires.com rocks. If by chance you haven’t caught wind, Scott Blitstein over at MyThermos.com and I have launched the site for rapid tech reviews.
YouMob.com rocks. This site referred 52 visitors to my site. Pretty cool.
MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog kind of rocks. Now don’t get me wrong, both sites have brought me some great blogging friends for which I am thankful. I just don’t find either site compelling to spend great volumes of time as a social networking site. I love the avatar system and check-in every other day or so.
Thereisnospace.blogspot.com rocks. The top blog referral site with 19 visits, this young lady writing from Dubai is a worthwhile read. She’s an original and engaging blogger.
Kellementology.com rocks too. Kelly is another one that is her own woman who is a pleasure to know and an interest to read. If you are looking for run-of-the-mill blogs, pass hers by.
Technorati and Digg aren’t rock’n. These sites seem to have too much gaming going on and I just don’t get into that stuff. I’d rather spend my time writing content.
Advertising isn’t rock’n. You could probably say because I haven’t given it a great effort, but honestly I get bored trying to manage it. I also struggle to find effective ad systems that don’t bug me. I regularly get offers for freelance web dev work. If I want to pick-up extra cash, I think I’ll just do some honest work and let you folks read my site without those distracting ads. I’m not anti-ads or anything, just where I’m at with thoughtsparks.net, at least right now. The main reason for hosting ads is to pay for bandwidth which may become more and more of an issue, but we’ll see.
In the end analysis, this site is not about stats but about readers, about you. It’s about "Igniting Ideas for the Common Good". The web stats along with your awesome, well-formed and thoughtful comments give me some sense of whether I’m on track or not in accomplishing this goal. Truth is that I gain more from your stimulating feedback than any ad system ever could. Thanks for reading and engaging.
So what’s rock’n your stats? Are you finding any social communities or bookmarking sites boosting your traffic?
With the exponential growth of photo sites like flickr, zooomr, and stock.xchng, there is a real need to raise the awareness of copyright laws and infringements. I ran across this photo on flickr entitled "Never Mind Your Copyright" (which I’m using appropriately under the Creative Commons some rights reserved). He writes a rant about this issue entitled "Freedom of expression?? Telling the truth??"on his blog. Copyright issues are becoming a very hot topic and will gain more and more press over the next few years. The photographer generated this image as a statement back to flickr about issues related to his photos being used in-appropriately.
Another related story reported by the Sydney Morning Herald states that a Texas family is taking Virgin Mobile phone company to court over their use of the girls image taken from a photo posted on flickr. While the photographer released the image under a sharing license, the company neglected to get a release from the family to use the image. This of course is a major no no.
It is easy to point fingers at large companies like Virgin Mobile and say shame, shame, for not following due process to get a release and offer some compensation to the model and most probably the photographer. In the case of the many other copyright infringements by bloggers who inappropriately re-use flickr and other photo sites, I believe those sites share culpability with the bloggers. There is more the photo sites could do to protect the photographers and to inform the users of the sites.
Some suggestions for photo sites to better inform users
Post copyright guidelines more prominently on their site. If they are following the Creative Commons standards, they should re-state or link-out to those guidelines.
Make the statements for use of a specific photo more obvious. This should not be considered the fine print, but rather a prominently placed tag next to the photo and download button. Of all the sites I’ve seen stock.xchng seems to do this the best.
Raise the awareness through a media campaign. This would instill confidence in users that they would be in less danger of infringement.
Provide usage examples to follow. More than stating the guidelines, educating users with visual use examples will help them properly cite borrowed media.
Most users are eager to follow the law and respect creative works. If media sites raise the level of awareness; the creators of the works, those re-using the works and the photo sites all win in the end.
TechFires.com is now officially kicked-off. This site will be a rapid fire location for the latest and greatest tech-related reviews. TechFires.com will serve as a complimentary blog to Thoughtsparks.net with screen shots and very brief reviews. For all of you thoughtsparks.net readers, no worries, thoughtsparks.net will carry-on with Web Helps, Productivity tips, extensive Reviews and plenty of Just Fun topics. TechFires.com simply will provide a great place to post discoveries of technology quickly with short commentary and links-out to the appropriate sites. Think of it as your tech search assistant.
Every once in a while I run across an application or online service that works its way into my everyday life. Quite often the most meaningful ones have such a narrow focus and perform one function very well. One of these services is urlTea.com. urlTea essentially does one thing, it makes long URLs shorter.
Now, when you first start to use urlTea, you may not see what is so significant about this simple little application. As you apply urlTea to your computing processes, I think you’ll find the deeper value of simplification and ease of use.
This URL is a bit long when posting to a microblogging site like Twitter or Jaiku or perhaps you would like to IM or email the URL to a friend.
Past that URL into urlTea and you now have: http://urltea.com/1ctd which goes to the same location.
when doing a mapquest or google maps query with a long URL string it proves very useful. urlTea again turns a three line URL into a short url as shown above. Recently while doing some planning for a road trip, I appreciated pasting short URLs into my document for the trip.
Adding to Your Custom URL
With urlTea you can add your own custom ending, so instead of http://urltea.com/1ctd which does not describe what the URL references you can use http://urltea.com/1ctd?JingProject which gives more information but still keeps the URL much shorter.
Ways to Use urlTea
Go to urltea.com and past your long URL into the form field as shown above and press enter.
Use the bookmark for urlTea in your toolbar. In Firefox drag this bookmark into your tool bar. In IE, right-click and add to favorites.
So there you have it, a very simple application that has many uses for referencing hyperlinks. Have you used urlTea before? Found any other great uses for this simple application?
I have recently started using a new desktop screen and video capture program called Jing. Overall I have been impressed with this utility and it shows a promising future as a utility for web publishing, teaching, tech support and other uses involving screen image and video desktop captures.
Just this week I used Jing to capture screen shots of images from my desktop and generated a report for work in a fraction of the time it takes to printscreen images and crop them in preparation for insertion into the highly visual report. This time saving was significant with real value added functionality to my workflow.
Here’s the brief rundown of features and items to keep in mind
Jing was easy to install. Download Jing at JingProject.com. It is compatible for both Windows and Mac. Windows requires .Net 3.0 framework which you can download here.
There has been some reported instability reports with Jing, so definitely be aware of possible issues depending on your machine setup.
In preferences you can set Jing to start-up on boot or launch it as needed.
The launch program is a cutesy icon that rides on one side of the screen either top, bottom, left or right depending on your preference.
Screen captures or desktop video can be saved to your machine to be uploaded to your website, placed in documents or emailed.
The other option for file distribution is to share the image or video by which the file is uploaded to screencast.com and a link is created in your clipboard that you can paste into an email. There is currently an issue with placing the link into Instant Messaging, but the workaround I would use would be to create a short URL at www.urltea.com which will give you an abbreviated version to send via IM or social media/microblogging sites like Pownce or Twitter.
Jing does not feature a resize for images. If you capture an image, you will either want to resize it in a blog editor or other publishing application. A better method is to edit it in an image editor before uploading or embedding in a document. This will make the file much smaller, especially if the size reduction is significant.
The video is created as a .swf file, a flash file with no automated way of embedding into a website. Definitely not an intuitive process, but it can be done fairly easy by using the Embedded Media HTML Generator created by UCSF’s Center for Instructional Technology.
The image size captured for the video is the size it will appear in the browser, so plan your desktop video imaging accordingly. There is a five minute Limit for a single segment of video.
You can choose to turn your microphone off or on. Keep it off if you don’t want to use voice recording for a smaller file and cleaner presentation. The video recorded below was done with a cheap microphone. I will invest in a higher-quality one for better sound if I get serious with this feature.
Two examples of Jing
Screen Capture
Video Tutorial
Jing is not necessarily the cats meow, but so far, it has provided the quick functionality I needed for rapid printscreen with immediate cropping upon capture.
Considering a Series of Tutorials on Thoughtsparks.net
I’ve given thought to developing a series of short tutorial videos for reader consumption for HTML, CSS, and graphics training. Is that something that strikes your interest? Do you like this form of communication? Why or why not?
ScribeFire is a very well designed FireFox plug-in that enables a blogger to write posts right in their browser.
The features that I enjoy most about ScribeFire include:
Launch the editor right in the browser with an icon that rests at the bottom of the browser window.
Continue viewing a webpage while you write in the bottom-half of the screen.
Save your posts as notes and return to them later. This is especially handy if you are working on several at one time.
Upload your images from within the ScribeFire FTP function and insert into your post.
Post to multiple blogs from the same application.
Utilize the full WYSIWYG Editor for quick formatting.
Manage your tags from within ScribeFire.
Publish straight to the blog when finished editing.
Built-in spell check with just a right-click.
One of the frustrations I had with blogging directly into WordPresses blogging application was losing my information if I left that window or the connection to the server crashed for some reason. I find that I lose much less information when using ScribeFire. The content is written locally on my machine and even though it does not have an auto-save feature, the "Save as a Note" button is right below where I’m typing so I tend to save often and rarely lose text.
ScribeFire Supports the following blog applications and services:
WordPress
Movable Type
Drupal
Textpattern
Roller
MetaWeblog API
Blogger
WordPress.com
TypePad.com
Live Journal
Windows Live Spaces
Performancing
Jeeran
If your blog is not on this list, you may want to try to manually setup through the Custom Blog settings. I have not yet been able to get Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce to work through ScribeFire.
One feature I don’t recommend: bookmarking in Del.icio.us and technorati.com. I found toggling between the functions to be a bit clunky. There are other more efficient and effective methods for interfacing with those sites than using ScribeFire. Like many programs, they added-in more features than needed. The magic of most well-developed plug-ins is their simplicity. That said, if you ignore that functionality, I think you will find this to be a very streamlined, rock solid method for updating your blog.
This is the best web editing tool I have found to date. Have you had any experience with other web editors? What features do you find most helpful?
It’s still in beta, but mark my words, this is a major advance in online media. The cable industry is going to hate this one. I on the otherhand am kicking-up my broadband speed. Full-blown online media here it comes.
A new, more refined communication platform has been developed with the features of Twitter and other micro-blogging apps but is packed with many functions. Pownce is a robust contender for the mind share of users. It offers essentially the functions of Email, IM and microblogging rolled into one.
Remember, all you early adopters, when email emerged in the mid-90’s as a mainstream means of communication? It was 1994 for me and within a year I designed my first website for work. With bated breath I would check each morning and several times a day waiting for the next message from anyone. Fast forward a decade plus and email is 80% spam/cumbersome communication. There has to be a better forum for communication than solely email. In answer to the questions Web 2.0 emerges and begins to mature. Pownce is a good example of the maturation process and the benefit it offers to users. Some of the aspects of Pownce I appreciate are:
Pownce users are very interactive. Both in posing and answering questions, users are engaging. My Pownce community has grown at a much more rapid rate than on Twitter or Jaiku.
The Pownce desktop uses a slick Adobe AIR app. Although keeping Pownce open in a browser tab works well, I enjoy the auto-refresh function.
Pownce is an ideal solution for group communication with the group messaging function to the public, to all friends or to lists.
Pownce handles private conversations well and is an ideal substitute for email and IM when used actively.
Pownce can add a dynamic feed to a blog. This works on Twitter and Jaiku as well.
Pownce is excellent for sending messages, but also links, file transfer and setting events. The free account allows for up to 10 MB file size. Pro accounts (only $20 a year) allows for files up to 100MB.
Pownce ads are very unobtrusive. Pro accounts have no ads.
Pownce is very reliable and doesn’t seem to crater like Twitter. Since Pownce is still by invitation only, they are managing the growth well allowing for infrastructure expansion.
Mobile Powncing is pretty slick using IMified.
Pownce doesn’t have a message length limit of 140 characters like Twitter so more meaningful communication can take place at the micro-blogging level.
When more of my friends from thoughtsparks.net jump on board and use Pownce, the world will be a better place. I have six invites for the taking, just ask.
