Anywhere.

After an extremely fun couple of months writing for ReadWriteWeb (thanks again for making that possible, Richard! Your team is absolutely the best folks to work with!) I found a full-time job working for CyberSource, working on the operations/support piece for a new product they (we) are developing for electronic payment processing. Sounds boring, doesn’t it?

In fact, I am learning and applying new technologies at a prodigious rate. I’m using Linux admin and deployment skills that, frankly, have gotten a bit rusty in the year I spent immersed in new media. And it is challenging me.. which also means that when I meet goals and deadlines, I feel good.  Also, I am writing a lot – but now in the form of documentation around the project. That combined with just wanting to come home and relax after a hard day has definitely made me step back from the active role I had on various social media sites and blogs.

But there are still times I find myself with an hour here or there, and I fire up Feedly or Google Reader, hit GA (go-all) and start skimming from the top. And the blog-o-sphere continues apace, weaving its own curiously compelling tapestry of news, insights, discussion, and often overwhelming coverage of larger events, and it makes me a bit nostalgic (if such could be said for something that I’ve only been away from for a couple of months).

In any case, these changes have made me see my own works from a fresh perspective. I’ve decided, for now, a fancy blog theme is not important. A lot of bells and whistles are not important. I just want something simple, maybe even too simple, that I can use as a framework to build upon.  To that end, I have chosen a theme that is fast and doesn’t waste a lot of time with CSS. I’m hoping with its limited potential for distracting eye-candy, it will also help me to focus on content.

I do need to figure out how to show the number of comments a post has on the front page though.  That’s a big omission.  For now, you can click on an article title to get to the comments (if there are any).

I don’t know if there’s still a lot of you out there cheering Scribkin on, or even just patiently (or bemusedly) waiting for a new post to appear, but if you are, thanks. I’ll try to write here at least every weekend.

Update: I figured out how to add a comments link. Time for a nap.

However, I’m mostly writing this today for two reasons:

1. To figure out if writing a post will ‘reboot’ my broken FeedBurner feed into working, and
2. To gloat a little about just how much I’ve been blogging over at RWW recently.

Of The First Part

So, starting with the Google FeedBurner issue.  I have no idea what it is, and I honestly haven’t had much time or motivation to futz with it recently.  I suspect it is similar to something that happened to Louis Gray recently (which you can read about here), but I’m not sure at all. If I view the RSS feed in Mozilla, I get something that looks like this:

But if I look at it in Chrome (which strangely has absolutely NO support for viewing RSS feeds), I get this:

So, I’m not sure what’s going on.  I’m going to post this, and if that doesn’t fix it I guess I’ll go into the Feedburner "hit it with a hammer" section and see if I can knock something loose.

Of The Second Part

They’ve been keeping me busy over at RWW. Generally, three posts a day, every weekday. That’s 15 posts a week, and I’ve been doing it for several weeks now. There’s actually a handy little RWW link that lists all the posts I wrote, and the number of comments on each.  So, that’s awesome. 

Plus, week I went to SXSW Interactive on a press pass, and that was a total blast!  It was so amazing to finally meet everyone that I have been reading and following in online, I forgot about blogging at all until a couple of days in. Sorry, RWW.

Update: I figured out the RSS feed issue.  It was a plugin called GooseGrade.  Updated the plugin and the feed is fixed.  Yay!

Last week, literally out of the blue, I got an email from Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb. He said that the blog had an opening for a news blogger, and would I be interested? Say no more, I replied. I am just a bit more than slightly interested.

In fact, I was thrilled.

So, after setting some timetables and learning the ropes, I can finally announce that I am RWW’s newest daily news blogger! I will be providing the tech and new media communities updates every weekday afternoon. In fact, I’ve already begun, you can already check out my very first RWW post here. We slipped it in Sunday night as a sort of test.

That’s not all the good news, however.

Apparently, though a series of what I can only believe to be fortuitous coincidences, I managed to score a press pass to South by Southwest Interactive this year! Oh my yes, I’ll be there representing RWW!

It took me a while to pick my jaw off the floor when the team revealed this news to me, as you may imagine.

Now before you start wondering if I somehow deposed a more capable, seasoned writer.. as far as I know, I didn’t. It happened to be the case where due to prior commitments (and perhaps the fact that I live near Austin) it was available. But I’m not looking this gift horse in the mouth! I’m just going to try my hardest to prove that their gamble with me pays off for everyone concerned.

So that’s my news. I honestly don’t know how it is going to affect my posting frequency here and other blogs that I write for, such as Louis Gray’s site yet. Time will tell. But please do follow me over on RWW as often as you can, and know that I am certainly open to post ideas, suggestions and recommendations.

I’m all about trying out new social services, applications and tools. I love learning about a new product and getting around inside it to figure out its capabilities and features.

Perhaps recognizing that fact, Mike from Chat Ventures contacted me recently and offered to let me beta-test a new WordPress plugin they were developing called Qwidget.

What is Qwidget? It’s simple. Think of it as a easy yes/no poll box that’s been pumped full of social media goodness. On the surface, you will see a simple question, to which you can (without registration and hardly any thought) answer yes or no. Your answer is recorded.

Next, Qwidget offers you the chance to register (in the widget, it’s free and quick, you don’t even leave the site) and provide more details about why you chose your answer. Also, you will see other comments from other folks on the same question.

Notice that I did not say anything about the other folks having answered the question on this blog! In fact, Qwidget keeps a keyboard-based library of questions available for all Qwidget-enabled blogs to choose from. This means that blogs with the same sort of content (and resultingly, the same sort of questions) will be able to pool their discussions and answers via Qwidget.

Although still in beta, I think Qwidget has a ton of potential and I’m proud to be one of the early beta-testers of the service.

So, I will put my first poll question at the end of this post and I invite you to at least click yes, no, or maybe. If you are reading this article in your news reader, hop on over. My site doesn’t have ads so you don’t have to worry about making me 1/100th of a cent.

If you really like the way Qwidget works, and you run your own self-hosted WordPress blog, feel free to contact me at the information provided in my sidebar or visit the Qwidget ‘get this’ link and fill out the form expressing your interest in the beta.

The process to enable the integration is fairly simple (steps blatantly stolen from the Disqus blog post):

1. Visit Account Services
2. Click Enabled
3. Retrieve your FriendFeed Remote Key and fill in the blanks
4. Then, visit The Administration Panel
5. Choose Your Site from the drop-down
6. Click the Settings tab
7. Check FriendFeed comments

If you don’t already have your blog in FriendFeed, add these additional steps:

1. Visit The FriendFeed Services Page
2. Click Blog
3. Add your RSS feed

If you want the full story with illustrated steps, I recommend checking out the Disqus Blog post.

TweetSuite

First, there’s TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella.  This is a err.. sweet little self-contained plugin that makes your WordPress blog aware of the Twitterverse.  There are four main components that make up TweetSuite:

1. A tweet this button that can be floated in the upper-left or upper-right portion of a blog post.  Very similar to a Digg button.
2. An area below the post that tracks tweets about the article and lists them, complete with the optional ability to include a re-tweet button next to them.
3. Four fun Twitter-related widgets that can be dropped in the sidebar: Most, Recent, Last, and Favorite Tweets.
4. Last but not least, TweetSuite will optionally update Twitter when a new entry is posted.

I am not so invested in Twitter that I can tell if TweetSuite is catching all the Twitter buzz surrounding my entries.  It did detect one tweet on my last entry and a couple more on older posts.. but that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this post!  To see if it works.

FF2Disqus

Second, I am using a cloud-based app called FriendFeed-to-Disqus (or FF2Disqus).  This little utility is by Carter Rabasa, the guy who wrote Twitter2FF, a handy utility for synchronizing your Twitter and FriendFeed friends.  Anyway, this web app isn’t a plugin, and in fact hooks in to FriendFeed and Disqus, so it isn’t specifically bound to WordPress blogs at all!

What it does is monitor a service on FriendFeed (say the RSS feed for your blog) and utilizes the Disqus API to push any new comments on the relevant entry in FriendFeed to your blog entry.  So in effect what this does is bring the comment activity back in to your blog.

There have been a rash about this utility and the value that it brings to blogs and FriendFeed.  I have to admit that I share a few reservations about deploying it full-time on my blog.  But I decided, I would jump in with both feet and see how everything turns out.  Hopefully, everything will be great.

Final Note

I have disabled Glenn Slaven’s excellent FriendFeed Comments plugin for the moment in order to avoid redundancy.  But don’t think I don’t like it – far from it!  If FF2Disqus doesn’t work out I’m going straight back to using this plugin!

Benjamin created a small YouTube video showing how SUP works.

Benjamin Golub demonstrates SUP

So naturally, I now have a bit of SUP-envy, since I run a WordPress blog and not my own home made cloud-based blog platform like Ben.  Which means my next step was to perform a Google search for ‘WordPress’ and ‘SUP’.  To my great surprise, a small SUP plugin has already been written!

Enter WP SUP, a small plugin that does exactly what’s necessary, which is to say add a bit of code to the RSS feed to make it SUP-enabled, and ping FriendFeed when the feed is updated.

Done and done.  Thanks Derek van Vliet!  Everybody go friend him immediately on FriendFeed.  Thanks!

WP SUP home page

Update: Feedburner seems to be stripping the SUP information out of the RSS feed header.  I’m looking in to it, along with Josh Haley and Benjamin Golub

Media RSS extensions allow one to describe different types of media, such as embedded music and video clips, directly in an RSS stream.  These extensions are technically optional, so traditional RSS parsers can safely ignore them.

Only slowly has this demo, Douglas, and the Stanford Research Institute team (The Augmentation Research Center, or ARC) gotten the recognition they deserve for the groundbreaking work they did here.  The system they developed was called NLS or “oN-Line System.”  Many of the concept developed for and presented here didn’t even have names back in 1968:

• The computer mouse (only recently named) as a alternative input device.
• Chording keyboard technology, a keyboard where multiple buttons are pressed simultaneously to issue a single command.
• Hypertext, or the concept of endowing a word to be a link to more information *about* that word.
• Electronic collaboration, the ability to share information and meta-information with other people in the same electronic system.
• Multimedia conferencing, sharing both audio, video, and electronic information simultaneously.
• Teleconferencing, being able to conference people in from remote locations.
• Metatext, the ability to endow text or other userland objects with contextual information.
• Email.  Do I even have to say any more here?

In certain ways, a lot of the concepts and technologies we enjoy today with our networked PCs not only were first realized in 1968, but were then immediately stuffed back into the closet because of the explosive and unforeseen growth of “personal computers” in the ’70s an ’80s.  Because they were so popular, funding for large, expensive collaborative systems such as the one in this demo dried up.

Only after years of first standalone PC use, local area networks and finally the internet did these technologies come back to the fore.

So, after 40 years, I’d simply like to say:  Doug, you and the ARC team were right.  You touched the obelisk and the rest of us ran away.  Thank you.

You can find more on Douglas Engelbart, ARC, The NLS demo and more at these links:

• Stanford’s 1968 Demo Page: “The Mouse Site”
• The Bootstrap Institute
• Invisible Revolution – a documentary

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

Disqus for WordPress 2.03 released.: This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as we.. http://tinyurl.com/5z98kh

That was enough for me!  Disqus’ lack of PingBack support in WordPress was really something that I missed, as you can probably tell from this article’s title.  So, without wasting another minute, I followed the link to the blog entry, and downloaded the new version of the plugin, 2.03.

And, I’m happy to report that it does indeed support trackback and pingback support!  I’ve included a screenshot below.

Disqus TrackBacks

Thanks for your hard work, Disqus team!

I’d like to thank Colin Walker (FF), Sarah Perez (FF), Corvida (FF & Twitter), Steven Hodson (FF),  Louis Gray (FF), Shey Smith (FF) and Mike Fruchter (FF) among many many other great people for being enthusiastic about the development and direction of my site. 

Also, I’d like to thank SheGeeks, Google Tutor and LouisGray.com for giving me the opportunity to guest-post on their sites.  I consider it an honor and a responsibility when writing content for another site, I always try to do the best I can.

Finally, I’d like to say that I am receptive to requests for those who would like to try guest-posting here on Scribkin.  I know my site isn’t huge by any stretch, but everyone likes to see their name outside of their own blog, and you may reach a different group of folks than you might otherwise..

Let me know if you are interested!

Diigo tries enable a lot of ways of using its service and related features.  You can use it exactly like del.icio.us to bookmark and tag web sites you may want to search for later.  But you can also use it to share interesting bookmarks with your friends, discuss content with like-minded folks, and also leave comments on sites that Diigo users can read later!

The feature they are testing out applies to their groups feature.  Now, if you are a member of a particular group in Diigo, you can give certain URLs a thumbs-up if you think it is especially helpful.  They are holding off on deploying this feature site-wide until they can make a determination how game-able the feature is.

Groups are similar to a web forum, but centered more around site bookmarks that are collected to provide a resource for the group.  There are groups for all sorts of things, from social media to cooking.  Some groups are extremely active, and others are simple collection points for related URLs.

This is the group thread that alerted me to the thumbs feature.  Here is another article about Diigo where thumbs are mentioned.

I love to explore new software. New social media web applications are no different – I like to learn about them, try them out, and be inspired by them. Some, like FriendFeed, become a tool that I use every day.

Especially in a field named ‘social media,’ most of you are the same as me in what you want to get out of it, but perhaps for different reasons. I am guessing that most of you are more interested in the social side.. you are on FriendFeed because there are interesting people there. And that’s cool. But that’s only half of the interest for me. I also love to explore and understand what makes software tick.

I’m not saying I don’t like people; far from it. I’m not a misanthrope! I’m just saying that my outlook on going to a party, mixer, networking seminar or other social event usually registers somewhere between uneasiness and dread.

The point with all this is to say that I know myself fairly well: I’ve always been a loner. It takes work for me to maintain social contacts and be suitably reciprocal and engaged with a lot of people. Frankly, it wears me out, probably a lot faster than for most of you, where I’m guessing it is more like second nature.

And that is what I mean by the burden of social media. For me, even when it is a joy, sometimes it is also a burden.

Applications like LinkedIn, Plaxo, not to mention social community sites like MySpace and Facebook are all about enabling networking and expanding your community of friends and acquaintances. When I started using these sites in earnest after SXSW Interactive in February, I was positive they would completely fill in the gap where I came up short in networking and socializing.

After 6 months of using one social app or another every day, I can safely say that none of these tools is a panacea for the introverted man. It’s not that they don’t work, they do provide a lot of leverage in different ways for those willing to put in the effort. But they do in fact require effort.

In some ways, the playing field is not leveled by these tools. For example, If I put in effort, that effort is magnified on a social media site. I may go from making 5 or 6 contacts in a certain industry or social circle to making 15 to 20. And that is great. But someone who could easily make 25 to 50 contacts without a social media tool would see their work multiplied ten times or more. They could easily have 250 or more contacts.

My point here is that, I have been putting in a lot of effort, and for a reclusive shlub, I think I’m doing really well in this funny online universe of FriendFeed and Facebook and Twitter. I can’t complain. In fact I want to thank each and every one of you who look for me on a new social media site and make the effort to link to me there! But I need to make sure that I am directing my energy toward creative endeavors as much or more than building a social network.

Therefore, I am going to make some changes to this site, Scribkin. I am going to re-dedicate it more toward writing what I am good at, which is more primers and tech-based stuff, and not fret so much about the social side. If an article warrants linking to an awesome article or other bit of writing that someone else wrote, fantastic. But if I feel like my energy is driving me toward writing something more introspective, I will run with it. My ultimate goal with this site is to become a better writer, to write more proficiently and clearly, and to provide a service to my readership.

So you will be seeing the site going in new directions as I discover new technologies that fascinate me, or topics that I feel I have something interesting to write about. I am also going to try to not worry so much about readership, page counts, etc. I think investing my attention in those things draws energy away from writing.

They say that most book writers are extremely interoverted, and masochists to boot. I believe it. More, I can empathize with it.. I seem to draw more clarity of purpose and more energy when I step back and gather my thoughts together. So, this might mean you will see me less active on FriendFeed especially, but I think in the long run it will be good because I will be giving back more worthwhile and interesting content to my subscribers this way.

I apologize for the personal tone of the article, and I hope you all choose to follow me on my path of self-improvement, but I completely don’t blame you if you do not.

This weekend Twitter has been more reliable than Identi.ca. Steve Gillmor ‘dented a threat about returning to Twitter. And Dave Winer tweeted that he was thinking of mirroring his tweets to Identi.ca.

During the conventions, and up to and including this weekend, Identi.ca has found out what Twitter already knows: the Jabber chat protocol “firehose” can be a wild stallion, even for a site that is an “increasingly quiet echo chamber”. It’s the same feature that brought the Fail Whale at Twitter during the primaries in May. It is now disabled at Twitter but for approved vendors such as FriendFeed and Gnip.

[ ... ]

I was at CNET in San Francisco last Friday with Evan Prodromou and representatives from Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Disqus and Seesmic. Evan mentioned that there could be millions of MicroBlogging networks in a few years.

There was a 58% drop in unique visitors to Identi.ca, that’s the only service where anyone can take their friends and the site’s software and make their home base wherever they want to. That probably affects the site’s traffic numbers.

I implemented the very same openmicroblogging protocol myself this summer. The 0.1 version of my Identi.ca-compatible software, OpenMicroBlogger, has been downloaded about 700 times in 3 weeks.

– Brian

Originally posted as a comment by brianjesse on louisgray.com using Disqus.

I’m really excited.  I’m not sure if I am going to do a lot of blogging, though.  I don’t plan to bring a laptop to the conference.  However, I am going to bring my trusty Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5 with the Eye-Fi Explore SD card and spare battery.  So hopefully you will be seeing a bunch of pictures from the expo after I get back to the hotel room!

Anyway, I hope I will meet a few of you while I am there!  There is a picture of me on the contributors page in case you are in fact going and want to look out for me.  Or, if you live or will be in the downtown Seattle area any time next week, feel free to call me at 512.961.6189 or email me at phil@scribkin.com.

…

Now on comments throughout DISQUS, you can find a reblog link where you can publish a quotation of the comment to your blog. This quote is cited with the original author, the blog where it originally appeared, and a link back to the original comment to give the discussion full context.

At the moment, we’re supporting publishing to Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad, and Tumblr with more platforms to come.

So next time you see a comment that everyone really needs to read, give it a whirl. We’re excited to see more good content bubble to the surface.

Originally posted as a comment by Devin on A VC using Disqus.

Hope you all (or as we say in Texas, ya’ll) have a great week!

Developed by Effigent for Automattic, it seems like a very sweet little app! You can learn more about it at iphone.wordpress.net.

Below, hopefully, will be a gallery of screenshots of the app.

Silona and the Unicorn

They say write about what you know, and since I’ve been spending hours of my time on FriendFeed, I am starting to know it fairly well.

The Apology

Therefore, I am sorry that I’m contributing to the growing pool of I had this great conversation on FriendFeed and it inspired me to write this post-type posts, but this is going to be one.

The Set-Up

Recently, there was a conversation on FriendFeed that Trish Robinson started off with the question:

“Has anyone used the "create an imaginary friend" feature? Does it work?”

As it turns out, people use the ‘imaginary friend’ feature in different ways.  Here is what we know about imaginary friends on FriendFeed:

• You can set up an imaginary friend to show you one or more syndicated feeds from any of the 41 (at last count) services FriendFeed offers.
• Only you can see your imaginary friend. 
• Any comments or likes you put on an entry created by a imaginary friend are only seen by you as well.
• You can reshare an imaginary friend’s entry if you want others to see it.
• You can create an unlimited number of imaginary friends, and they can have any name at all.  Even the names of actual FriendFeed users or other imaginary friends.
• Just like there is no way of deleting a room, there is no way of deleting an imaginary friend.
• If you unsubscribe from an imaginary friend, its GUID remains, but inaccessible from anyone but perhaps the FriendFeed gods.
• You cannot invite or otherwise add an imaginary friend to a room.
• If you see an entry from an imaginary friend in your main friend’s feed, you will not be able to hide the entry.  (Unverified)
• If your actual friend creates a new account using the same name as your imaginary friend, that is entirely possible and you will potentially see duplicate entries.

The Payoff

So far, imaginary friends seem fairly straightforward.  Let’s say you have a friend or a web site that is not represented well on FriendFeed and you want that information to be there in ff.  Not a problem, add an imaginary friend, add a feed to it, away you go.  You can treat that imaginary friend like you would other users aside from your likes and comments not showing up on the public stream.

However, if you look at an imaginary friend as a customizable feed reader, it suddenly opens up into a very useful construct that fits well into the FriendFeed workflow (or is that idleflow?).  Now, you can see new feed items as they are published and you can like them to bookmark them, or comment on them to leave yourself little notes for research or further reading.  Instant feed reader, no Google Reader needed!

You can also use imaginary friends to keep track of comment fragmentation.  You can, for example, assign the comment feeds for different web sites to imaginary friends with those site names, along with their RSS feeds, then, you will see ongoing discussions as they happen on those sites.

You can keep track of people or entities on the internet that you love to hate, or just hate.  You can then cathartically scream and punish your invisible enemy as much as you want, and nobody is the wiser (except for the aforementioned FriendFeed god, who if they know what is good for them will never tell anyone).

The Unexpected Bonus

I like you, reader, because I could have saved this tip for a different article.  But you will get it here, a reward for getting this far!  Here’s your bonus tip:

Most of these things you can do with invisible friends can also be done with private rooms.

Yep.  You can create a room, add a feed or 3, reshare, comment as much as you like, etc.  Private room entries also will show up in your main friend feed if you want them to.  Rooms provide another layer of segregation of content, if you want it.

It would be cool if you could have invisible friends feeding in to private rooms, but since the functionality is duplicated, personally, I don’t miss not having it.

The Wrap-Up

Don’t take features for granted.  Please refer to this post, where I say:

Find uncommon uses for the service.  See if it makes a good search engine, or gets free concert tickets or a better job.  You never know.

Even after using FriendFeed daily for almost two months, I am still finding cool new ways of doing things in the service.  That, almost as much as the community aspect, keeps me coming back to it.

The Belated Credit

For some reason, I totally blanked on the fact that Justin Korn (FriendFeed profile) wrote up his experience using FriendFeed as an RSS reader and organizer on his own blog.

I feel especially bad because I encouraged Justin to write it!  Honestly, I feel like a complete heel.  When it comes to giving credit, I have a thing or two to learn.

My unreserved apologies, Justin.