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.

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.

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.

First up, Caleb reports via the Toluu Blog, that the feed-matching page has undergone some refinement, adding three selectable filters.  The new filters let you choose a time window for best matches, adding this month and this week to the matching algorithm.

Finally, in-line contact management as been implemented pretty much everywhere.  What this means is wherever you see another user, whether it be on your contacts list, matches, or a feed’s subscribers, you can now add or remove them from your contact list right there.  No more needing to go to a special page!

These tweaks will improve an already unique and useful (and free) service even further.  As always, you can ask for a Toluu invite here in a comment, in an email to me (phil@scribkin.com) or from Caleb at Toluu (.com .. get it?)

.. last.fm and Pandora are both great but, like Twitter and FriendFeed, have completely different goals. Pandora works behind the scenes to tailor a stream to you. last.fm throws everything together in a huge pot and gives you the sliders to make a great listening experience. They call this "scrobbling" (actually, the AS in LAST stand for "Audio Scrobbler") .. anyway, like a stew, the more stuff you put in it the better it is. Add a bunch of people, hook up last.fm to your itunes, go nuts!

By thinking about the approaches of the two applications, and how to describe the difference as concisely as possible, I realized that this concept can be applied on a broader, more general scale:

With most internet-based social applications, they become more interesting and useful as the number of people you interact with also goes up.

Go ahead, call me a little slow.  It’s probably a blindingly obvious thought.  But after I had it, I started applying it as a hypothesis to different social networks.  I realized that most social media applications such as Twitter could easily be categorized into the the more friends, more fun category, but not all of them.  Pandora would be an example of a social app that does not require more friends to be more enjoyable.

So, for most social media applications, simple rules can be followed if you want to make the service more interesting, rewarding or worthwhile:

1. Befriend, invite, follow, reach out to, stalk, or use whatever verb the service you are joining calls adding people.  Do it as much as possible.  Tens of people, hundreds of people.  Don’t worry if they aren’t close friends or you don’t know if they will end up being creepy.
2. Poke around with the service.  It might have some stated goal, such as rewarding you with some abstract concept such as points or ningis or karma.  Generally, ignore this and see what you can get out of the service.
3. 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.
4. Try to find ways of cross-linking this new service with other, more established services you are already a master of.  Your blog, if you have one, is a good place to start.  Or Twitter.. everything links back to Twitter.  Or see if there is a Facebook plugin.
5. If you really love the service and you think you will use it, invite your friends from other services  to it.  Notice that this advice is not point #1.  Jumping in the deep end is fine, but your other friends may not be so eager to go with you every time.
6. Don’t worry about extracting your social graph or bailing from the service if you feel like its time to move on.  In the former case, you probably can’t, unless they explicitly support it. In the latter case, a service stops being fun if you feel you have to use it out of a sense of obligation.
7. Last but definitely not least, don’t pay money for a service you have not tried yet.  Unless you are convinced that you love said service, you don’t want to commit money to it.  This is not to say that services you find awesome must always be free.  You are not owed a free ride and the logic behind paying for a service is pretty straightforward:  Somebody made something you like, and you would prefer to keep using it without significant changes or intrusive advertising if at all possible.  Your contributions will help that outcome.

You may ask yourself, this sounds like a grind, what’s the point?  Why should I keep doing this on one service after another?  And the answer is: 

There is no good reason to do it.

You will have to see if exploring a new service or application is something you like to do.  If it is, welcome to the social media club, my friend.  Those of us in this little club often need little to no provocation to hand over our personal (or at least carefully crafted fake) information to take a free ride at the social media carnival.   Sometimes you get the Ferris Wheel, and sometimes you get the spinning barrel.   Diving in and trying it out is the most direct and useful way to know that for sure.

You will find your answers to why you are on these merry-go-rounds as you gain experience with them.  You might decide one is awesome for networking, while another is great for conversation.  One is an amazing music-sharing community, while another is just brilliant at lifestream aggregation.

And, when you are sick of the endless circles and the cotton candy, you can always take a breather and fall back on those tried-and-true antisocial applications that exist just for you.

Taming the gator

The news from ReadBurner is anything but a joke, though.  In short, ReadBurner now supports direct sharing from all the NewsGator products: NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Online, and last but not least, FeedDemon.  Of course, transparent support continues for Google Reader and Netvibes.

Full instructions for adding your shared articles can be found here, or by going to the home page and clicking on the light-gray Add Feed link.

Once your feed has been recorded in ReadBurner, your shared items will immediately start being tallied in the system.  ReadBurner is (what they call) a 100% democratic aggregator.  That means that the system does what it can to make sure each share is counted, but with no redundancy.  This means that, as you surf their site or subscribe to one of the aggregate RSS feeds (I recommend the climbing category), you will get unique stories that haven’t been gamed.

They have also added a new color to the share names.  Now, along with blue for Google Reader and green for Netvibes, you have RB orange for NewsGator folks!

The other bit of news is that ReadBurner supports ajaxed iframes to render a preview of any article on their site!

Slick Ajax Iframes!  .. Iwhats?

Basically, an iframe is an embedded web site or other formatted data inside of a browser window.  It is different from a popover or popunder browser window in that the frame is still part of the web page you are viewing.  Combine iframes with ajax (a fancy web enhancement that lets parts of web pages update without refreshing the entire page), and you have some really flashy effects.

So if you want to see an example of ajax, and you are reading this on my web site, you can click on the ReadBurner logo up at the top of this article to get a larger version.. in an iframe.

ReadBurner uses a similar effect in a couple of different places.  The new development is embedded in the story headlines on their site.  You can see an example by clicking on the thumbnail to the right.

To get the pop-up iframe, simply click on any bold headline on the page.  If you want to go to the original article, they have added a big red arrow next to each article that will navigate you to the article in question.

This feature has already generated a bit of debate, so no matter if you love it or not, they are ready to hear your side.  Just go to the official blog and leave a comment.

The other place, in case you were wondering, is the tabs across the top of the ReadBurner page.. the ones for NewsGator, Netvibes, and Google Reader. They will bring up those respective pages inside the ReadBurner page.  Smooth.

Now Go Enjoy

Hopefully, you will really dig the new functionality, especially if you are a NewsGator user.  Head over and see if you can’t find a few new blogs to follow or subscribe to.  And if you run a blog, be sure to get your chicklet (I actually call them widgets) and proudly display how many times your articles have been shared!

By the way, if you want to know where I stand you can see my chicklets on my contributors page.

Ben has not sat still in the intervening week, though.  Utilizing the friendfeed API and his brand of Django programming wizardry, he has taught his shared-story app to leverage even more services to get a better buzz count on current articles.  Essentially, RSSmeme will now look at all the social bookmarking services that friendfeed supports and allow those shares to contribute to an article’s popularity! 

These services include:

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Diigo
• FriendFeed
• Google Shared Stuff
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• Mixx
• Netvibes
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit (not yet, maybe soon)

Of course, RSSmeme is still 100% democratic – if someone links up a story on more than one service, those duplicates will be filtered out. 

I imagine there are a lot of folks out there who will bookmark stories on one service exclusively and don’t even use the others.  Maybe some folks out there who love their desktop-based feed reader and so have been left out of the count until now.

Well, now they are counted.  Even stuff that has been shared using the friendfeed bookmarklet!

The best part of these enhancements?  You don’t have to change a thing about how you share your bookmarks and stories.  Just keep doing what you are doing, and go visit RSSmeme to see what comes out on top!

For the full details, be sure to stop by the newly-launched RSSmeme Blog as well.  See you there!

Swurl

I’m playing with a site called swurl. Signing up is free, so I made my own site. So far, it smacks a lot like Tumblr, but it seems to handle aggregation of high-volume sites better, but the tradeoff is that there is little in the way of customization of the theme. You can specify a logo image, logo text, background image.. and that’s about it. But the theme does allow the content you re-syndicate to speak for itself, and has a very clever commenting system built-in.

Also, it doesn’t have a way to enter in new articles directly. It is more of a new, unique take on a content aggregator/lifestream app than Tumblr.

Feedly

Louis Gray broke the news on a great little Firefox plug-in that dives in to your Google Reader feeds, your FriendFeed, del.icio.us, and Twitter networks, and your Yahoo! and Gmail email networks (and more) to pull together a magazine-style presentation. It’s called Feedly. As far as I can tell, it runs entirely within the browser frame (completely client side, except the data sources) and is really slick and fast. Definitely worth a view.

Disqus Trackback Support

Disqus announced support for trackbacks on the back-end and javascript plug-in today! This is great news, as up until now, us Disqus users had to be satisfied with a hack that was whipped up by Scott Jangro.

Enabling the support is as easy as clicking a button in the Disqus site configuration. As far as I can tell, it does not support rolling in old trackbacks, it just provides an XML-RPC interface that is used from the point it is enabled forward. Which means, until the new version of the Disqus API plugin rolls out, the Jangro hack is still useful.

Duncan Riley also wrote about the new trackback support. Mostly, I wanted to see the trackback link show up on his site.

Louis Gray goes Breaking News Crazy

We had a bit of warning about this on Sunday on FriendFeed. It’s been breaking news story after breaking news story on Louis Gray’s site.

• Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS
• OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple
• LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network

Ohh yeah.. one other bit of news..

Firefox 3 Release Candidate Download Day!

That’s right! Go get it! This has been the big news today, and it is being downloaded worldwide at a furious pace. You can find it a working download link here.

PS – Yes, I am messing with an article style. If it annoys you, please read my about page…

With plenty of hubris, I was pleasantly dreaming of my easy entry into a work-from-home lifestyle, writing insightful, hard-hitting prose for a thankful employer and fawning audience.  If only they saw in me that spark of brilliance that I would sound too egoistic to point out directly! I thought to myself.  I perused my writings on my blog.  Why couldn’t this be my job?  I love it, I’m good at it.. perfect!  .. right?

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. My daydream started to evaporate when I saw a discussion on the income potential of professional bloggers, spurred by this WinExtra article from Steven Hodson, which talks about the cost of the latest gadgets.   That led to this Profy article written by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, about the strange economy of silicon valley.

Strike one: bloggers often don’t get paid a lot, if at all, and the job can be a grind.  Also, San Francisco is an alien world akin to the vacation planet in Star Trek.

Next up, I saw this Profy article on FriendFeed.  In it, Cyndy recounts that a female blogger had quit her job due to heckling on the blog she was working for.  While I agreed with the message of the article, I was saddened by the fact that this was a reality of being a quasi-famous pro blogger.

Around that time FriendFeed was getting warmed up on the topic of blog hecklers, and (although of course, now I can’t find it) there were several comments about extended periods of vitriol sustained by many of today’s more popular bloggers.  And when I say extended, I’m talking months to years where bloggers had to ignore or put up with baseless accusation and peanut-gallery criticism while the blog owners dared not take a side in case they lost readership.

So that brings me up to this weekend.  Steve Hodson is back, having written an impassioned article about testy grammar comments on a guest post he did for Mashable.  His detractor then followed up with another patronizing comment.

Personally, I find Steve’s writing very readable, but then again I am not that careful about noting grammar inconsistencies, leaning more toward trying to glean what the article has to say, rather than how it is said.

I’ll just say this about grammar and sentence structure: Have you ever read a book by Stephen King?

If you have, you know that he has a rambling, descriptive writing style that plays fast and loose with all sorts of grammar and punctuation rules.  Does anyone care?  Absolutely not.  In fact, if you took that away it would looks that essential something that makes the book a Stephen King book, and consequently, not very interesting to read.

Strike two: no matter what it pays, making it moderately big as a blogger means having to shrug off criticism and invective, whether it is true or not.

Recently, Louis Gray went to dinner with Daniel Ha, the founder and lead developer for the comment system back-end that I use on this blog, Disqus.  Louis also uses Disqus on his blog.

Anyway, the next day, Louis took the time to write up what he could reveal from their discussion.  It was a good read and it got me excited about where Disqus was headed.

Not everyone was as pleased as me.

Specifically, someone had called Louis out for not asking the hard questions to Daniel on Disqus, and subsequently stating that Louis’ article was a puff piece, and Louis was a sell-out and using his blog to promote his favorite causes.

It turns out this person is well-known in the blog world for having a modus operandi of basically scanning for a topic, and then writing a scathing article about some random quasi-famous blog in order to draw readership to his own blog.

Strike three: in the world of internets, negative attention can sometimes be as rewarding as positive attention.  Some people know this, and they take advantage of it.  You can never be sure of someone’s motivations for being critical, but somehow must accept the criticism nonetheless.  Maddening.

I have to admit that this past week, with its focus on the seedy underbelly of the shiny blog beast, has rather tempered my enthusiasm to dive into the blogging business full-time.

I still think wistfully about being able to work from home, on my own schedule, and having each new entry be received with cheers and ovations, but for now, perhaps quietly working away in an air-conditioned cube for an employer that treats me with respect is a great place to be in.

PS – I’m still waiting for my Disqus shirt.

Blogging For Dummies by Susannah Gardner, Shane Birley Read more about this book…

On Writing by Stephen King Read more about this book…

Image via Wikipedia

This has been brought up in the past, but recently I’ve noticed that my Internet Service Provider (ISP), Road Runner from Time Warner Cable, has decided that when I typo on the location bar, it’s perfectly acceptable to send me to a not-so-helpful search result page.

The Problem

This usually happens to me when I typo my own domain, like this (or you can click on the picture for a bigger version):

As you can see, the result pages are pretty much bogus.  In fact, even legit-sounding sites like myspace resolve to blatantly different spam and link farm targets.  This page may look like a search result page, but it really isn’t.  It’s a huge advertisement for Time Warner’s nebulous affiliates.

I’m guessing that it should include my site, since I simply transposed two letters, but it doesn’t.  And I don’t think it ever will.

In the upper right corner, I noticed that Road Runner claims the search results are from Yahoo!  It also has a link entitled, “Why Am I Here”?  Which, when clicked, opens an ajaxy description:

Here’s the FAQ page.  The other blue text, the Preferences page, is interesting in that it doesn’t seem to have any sort of login or other means of knowing who you are.  I am guessing they log the IP I (or other Road Runner clients) are using, and use that as a basis for future URL typo preferences.

By the way, I also did a specific Yahoo! search for the same typo and here is the result:

Not helpful, but also not harmful.

The Obvious Solution

So, Time Warner doesn’t want to get in trouble for this practice, so the preferences pane is their way of allowing you to opt out of their crappy service.  And indeed, after updating my preferences, waiting the requisite 10 minutes, and trying my URL again, I got the standard Firefox page load error page, see over there to the right.

This would be the easy and perfectly adequate solution to this predatory practice.  However…

A Better Solution?

We can actually go a step further, and avoid using the ISP’s DNS service completely! You may think that you are stuck using whatever your ISP gives you via DHCP but you aren’t.

First, let me explain a bit.  DNS stands for Domain Name System and it’s what computers on the internet use to figure out what the real number address for a website is.  When you type in something like www.twitter.com, what your computer does is ask the DNS server what the address for that domain is.  The server looks it up from a table, and returns a number.. the IP address.  For Twitter, this would be: 128.121.146.100 .

Go ahead and try it… you can get to twitter with that number:  http://128.121.146.100

But who wants to remember a long string of numbers for each web site they go to?  Thus the existence of DNS.

Anyway, in order to distribute the load of all these computers doing DNS lookups all the time, what is set up is a tiered system of DNS servers, all pointing up to an authoritative name server (actually 5 or 6) up at the top.  They are supposed to know pretty much every IP address in existence.  Once the lower-level DNS server gets the result, it caches it, so that future lookups are faster.

Back to alternative DNS servers.  In the past, if your ISP had an unreliable, slow or suspect DNS server, you could use a different one, pretty much any DNS server on the internet.  In theory they are all supposed to give you essentially the same results.

But unless you really knew that the DNS server you were using was legit, it’s kind of scary to just start trusting random servers out there for your lookup results.  Remember — the DNS server can tell your computer anything and it would be trusted implicitly.  One second you are going to twitter, the next you might be going somewhere completely different.

So, a group called OpenDNS was formed to provide a safe, reliable way of getting DNS results that you can hold them responsible for.  Also, they are committed to speedy results.

If you are going to go through the trouble of re-programming your PC or router to use a specific DNS server,  I would recommend OpenDNS.  They have full instructions for changing your PC or router settings on their page, and they work with other organizations (such as Google) to help prevent you from accidentally going to a phishing or other nasty site.

Best of all, they will never send you to an advertising-laden pseudo-search engine spam result page!

RSSmeme is about to be faster than ever at finding the hot news of the day. Everyone knows that FriendFeed is fast; and I’m not talking about the speed at which the site loads (which is very fast). FriendFeed is extremely quick at crawling. RSSmeme takes 7 hours to do a round trip of it’s nearly 15000 feeds but FriendFeed is able to pick up your shared items in minutes.

My take? Well, if you are looking to hitch your wagon somewhere, making use of a nearly unrestricted API for one of the internet’s (or is that internets’) fastest growing social aggregation networks is brilliant. Just to put this in context, let’s take a look at Alexa’s idea of FriendFeed’s web presence:

Ok, ok, it does appear that FriendFeed has a ways to go to catch up with the likes of Twitter. But it got a big boost in popularity during WWDC and early indications appear that people are staying on the service.

Returning to RSSmeme, this is an interesting development that definitely will give the service a unique flavor. Along with fast search and index results, I am guessing we are going to see weightings start to be subtly influenced by FriendFeed use as well.

A few days ago (May 30th) I got my usual twice-monthly  Microsoft Technet Flash newsletter.  Usually I just skim and toss, not finding that much of interest.  But in this one I found not one, but three interesting links!  It sort of jolted me, in a way.. I really didn’t think Microsoft was doing anything really breakthrough in the social media space, I mean Live Spaces has been covered to death, and let’s not even bring up MSN.

Social Bookmarks

The big social app news from them is a social bookmarking service cleverly called TechNet Social Bookmarks.  Currently a preview (beta?), and confusingly referred to in the FAQ as MSDN Social Bookmarks, it seems to be very similar to del.icio.us.  Although they only support Internet Explorer explicitly, they say that other browsers will work if they support javascript.

They support bookmarking in the form of a javascript bookmarklet.  They have specific support for Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it has been my experience that most bookmarklets written for Firefox also work in Safari.

I am guessing that this is one of Microsoft’s first pushes to open MSDN to a wider social networking community.  How do I know?  They happen to have published an introductory video as well, linked below.

In the video, Microsoft Evangelist John Barton gives some details about this new direction and also gives two links to the Social Bookmarks application:

• technetbookmarks.com
• msdnbookmarks.com

Except for the color of the banner and the default homepage link, I’m not seeing a huge difference in these two URLs, and in fact my login works in both and my avatar appears the same.  So, I’m guessing that your private bookmarks will work in either and it’s mostly differentiated by what public bookmarks appear.

Updated Useful Microsoft Apps

Also in the newsletter were links to a couple of updated applications:

• Process Monitor 1.33 – this is a great utility for any Windows-savvy user to have in their toolkit.  It allows in-depth examination of any running processes, with a number of different sort and search options.
• Autoruns 9.2 – This has been a key tool of mine for many years.  Similar to msconfig, this will examine the registry and other places for any programs set to run on startup.  It is extremely thorough and allows you to directly disable or remove anything you might think is suspicious or useless from starting up when you log in to your PC.
  • A similar utility (but much smaller) is Mike Lin’s Startup Control Panel.  This is a real gem and I definitely recommend it.

To be honest, the first time I found Autoruns, it was not from a Microsoft site.  So I was a little surprised to see that it came out of the MSDN labs.  In my eyes, that just gives it a big dose of legitimacy and trustworthiness that I hadn’t afforded it before!

And in fact, with a little more research, I learned that Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006!  How did I miss that!

Corvida

Corvida has made her move over at ReadWriteWeb.  Hopefully we will get some more enterprising souls to give the project a go.

Caleb

Caleb Elston, the creator of Toluu, has been a strong supporter of this move.  He has decided to join us and should announcing this on his blog!  Welcome, Caleb! Be sure to check out his FriendFeed Room if you need help or have questions.

Also, he has hooked me up with a bunch of invites to Toluu.  So if you want to experience it for yourself, please email me at phil(at)scribkin.com and I’ll shoot one off to you. See you there!

TechMeme

Although not exactly in the same category as above, my post was featured on TechMeme!  At this point, it’s no longer front-page news, but that’s ok because I took a screenshot.

More after the break…

Feeds

I wanted to go over my initial set of feeds.  This is pretty much pulled directly off my Toluu profile.  Since I just pruned today, a lot of smaller blogs that I was following, I dropped.  I will be re-adding them back as I scout them out and check their size.

All feeds listed in no particular order.

The grand total is 43 feeds and 6 sharing friends in Google Reader.  I don’t have a good handle on how many new posts a day I will get, but I’ll update later in the week with that information.

I was looking forward to seeing the review, as Steven Hodson had promoted the series earlier in the day.  I just happened to be on FriendFeed when it picked up Steven’s tweet about the new article:

Of course, I replied immediately in utter disbelief, and rushed over to check out the article.

Overall, I am completely flattered and honored that Steven chose my site to be reviewed.  This attention really helps reinforce my resolve to continue writing solid, helpful posts and news into the future.  And with that resolve comes a new awareness of networking. 

While each of our blogs may be an island, its important to remember that when reading something interesting or useful, link it up if you write about that subject later.  It will add depth to your article and raise awareness for the other site.

Now, head over to WinExtra and check out the article!

Essentially, this algorithm looks at the articles that a certain person has liked (currently the the latest 300 liked articles), then keeps a list of all the other people that liked the same articles. The people who have the highest number of the same articles liked are at the top of the list!

Simple, but also revealing! Take a look at my list:

1. shey – 66

2. bhc3 – 50
3. susanbeebe – 48
4. scobleizer – 43
5. atul – 39
6. mitchelltsai – 33
7. mikereynolds – 30
8. louisgray – 30
9. nikpay – 29
10. solacetech – 29
11. mortonfox – 28
12. ontarioemperor – 26
13. jbaldwinconnect – 26
14. anjrued – 26
15. dobata – 25
16. trishussey – 25
17. sarahintampa – 25
18. itafroma – 23
19. voyagerfan5761 – 23
20. furry – 22
21. bwana – 21
22. fpettit – 20
23. thomashawk – 20
24. robdiana – 20
25. charlieanzman – 19

As you can see, of 300 articles, Shey comes out on top with 66 similar likes. However, Shey also tops many other people’s lists — I am thinking Shey just loves to like stuff!

If you head over to Yuvi’s article, you can see more compatibility lists. Worth a read!

Update: I forgot to include some other conversations surrounding this type of stat.  Felix has posted his own quick’n'dirty utility looking at the last 30 300 likes.  Mark Trapp posted about it here, and Hutch posted here.

As I was catching up in Google Reader this morning, I noticed this item in my RSSmeme FriendFeed feed.  I highlighted the new change — it now appends all Google Reader shared item notes!

I’m not sure when this was added, but I think it is very .. err, noteworthy!  No pun intended. 

Another bullet point on the long list called reasons why RSSmeme is awesome.

If you want to get your own custom RSSmeme FriendFeed feed, simply go here and put in your FriendFeed nickname.  Then, subscribe to the resulting RSS feed.

With the right approach, FriendFeed can not only be a valuable source of news and new opinions, but also a fertile, open community where you can make your name known.

As far as I know, Digsby is the first multi-IM client to support Facebook chat, and it’s a feature that many Facebook users are looking forward to. They say in a blog entry that messaging, buddy icons, status and status messaging are currently supported. The more advanced features that Digsby is known for will be added soon.

The latest Digsby build also fixes some bugs associated with Yahoo! Mail beta and proxy support. Full details can be found at their blog.

According to their blog, they now have more information in their popup profile. This is the bubble of info you get when you hover over someone’s picture in the comments section here or in any other Disqus-enabled blog.

The popup profile now not only lists the Disqus user’s registered services, but also their most recent comments and their last tweet, if they are on Twitter.

Have you heard of Spokeo? Most likely it has heard of you. More specifically, it knows about any occurrence of your email address or other identifying information (like your Myspace profile name) in pretty much any public forum.

Spokeo – Helpful Web App or Cyber-stalking Tool? | SheGeeks