My first thought was that it was a new feature of the OS. I was pleased, but not completely surprised, because I had a bit of a secret. You see, once upon a time I used a jailbreak on my phone. It was a heady time for me, running two apps simultaneously, recording video with Qik, and most importantly using a hack that turns the battery icon to a percentage view. And, once I decided to un-jailbreak, all my various interface hacks and other things vanished, except for that surreptitious little battery percentage toggle.

Through a couple of iPhone OS updates the battery hack stayed with me, apparently hidden away in some configuration setting or firmware file. And apparently, that setting triggered a feature that is only meant for the iPhone 3Gs when the firmware installed. Excellent!

What’s weird is that this is distinctly different from how it appeared on older firmware revisions. Gone is the ability to tap on the battery to toggle it to a percent.. now both appear, all the time. And of course, since I don’t have a 3Gs, there is no setting in the Usage menu for me to turn it off. Good thing I like it.

Now how do I tell my iPhone to play music through my bluetooth headset? sigh.

More discussions on this:

Phone 3.0 comes with battery percentage meter – The iPhone User Guide
How to get battery percentage in 3.0- [Archive] – Mac Forums
iphone 3g battery percentage.. am i lucky-
Battery % Hack – Mac Forums

Apparently, people assume too much and don’t promote enough.

You know what they say: If you assume, you make an a out of Su and me. And believe me, Su doesn’t like being an A. So don’t do it.

If you think a product is great, promote it! Tell people. Write up an article. Whatever. But don’t say, “Gee, yeah, I really loved that last week when I used it for 5 minutes and now you’ve missed the bus.” Because that is what you are saying. To me. And to Su.

Su doesn’t even have a car. Now he has to walk.

So what the heck is TinEye? Is it that decorating show, you know, the one with the people? Hardly.

If you assume that the Tin Man has eidetic memory and a talent for finding pictures that look like each other, you’d be getting close to what TinEye does.

In a nutshell, TinEye leverages some proprietary tech that Idée has been working on for creating digital fingerprints of images. This technology is mated with a high-speed matching engine and a database of hundreds of millions of public domain pictures to give you fast image matching based on a source picture.

You know what, I’ll just link in Scoble’s little QIK interview with Paul Bloore, the CTO of Idée, and you can see a little demo of the product in action as well.

After using the product for a while, I have to say I’m impressed. Currently, with its sub-set of all the pictures out there on the internet, it can’t find a lot of pictures uploaded to, say, Flickr. But if you do a Google image search and then drop the URL of the image you are interested in, it will find that picture wherever it resides on the internet.

For example, I searched for a picture of George W. Bush and dropped the URL in TinEye. Here is the result (click image for larger size):

It found the image in 272 different locations on the internet! It also gives the size of the image, and lists separate links to the same source image by domain. I do wish they would give you the option to re-sort the results by different criteria, such as image size, file size or bit depth.

So, if you want to know if a particular picture appears somewhere else on the image (say for copyright reasons), this is a great tool to have.

I’m really happening this comes out of closed beta soon, however, if you are clever you may already have noticed that the FriendFeed link at the beginning of the article has a special URL you can use.

In fact, I think it’s absolutely amazing how last.fm built clients for the Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows platforms, and then does all the heavy lifting: cataloging song titles and artist names, playlists, and recently played tracks. Lay on top of that its ability to carefully keep track of what you are listening to (a technique they call audio scrobbling) and tie that all together on the back end with the ability to compare and listen to other people’s catalogs, and you have a killer app.

There is one thing I tripped over, though. Being the brilliant hacker that I am, though, I found a workaround. But when I pondered why the limitation was there, I could see their logic but I still believe it’s annoying and bone-headed on their part.

The fault has to do with the flash radio player widget that they offer. Here is the problem in a nutshell:

• If your web browser is logged in to the last.fm service (i.e. has a web cookie) you can create a flash-based radio station widget that you can place on a web site or blog so that other people can listen to tracks you enjoy. No problem so far.
• If you have not upgraded to their $3 a month subscription the widget creator will mysteriously fail to render your custom flash widget.
• If you dig around a bit, you will discover that you cannot, in fact, listen to your own radio station unless you subscribe.

Ok, so I can follow this reasoning, I guess.. they don’t want you listening to your entire library of scrobbled songs via the internet for free. If they allowed this, everyone would do it. Why get an iPod?

However, they leave the door open for you to create a flash widget with any other last.fm user’s radio station, including people who also do not have a current subscription.

Again, I can follow the logic, they want you to love the service so much that you will subscribe. How do you love the service? By listening to other people’s music, and finding new awesome music. Great! Love it!

Only one little catch guys: I want other people to listening to MY radio station on MY site! The way they have it set up, I can’t freaking use their own awesome widget to do that! I’d have to have some other last.fm user log in and create a widget for me. Or, I guess, get a subscription.

Baaah. I am leet.

So what I did, is I went ahead and created the widget with Steven Hodson’s radio station. Then, I took advantage of the open nature of the widget to search and replace for every instance of his name, and put my last.fm user name in. Poof! I got my widget!

You can see (and listen to) it on the scribkin contributor page.

Of course, I can’t actually listen to it myself.. unless I log out of last.fm or use a browser without a last.fm cookie. Yeah, I believe they need to re-think their artificial limitation here, but I’m not going to complain too loudly as long as I get my widget.

PS – I did want to add that I am seriously considering getting the subscription anyway, because the service is simply really great. And I don’t mind paying for great.

My Fascination with FriendFeed

Recently, I’ve been on FriendFeed quite a bit. In fact, I’ve been using FriendFeed to the exclusion of any other social network, such as Twitter or Facebook. There is something fresh and compelling about the service, yet familiar as well. I think the familiarity comes from how the interface works, it reminds me a little of a lot of different social services I have used in the past.

• Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) – Before the internets, BBSs ruled the phone lines. Incredibly dynamic for the time, people would log in to a BBS (usually one user at a time) and reply to messages, upload and download files, and perhaps chat with the sysop (system operator). Although we have come a very long way since then, there was a indescribable sense of community and feedback on BBSs. I have felt this more on FriendFeed than any other service.
• Chat Systems – I’ve used a few in my time. Real-time chat has an interesting, transitory, yet compelling feel to it. FriendFeed is similar, especially after the addition of rooms. However, chat systems don’t really have any affinity settings, you follow what is said by everyone in the room. Also, any external content must be brought in by hand.
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) – IRC was an early (and subversively successful in many ways) attempt to replicate chat system or chat room functionality on the internet. See Chat Systems above. I would make a separate bullet for Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and the like, but for this conversation they are similar to IRC.
• Forums – Forums are a framework for providing conversations around a topic. However, Forums attempt to keep a fairly permanent record of anything that is contributed, and the conversational flow is far from the dynamism found in FriendFeed. Plus, any external content must be added manually. Unlike chat systems, it is more worth the effort on a forum since it can be indexed by a search bot and found later.
• Twitter – The obvious comparison, of course. The big similarity here is that you interact with other people that you follow and who follow you. However, apart from the fact that stuff scrolls past, these services have more differences than similarities.

So already, FriendFeed feels a little like an old friend. Or perhaps a young friend with an old soul. Of course, it brings a lot new to the table, like content aggregation, social network features, content sharing and an advanced API. But at least for me, that explains what makes it more fascinating than, say, Twitter.

On To The Good Stuff!

The format I am going to employ here is to take it one tip at a time, and then explain why it should work for you. I will warn you that some of these tips could potentially be very annoying and disruptive, so I haven’t personally tried them all. However, experience and a bit of logic makes me think they should work.

1. Make Sure Your Profile Has Some Credibility

You know how I said that some of my tips may be a little dirty? This is one of them. Different people have different ways of vetting the people that they follow. Some will follow anyone who follows them. Others will only follow their friends. However, many take it case-by-case, or look for some criteria:

• Upload an avatar picture. This is very important. Either one of yourself, a picture of a person, or a an eye-catching cartoon or abstract image. Don’t upload anything offensive. As anywhere on the internet, people will be interested in looking at a girl picture more than a boy picture.
• People will often look for certain service icons in your profile. If all you have is Twitter and Flickr, pack it up and go back to the minor leagues, kid. I’m not saying you have to add every service that FriendFeed supports, but having more than 5 looks pretty good. You will want to make sure you have at least one or two Blog RSS feeds, a LinkedIn profile and a different established social network such as Upcoming or Last.FM. Having these gives the impression that you like trying out services and using what’s available on the internet.
• Choose a nickname that is inoffensive and easy to remember, and make sure your name is a real name, at least a first name. If you are using a bunch of numbers or something random, people will be confused or turned off.
• Some people will go to extra effort to see if you have liked or commented more than say, 5 times since you signed up. At the beginning, this is pretty much impossible to game.. As you use the service these numbers will accumulate.

2. Follow People

This sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But I suspect there are a LOT of people out there who joined the service, maybe had FriendFeed look at their address book to see which of their friends had an account, added a couple of people, and then waited. After getting bored, they added some of their other services, refreshed a few times, and got bored again.

The solution? Follow people. It doesn’t matter who. If you want to apply a template of some sort, you can, but actually, the more random the better. The reasoning up front isn’t that clear but once you start to get popular, you will notice a sort of herd mentality that FriendFeeders like to call the echo chamber. The more you can break out of the echo chamber the better. Might as well start from the beginning.

Here are some tips for getting started finding people to follow:

• Under the friend settings tab, there is a recommended link that will take you to a page that lists a bunch of people. Subscribe to all of these. Then refresh and you will get a new page. Subscribe to all of them too. Keep doing this for a while.
• If you have already subscribed to a few people (by using the above method or some other way), you should see them listed under the friend settings tab in my subscriptions, or in the right-hand navigation bar in the me tab. From either place, click on a few people and you will see who they are following in their right-hand nav bar. You can subscribe to more people from there.
• Ok, doing the first two methods going too slowly? No problem. Either go to one of your friends’ pages, and then click on see both over on the right-hand nav bar (to bring up all their comments and likes) or go to the everyone tab. Now just hover over any name you see. You can subscribe right from within the pop-up bubble that appears.
• Combine all three techniques to follow a lot of people. For now, don’t worry about how many people are following you.

3. Comment and Like

This is very important. You are trying to make yourself noticed. This means you have to contribute in two ways, and commenting and marking as liked is one of those ways. You need to walk a line between being obviously spammy and being really active. To this end, here are some pro comment and tag tips:

• Contribute to established conversations and popular entries, but also comment on and like stuff that hasn’t been noticed yet. People quickly get used to seeing what a FriendFeed entry looks like without a comment or like. Just by liking an entry, you push that entry to the top, you make the entry more visible, and you associate your name with the entry. It’s a win-win-win!
• If you want to be noticed by people, not only do you want to comment on or like their various feed entries and FriendFeed updates, but also be sure to add, comment and like their friends’ entries too.
• When you see that FriendFeed has glommed a bunch of similar entries together, such as tweets or Google Reader shared items, be sure you click on the more button to look at those extra entries. First, you might find a hidden gem there that would have been overlooked, and second it gives you more chances to comment and like stuff.
• Try to be as helpful as possible when commenting. Your observations and thoughts are great, and if you are really funny, sure, use that, but if you can answer a question, or provide a link to a resource, or point out something new, you will get attention.

4. Make Sure You Are Contributing

This one is pretty simple. Only two pieces of advice here. Make sure the services you list have stuff coming in to FriendFeed, and also give that FriendFeed Bookmarklet a workout. Why do you want to do this? This adds to your cover story. Your cover story may not necessarily be a lie, but if someone visits your user profile page and it’s empty, warning lights will go off. You don’t have to go crazy here but at least 5 or 6 things a day, all services combined.

5. Promote Your Own Stuff

Ok, we are really getting into the voodoo now. This is an advanced tip that will let you get more eyes on your name. This is a grab bag of techniques so be sure to mix them up.

FriendFeed uses a secret algorithm to figure out when glom updates from a service together and present them as a truncated list with a more button. People like this because otherwise you would see nothing but tweets, but for you this works counter to what you want. Here are some tips to defeat this behavior:

• You can’t like your own stuff, but you can comment on it. This also effectively breaks the update out of the pack. Don’t use this every time, but if you have, say, 5 Google Reader shared items glommed together, comment on one or two of them. This will push them up to the top of the stream and show a comment, besides.
• Luckily, if you use the FriendFeed bookmarklet, it allows you to add a comment on anything you bookmark. So people will be used to seeing FriendFeed updates with comments. Ergo, use this as much as you can in lieu of other services. Every time you use the bookmarklet, the update will actually be seen by your followers, with a comment already attached.
• Use the FriendFeed bookmarklet’s ability to grab up to three images per link. Another technique you don’t want to overdo, but this is a real attention-grabber. Shared items that have an attached picture or graph almost always get a comment or a like. Don’t forget about this one!

6. Use Rooms

This is a bonus tip, and probably the one that requires the most effort on your part. Rooms are the double-edged sword of FriendFeed, and in fact most chat systems that use the room concept. Rooms can be active, fun and interesting, or they can be completely empty. Think of a room as a bar or a nightclub.. carefully consider every aspect of the room’s presentation and interaction with the larger FriendFeed community. Food for thought:

• If you decide to create a room, make sure it has a nice avatar. This is a light touch but worth the effort.
• Make sure your room is both novel and compelling. It can’t be too broad, but it can’t be too niche either. Things that are popular in the world are going to be popular in a room too, I suspect. Like photography or hobbies or cell phones.
• You have to work at keeping a room interesting. This isn’t Field of Dreams. If you create it, it won’t suddenly get popular, unless you are very lucky. You will need to attend to the room, inviting people, adding content, seeding discussions, maybe even having contests or giving stuff away.
• If you don’t have the time to work on a room, find a hapless lackey. There are plenty of people out there with boundless enthusiasm and charming naiveté. Use this to your advantage by making a room popular, and then allowing someone to help you keep the level of excitement and discussion high. How do you think Rob Malda and Kevin Rose made it big?
• Rooms can be public or private. If they are public, they are essentially sideband clones of the main feed. If they are private, you have much more control over who gets invited, who gets in, and what happens in the room.
• If you make a private room, it will require a completely different strategy than a public room. You will need to carefully consider how to get the news out that your room is awesome, and get people excited about being invited. Here’s a suggestion: Team up with a well-known personality who will talk your room up, but be careful to control access yourself.

Conclusion

I don’t feel too guilty for sharing these tips with you, my eager reader. Sooner or later, these and more effective secrets will be discovered, so why not be out in front of the pack a little? Go forth and have fun. If you found this article useful, share it. Digg it. Mixx it. I’m not proud, this is how I get readership!

Feel free to skip right over this post unless you love this sort of stuff.

Preface

Before I begin, I have to state that a good real life (RL) friend of mine, Rob, cautioned me against writing about blog twiddling as I was just starting out. He calls it macdinking. I have tried to take that advice to heart, either not mentioning changes or additions I have made at all or working them in to review posts.

But recently I have seen several of my blogging friends write articles about MoFuse, a service that takes your site RSS feed and makes it in to a mobile-enabled mini-site. I’ve been using this service for over a month on this site, and I realized I had overlooked the opportunity to voice my thoughts about it.

In essence, it’s cool but I like the wp-mobile edition plugin slightly better. I am going to compare the two in an upcoming article.

What’s Under the Hood?

I’m running Wordpress 2.5.1 with a modified version of the Silver Light theme. In terms of UI tweaks, here are the essential ones:

• Changed the primary title and link color to #990000
• Added a custom logo
• Changed the default font from Verdana to Arial
• Changed the default body text back to Verdana

Ok, How About Plugins?

Oh boy, this will be a big list. I have probably installed and removed more WordPress plugins than I get visitors on a normal day. Here are the ones that have stuck. This list, of course, could be completely different tomorrow.

Wow! You Weren’t Kidding!

Nope.

Anything Else?

Well, I use a bunch of widgets in my sidebar. Here’s a list. These will change faster than my plugins, in all honesty.

• Text – Feedburner Subscription Widget
• Polls – Poll Widget
• RSS Feed – RSSmeme Top Shared Stories
• Adsense – Default Ad
• Archives
• Categories
• Text - Disqus Stats combined widget
• Text – Digsby chat widget
• Text – MyBlogLog widget
• Text – Twitter info
• Text - Twitter flash widget and Awesomesauce link
• Text – Gaping Void cartoon
• Odiogo Subscribe Button Widget
• Text – Blogged link

Are You Done Yet?

Maybe! Well ok, no. I’ve also customized some of my plugins so that they fit into the the theme better:

• The WP-print icon can be found in the upper-right-hand corner of each article
• The Odiogo listen now icon can be found under the timestamp of each article
• The CSS for my FeedBurner FeedFlares look more integrated
• The Add to Any button only appears on full articles, and under the FeedFlare
• The FriendFeed status text is more terse and avoids pluralization issues
• Added Jangro’s trackback hack to the Disqus plugin

Yeah.. that’s about it, I guess.

What About the Page Tabs?

Ohhh yeah, I have a lot of those. Let me break them down real quick.

• Home – This one is obvious.. takes you to the front page.
• About – About scribkin.
• Contributors – This is only me at the moment. I’ve taken the opportunity to modify the default page template to include the Profilactic Where to Find Me Online (WTFMO) module. And an obligatory flash Twitter widget.
• Polls Archive – self-explanatory.
• Lifestream – A tweaked version of the Profilactic plugin.
• Blogroll – A list of pages I find cool, generated by the Blogroll Page plugin.
• Promote – Right now mostly a placeholder that has an animated FeedBurner gif on it. Feel free to put it on your site! I won’t complain, promise.
• Bookshelf – An embedded widget from Living Social that lists current books that I am interested in or reading. I really need to get this current.
• flipside – Used to just be a link to my tumblelog flipside.scribkin, but I found a great site that makes custom RSS widgets called widgetbox. I now have the 10 most recent entries showing in this widget.

Now Are We Done?

Yep.

Just look at it. It’s not good.

Even if you don’t know what clout is you can guess that three is pretty low. We aren’t playing golf here, the point isn’t to get as low as possible.

What is Disqus clout?

Glad you asked. Without going too deep into what the Disqus comment system is and how it is similar or different to other comment systems (including the one built-in to Wordpress), the high-level overview is that Disqus manages my comments on this blog, as well as comments on thousands of other blogs. Because these comments are managed centrally, on Disqus’ site, this means that people using the system to write a comment only need one login everywhere that Disqus is used.

Aside from the convenience of a single login, this also means that each user gets assigned a clout value. By default the clout value is 1. When you comment on a blog, and someone likes your comment, they have the option of voting your comment up using a small arrow next to the comment. Each vote adds one to your clout. Conversely, they can vote you down as well, taking away a point.

As you can see the official FAQ documentation is deliberately vague. I believe that clout can’t drop below 1 (at least, I’ve never seen negative clout), and right now, having a lot of clout points doesn’t really net you anything awesome except a certain kind of Disqus-specific prestige. So far.

So Lets Talk About My Clout

Yeah, so the point is, my clout is in bad shape. I’m not sure if this is because my commenting is spotty and of low-quality (probably) or people are forgivably forgetting to vote my comments up (they are busy, no worries), or there is a vast conspiracy to destroy my clout rating (they follow me wherever I go!) Whatever the reason, I am now on a campaign to get it higher. Take a look at some of my peers’ clout ratings:

Ok, so putting Daniel Ha in there can be seen as cheating since he is a Disqus developer, and pretty much answers all the questions on the Disqus Blog and Forum.

Also, I cleverly didn’t list anyone who had less than 10 clout. Hey, it’s my blog.

What You Can Do To Help

Ok, so my goal is to provide more insightful and interesting comments on a wider variety of blogs using Disqus. What you as a Disqus user can do, to me and anyone else you notice writing a good comment, is to vote more. Or, if you are lazy, you can just vote me up.

I won’t complain. I promise.

I’d republish it here but it is mildly NSFW (swear words), so head on over if you have a minute.