Category: Life online

A million cool things

I need to get this out of my system so that I can get back to real work, but damn, there’s plenty o’ cool things in and around the web-making world lately. A sampling of what’s new and decent that you, yes you, dear reader, might check out:

In the WordPress plugin category:

In new web apps:

In the Hack MySpace corner:

In “software you haven’t heard of but should try”:

  • Pastor — still the simplest way to store your usernames, passwords and serials
  • Virtue — multiple desktops, now in active development again (r122)
  • Endo — from the 4-letter-name app creator of 1001 and Ect, a slick newsreader
  • Journler (via Greg Elin) — not the most pretty, but very functional journal (oo! with tags!)
  • Pyro — neat use of Webkit for one purpose: showing Campfire chats (via SvN)
  • Corripio — super simple tool for grabbing album artwork
  • CamiScript — add Applescript support to Camino (script repository)

Got anything you’ve come into recently that you want to pass along? Always looking for the latest and greatest, so drop a note in the comments.

These things are new or weird in my world

AT&T - Under Surveillance

Oh, and WineCamp got a website (thanks João Antunes!), I started a Practical Microformats wiki for all you designers out there (now help me build it!) and Tara and I leave for Barcamp Bangalore on Sunday for 8 days.

…and Barcamp San Francisco is happening June 20. Want to help? Good — because we need it!

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

50K Wikis!Hometown hero (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of fame) has hit 50,000 PBWikis (what’s a PBwiki?).

You’ll note that almost all the wikis that I use today are PBWikis: Barcamp, Munified, Coworking, CivicForge, Mash Pit and the new Micro Microformats wiki.

Why? Ease of use, simplicity, speed… and the right subset of features and a simple interaction model. It feels solid. It looks good. It does what I want it to do (I’m also watching Stikipad as it offers Textile).

And now it looks like I’ll even be getting to do some work for the team on some upcoming usability and design tasks. Not to mention microformats integration. Nice.

Bonus: So I’m curious — what features do you look for in a wiki? What’s missing from your experience? Essentially, if you ever had a wiki feature request that you’re dying for (or something you never want to see in a wiki again), what would you say?

You work for me, now shut the fuck up

Via Zak Greant, Tim Bray lays it down: “As a thought experiment, replace the word ‘blogging’ with ‘email’ or ‘conference presentation’ or ‘teleconference’ or ‘sales presentation’. Or ‘barroom conversation’ for that matter. Quick, quick, you wanna be safe, you better lock all your employees up and never let ’em say anything to anyone!” … “If your employees are going to say stupid things in public, you’ve got a management problem and a policy problem, not a blogging problem.”

Powazek said it best

User Generated Content

Derek makes a great point. Of course, this point has been made before, only now we have an alternative phraseology (that no doubt will be corrupted all the same at some point): “authentic media“.

I dig it, but perhaps we could go a step further and make it totally off limits, calling it “amateur content”, in the nothing-is-worth-doing-unless-you-love-it kind of way.

Think about it this way: friends don’t let friends monetize friends. You’ve gotta be an amatuer to do it for something other than the benjamins. I mean, who wants to create “professional” content? Exactly.

Still, let’s use “authentic media” for now and see how it goes. And we can all be happy amateurs creating authentic media together.

I need a Mapendar!

Mapendar sketch

Ok, here’s an idea for some ingenuitive masher.

I’m a visual person. I suck at planning when I can’t visualize the what and where of what I’ll be doing (or what I’ve done). In that single respect, thank Ford for Web 2.0 making things a degree more designerly!

Anyway, here’s what I want.

Take Google or Yahoo Maps. Take my Upcoming feed (or just grab a microformatted event listing like the one on Tantek’s site). And sure, grab a list of free or open wifi hotspots from Plazes. For bonus points, cross-reference the data with my Trazes and Dodgeball checkins to let me know when and if I or my friends have been there. Oh, and yeah, grab stuff from my Flickr stream and hey, Riya? could you like do some searching for photos from the events that I didn’t attend but was watching on Upcoming? Yeah, tanx. And heck, let me throw random things at it like my PiC’s feed or listing of upcoming Barcamps.

Oh, and Flock? Could you like toss in my browser history sorted by geolocation and where I published various blog posts from? Sweet.

Now, I want to see this stuff all pulled in together and tossed on a map. I want 30boxes without the 28, 29, 30 or 31 boxes. I want a big effin’ map (I know Jeremy Kieth can help). And I want to see time represented like sheet music (credit goes to Greg Elin for that idea).

Oh, and please note, this is not a business. It’s an interface.

…Alright, fine, it’s a big old Attention Aggregator — except that it can look into the future and tell me where to be, when. Which makes this what?, an Intention Aggregator? Anh, whatever. It’s a Mapendar and I want one!

Blogger Doom 3

Blogger Doom 3

Okay okay, calm down, kids. We can work this all out.
RoSco, like the rest of us, is human and clearly has moments that inspire the need to get some aggression out. Instead of pissing off one’s readers, why don’t we set up a weekly scrimage for bloggers to to it out on each… in 3D?

Hey, the idea’s not original, but I’d be down for some good-old-fashioned blog’em up fun!

Who’s with me? Anyone?

[Original image courtesy of About.com]

Will Pate joining the Flock

Will Pate & FlockWill Pate of Canada‘s first day on the job starts today at Flock.

His role will likely be similar to parts of mine, given the mantle he’s taken for himself:

Community Ambassador
They let me choose my own title, which turned out to be more difficult than I expected. “Community” had to be in there because that’s what my focus is: getting people excited about using Flock. “Community Director” didn’t work because you can’t direct a community of the type we deal with. “Community Manager” sounded too stuffy. I took a cue from my colleague Chris Messina, Open Source Ambassador at Flock, and chose that word. I like ambassador because it implies goodwill, diplomacy, and a mission of relationship building. I’ll be talking more soon about what exactly I’ll be doing, but that should give you a general sense for now.

Will’s going to make for a great addition to the Flock family and I know that he and I will have a great deal to discuss and stew on as I transition into my old consulting role.

That and I’ve gotta make sure that he becomes Flock’s de facto Pinko Marketer.