Email isn’t dead

activate us

With cultureware services like Flavorpill launching a new email newsletter called Activate (“World News Once a Week” — subscribe) and Amit Gupta and co‘s PhotoJojo pulling in over 10K subscribers (4K via RSS) and getting Wall Street Journal ink, email newsletters are far from dead.

Just put that one away in your quiver next time some tries to suggest that email’s dead (I’ll have more on this later).

Announcing BarCampEarth

BarCampEarth v4 (final)

Last year, on August 18th, I wrote of BarCamp that:

Next year I expect to see multiple satellite Bar Camps happening the world over, loosely joined via the web, bringing distributed collaboration and culture building to a much, much wider audience. Podcasted, Flickered, wikified, videographied and blogged like mad.

I wrote that before the first BarCamp ever happened. Before 300 people showed up at Ross Mayfield’s new offices… before Flock was shown publicly for the first time… before TechCrunch had 1,000 readers… before the Wired article or BBC feature… before we thought we were in Bubble 2.0. Before snark jumped the shark and the uncreatives got uncommon.

Let’s just say, a lot has happened in the past year.

In fact, a lot of BarCamps and spin-offs have happened (or been proposed) since the original: 4Camp, ArtCamp, BarCamp Paris, BarCampWashDC, BarCampAmsterdam, BarCampAmsterdamII, BarCampAtlanta, BarCampAustin, BarCampBangalore, BarCampBerlin, BarCampBirmingham, BarCampBoston, BarCampBrussels, BarCampCapeTown, BarCampChennai, BarCampChicago, BarCampDallas, BARCampDC, BarCampDelhi, BarCampDenver, BarCampEnschede, BarCampGrandRapids, BarCampHouston, BarCampHyderabad, BarcampJacksonville, BarCampKiev, BarCampLasVegas, BarCampLondon, BarCampLosAngeles, BarCampManchester, BarCampMumbai, BarCampNYC, BarCampOttawa, BarCampPaloAlto2005, BarCampParis, BarCampPhiladelphia, BarCampPhoenix, BarCampPortland, BarCampPune, BarCampQuebec, BarCampRDU, BarCampRDU, BarCampSanAntonio, BarCampSanDiego, BarCampSanFrancisco, BarCampSeoul, BarCampTdot, BarCampUtah, BarCampVienna, BarCampZurich, BarSeder, beCamp, BrainJams30Jan2006, CesCamp, CocoaDevHouse, DCamp (Palo Alto, CA), DHX: Dev House Ten, DrupalCampNYC, DrupalCampToronto, IndieFilmCamp, MashPitDallas, MashupCamp, MicroBarCampParis, MinneBar, MooseCamp, NPTECH Bar Camp, OpenHack Night San Diego, RecentChangesCamp, SeattleMindCamp, SlamCamp, TorCamp1 aka BarCampToronto, UXCampNYC, WineCamp, WoolfCamp… with more to come in the future.

And so it’s with great pleasure and honor that I get the ball going on the one-year anniversary celebration that will be called BarCampEarth. It’s scheduled to take place the weekend of August 25-27, the same weekend as the original inspiration FOO Camp and right before Burning Man. And most importantly, it takes place on every conceivable corner of the globe — wherever anyone who’s interested, motivated and inspired to participate can — and should.

Though we’ve already signed up 20 unique locales spanning the globe, we, the members of the worldwide community of BarCamps, hereby invite everyone everywhere to attend and to participate, in whatever way possible. If you can host a *camp, by all means, do so; if you want to organize a Mash Pit, a Demo Camp, and Tequp… a gathering in your local pub or library. Do so! Or, feel free to tune into the IRC chat, into the Skype channel (ask me to add you), the Google Group, or the streaming video (which Scott of BarCampSudbury is setting up).

Most of all, this is your event to make of us what you will. The BarCamp community has grown and matured in the past year and there’s a wealth of knowledge to be tapped if you’re interested in running your own event. Now’s your chance to ask questions, to seek and build your local community, to connect and to get en-fucking-gaged.

Chris Casciano’s microformats hacks

In case you haven’t been watching, Chris Casciano has been pushing in some potential…ful directions lately (“potent” just seems wrong in this context) with microformats. First he releases a script to extract microformats in NetNewsWire then he creates a tool for subscribing to hAtom feeds (which basically allow you to subscribe to an properly marked up HTML document instead of nasty-looking RSS).

On top of that, he pushing the envelope for microformats support in Camino. Not too shabby.

Keep track of this stuff in my Microformats Ma.gnolia group.

Hacking Google proxies on your BlackBerry

You may or may not realize this, but when you use Gmail on your BlackBerry, they’re doing some tricky things behind the scenes to “improve” your “Gmobile” experience.

For one thing, when you’re reading your Gmail, they strip down the service to its barest essentials: AJAX, tables, selecting… all gone. But unsurprisingly, it remains quite useful (that whole simplicity thing).

Anyway, I discovered an interesting hack along with some serious privacy … concerns … while tooling around with Gmail.

The privacy issue is pretty simple: everything that you visit from Gmail (and this is more or less true whether you’re on Gmail Mobile or the regular version) is tracked by Google. Click on a link in an email from your friend in Gmail? Google knows. One might argue that this is how they improve their service and add relevance to the AdWords that they show you (they already grep your emails to contextualize the ads in the sidebar, so watching the links you click improves the personalized search results you get). Ok, that’s the tradeoff I’m willing to bare in order to receive their free services; I’m not complaining necessarily, just pointing it out because they don’t make it explicit that they track the links that you click.

Now, on to that hack.

I was looking to make dinner reservations last night on the OpenTable website. Tragically they don’t have a mobile-friendly version (still using tables for layout?? gross!) so the experience was… let’s just say, pretty terrible.

But then I remembered! — ah ha! — Google tracks all my surfing habits with their Gmail proxy — but they also reformat all the sites that I visit to be more mobile friendly… So I opened up the Send Address dialog in the BlackBerry browser and sent it off to my Gmail account (which I’ve set up as “me” in my address book).

I opened up my Gmail inbox in the BlackBerry browser and sure enough, visiting the link that I just sent myself took me through the Google proxy to a page that looked like this:

OpenTable over the Gmail proxy

…instead of this.

Sweet! So now whenever you find yourself on a site that’s completely unusable on your mobile device, just prefix the url with this http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u= and you’ll have a much more usable interface, thanks to Google’s spying proxies!

Bonus: WordPress plugin Bad Behavior will block attempts by proxies like Google’s from being able to access your site. I’ve got it installed and you can see how many Spambots have attempted to access my site in the few days that I’ve had it running!

Icon Factory gets remanufactured

Icon Factory redesigns!

On the 10th anniversary of icon and graphic design stalwart Icon Factory, they’ve unveiled a brand new Rails-backed design and infrastructure, tightening things up and lightening up the whole feel of the site.

Meanwhile pixel fucker designer extraordinaire David Lantham has released a gorgeous new icon set and theme called Amora to commemorate the date:

Amora

Wow.

Oh, and some nice innovation. This:

Sharing prefs at Icon Factory

lets you pick what these:

Sharing links

links do. As in, Send to Ma.gnolia or Post to Digg. Nice!