Monthly Archives: October 2005

Firefox MailTo: Fix

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Isn’t it frustrating when the contact info on some one’s web page is just a “mailto:” link that makes your desktop email software system pop-up when you click on it? Are you one of the many people who only uses web based email, like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail? Well, for Firefox users there’s now a solution. Check it over at the Download Squad’s write up of a tool that allows you to change your browser settings to open your web mail account instead when you click a “mailto:” link.

BTW, I’ve been really bummed lately but Firefox is just moving so so so slow on my Mac that I’ve been using Safari instead. Anyone else having a similar problem? There’s so many incredible things that can be done with Firefox, I’d really like to get it working for me again.

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Blog Alerts: Bloggers in Trouble

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This morning I added another section to the sidebar here, called Blog Alerts, from The Committee to Protect Bloggers. The CPB is a group that raises awareness about bloggers around the world facing state or other repression because of what they’ve written on thier blogs. You should really check them out. This BlogAlert system is something I set up for them and had on my old site. It’s a system by which the director of the CPB can write a post and put it in his category “Blog Alerts” and will thus appear automatically in the BlogAlert sections of any supporters’ web sites who have resyndicated the RSS feed for that category. You can grab the code snippet via the link at Add BlogAlerts to Your Site. This is an easy way to help spread the word quickly about bloggers in trouble. (I used Feed Digest to turn the RSS into javascript-to-HTML, very easy to do.)

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Wiki Resources Galore!

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If you are unfamiliar with what a wiki is, I explain it like this: it’s a web site that anyone can edit, where all previous versions of every page are viewable, and where users can recieve automatic notification whenever a page of interest changes. Wikis are used for collaborative knowlege and document development. The best introduction is Wikipedia, the biggest wiki in the world. If you visit that site, make sure you click on the tabs at the top of each article and give a good look around.

There’s a fantastic looking conference underway yesterday through tomorrow in San Diego, called WikiSym 2005, the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis. The online resources available alone are terrific. The workshop page for the Wiki Spam session alone looks worth a look. I’ll be looking over this site as much as I can before I facilitate a discussion about wikis at a TechSoup online event later this month (Oct 24-28).

I found out about WikiSym via the blog of Ross Mayfield, wiki-guy extraordinaire and head of the wiki heavy-weight company SocialText. Ross is a charming guy and is providing some good, live coverage of the conference.

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Tagging Bookmarklet and How-To Screencast

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Update: Just talked to a Windows person who says that the new Explorer 7 blocks some javascript bookmarklets. Going into Preferences/Security and enabling javascript will save soom bookmarklets, but not neccesarily this one. I’m going to have to get to the bottom of this for many different reasons, but it looks like this is the worst of Microsoft’s new security philosophy: block users from changing almost anything, so they don’t leave anything open to hostile intrusion. But the toolbar? I’ll figure out something asap, but I’m on a Mac so we’ll see. But I want to enable lots of Windows users to use tools like this, so I’ll see what I can figure out. In the meantime, check out the awesome screencast Beth made.

See also this post about pinging to make sure your tagged blog posts will show up in Technorati.

Drumroll please…

BlogTags

Ok, that link right there should work for people using Macs and PCs (thanks to my brother Tom the PC user!). Beth Kanter created a terrific little screencast about how to use it! Here’s the screencast itself and here’s the write up on the bookmarklet. What a neat example of collaboration, huh? Beth’s work is really cool, she’s got a great blog to check out too.

Well, thanks for the patience everybody. Hopefully this will all work now for everyone.

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New Web Tidbits

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Here are some changes I’ve made to my site, followed by an interesting graph about the state of the blogosphere.

People subscribed to my RSS feed won’t notice changes made to my sidebar, but there have been several this morning. First, I got rid of the Google Adsense. It was supposed to be contextual advertising, but it was often not very specific in connection to the particular post it was near. I’ve had 1300 page impressions in the week since I put the ads on this site and not one person has clicked on a single ad. Ok, good learning experience. A friend pointed out that my readers are probably particularly sophisticated, and thus uninterested in the ads. Hey, that’s you, particularly sophisticated!

Second, I moved my little cluster map up to the top of my sidebar. I think it’s pretty interesting to see where people have been visiting this site from lately. Don’t you? Click on the map to zoom in for more detail. You can get your own map easily at Clustermap.com.

Furthermore, I removed the link I had on the top of the sidebar to LiveMarks. I think it’s great fun, but just didn’t want to link to it anymore.

Finally, check this out. Technorati just released their newest “State of the Blogosphere” report. I found this graph particularly interesting and thought I’d share it with you. (Click on it to enlarge)

Following Up on the Bookmarklet

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Ok, if you’ve seen the comments after my last post about the wonderful Technorati Tag bookmarklet, you’ll notice there’s some issues that need to be addressed. Your help would be much appreciated:

On not being able to make it work:

  1. I’m on a Mac, but 80% of my visitors yesterday were using Windows XP. I’m still not sure why folks are having trouble dragging and dropping the bookmarklet onto their toolbar, but if there are any Windows XP folks out there with suggestions, I think we’d love to see them.
  2. Second, four visitors yesterday had javascript disabled on your browsers. So if that’s you, you’ll need to change that before you can use this – and lots of other great javascript based tools.

Philosophically: there was some question on whether it’s good or even ok to tag your own blog posts. Here’s a couple thoughts.

  1. Technorati Tags in particular are something that bloggers themselves have to apply to their own blog posts. Tags in other systems (like del.icio.us or Simpy) can be applied by readers wanting to describe a particular article or web site, but Technorati Tags are applied by bloggers to their own posts.
  2. Tagging your own blog posts is a way to tell the world that the post exists and where it fits in the blogosphere, what it’s about. We’re trying to communicate here, so that’s a good thing. It’s similar to pinging search engines after each post (Feedburner does this automatically once you set it up, or ask me for more info on this if you need it.) Or, for a brick-and-mortar example – it’s like having a garage sale and puting up fliers around the neighborhood, or throwing a party and sending out invitations. It would be spammy if you put a flier under the doormat of every house in town, but on the utility poles or mailed to your friends is just fine. Technorati Tags are like community billboards organized by subject.
  3. Placing these links at the end of each post is a way to direct readers to what other people in the blogosphere are writing about the same subject. This may be mitigated by the fact that the tools are new enough that many readers don’t know that, but just so you know: when you see that someone has added a Technorati Tag for “Web2.0” or “environmental_justice” to the end of a post on their blog – you can click on that link to go to Technorati’s Tag page and see a whole lot of other blog posts (and other resources) that have been tagged with the same tag. It’s a great way to get a feel for the larger discussion on any topic.
  4. If you think it’s ugly to see the tags at the end of each post, you can delete the text that the link is tied to and just keep the link itself tied to a space or a dot or some other place holder. This bookmarklet makes that take another step, but I believe it’s possible.
  5. I go so far as to bookmark my own blog posts in my del.icio.us and Furl.net archives. It’s a collective database out there on the web, why wait for someone else to submit what you’ve written into that database? I get visitors every day because people are subscribed to the RSS feed for all items tagged “RSS” in del.icio.us for example. People are interested in these particular channels of content, so they subscribe, and for now the cost of entry is nearly nothing. So if you have something to submit to these channels that people are interested in, put your content in there, give it a good headline and see if people like it. If they do, they will subscribe to your own site’s RSS feed. Web2.0 is about everyone being able to publish and distribute content. Tagging is like our version of TV Guide, each tag is a channel that you can view, subscribe to or ignore. There’s not a solution to tag spam yet, but there’s not that much of it out there yet either.

So I can’t recommend Technorati Tags and the bookmarklet found in the previous post highly enough. I use them every single day. Let me know if anything I’ve posted here is unclear or if you still can’t get the bookmarklet to work. It really should be easy as can be.

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Check it out! There’s those tags again!