Monthly Archives: May 2006

Contest: Tag web applications, win web applications

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This might be totally obnoxious, but I’m going to give it a try. Randy Morin of the RSS Blog began an experiment recently where he gives a free book from Amazon.com to the person who sends him the best link via del.icio.us by tagging it for:randymorin. Similar to Engadget Mobile giveaways, where a new phone is given to one random person who comments after a particular post. Those posts get thousands of comments.

I think that’s a pretty cool idea. It’s like in SnowCrash where people suck up “intelligence” information freelance about everything, submit it to the Central Information Agency (privitized CIA) and get paid whenever someone pays the CIA to access their intel. Hmmm…maybe that’s frightening.

Regardless, let’s try it.

If people tag their favorite online productivity product, service or application for Web 2.0 style info-management/research with the tag tools4marshallk – I’ll pick my favorite one of the month and the person who submitted it gets one year of premium subscription to any web service of their choice on me, up to fifty bucks. For two runners-up I’ll pitch in twenty bucks towards premium subscription to a web service of your choice. High stakes stuff, huh? I think it could prove more than worth it. And fun! At the end of this month I’ll profile the winners, their submissions and their selected services. Unless I have less than 20 submissions, at which point I’ll extend it to one month from this post. It’ll be great, and did I mention fun? Since it won’t be a for:marshallkirkpatrick tag, anyone can see the submissions here. Heck, if this works well then we could all vote on which submissions are best. But this whole idea might be really stupid, or at least in need of continual evolution.

Update: the tagging has begun! Check out the first submissions at http://del.icio.us/tag/tools4marshallk
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MyUSAToday does Newsgator RSS reader

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MyUSAToday just customized Newsgator Online much like Newsweek did last month. This has so much potential. Who’s going to be the first nonprofit to move on this and set up a branded feed reader with well gardened default feed options? I’m pushing for it to happen and for me to be the admin. Two important factors I can think of so far: it’s got to work faster than the Newsgator online account I just abandoned in favor of a desktop reader and users have to be able to import and export reading lists or OPML files.

Hugg.com is like Digg for eco-types, but hardly used

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The super popular enviro-blog Treehugger has started its own Digg clone called Hugg. Both are systems where users submit and vote on the best stories online each day and the top stories are displayed on the front page. Digg is mostly for tech related news so it’s nice to see Hugg come along for a nontech topic, environmental issues are great for this.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. The top stories are ones with less than 10 “huggs” so far. See, for contrast a Spanish digg clone Meneame, which I wrote about a few months ago on Social Software. There’s another system like this for political news voted on, part of a larger network of shared video and audio, that I can never remember the name of or find in my del.icio.us archive. It’s pretty successful too, though.

Why hasn’t hugg.com gotten more participation yet? It couldn’t be more high-profile than Treehugger makes it. I would really like to better understand what makes a system like this work or not work, as I think it’s a great model. Is it viable outside the super geekosphere though?

My guess on Hugg.com is that the darned thing is just not very easy to use. There needs to be a javascript bookmarklet to submit a story, not a form on the Hugg page that you have to go to and click through 3 times. It looks like they are worried about people submitting too many stories – in reality the problem has been just the opposite.

Hugg has been around for more than a month. My new buddy Gillo from TotalTactics.org is one of the top 10 submitters to Hugg and he’s only submitted 11 links. So this system isn’t working. Why not?

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Off-site round-up

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Way too tired to make an original post here today after staying up till 3 amazed to see how many of my old anti-establishment type friends have active MySpace accounts and then getting up at 5:30 to interview Robin Good in Rome for Net Squared (coming soon -yay!)

I have made a number of posts over on Social Software today that I think will be of interest to readers here, though. Including: YouTube goes mobile, a New Survey of Familiary with Web 2.0 terms, Grazr gets money and a partner, Global Voices Online gets money from Reuters, CoComment now offering Fire Fox extension for auto-capture of your comments and finally, anyone’s video soon to be subscribable via Tivo.

I thought I’d also point out a post I made yesterday to the MobileActive blog about the use of RSS to SMS/IM for mobile phone toting activists. Big thanks to Katrin for the invite to post that (I love these tools, really want to spread those ones in particular.) I’ll be posting an interview with Katrin from MobileActive over at NetSquared early this evening hopefully. But first I’ve got to go walk the dog and listen to a podcast.

Super bonus link-o-rama: speaking of podcasts, check out this excellent one with 25-year marketing pro Sally Falkow on the power and pace of RSS and general web 2.0 adoption in the corporate world. She’s more dismayed about peoples’ reaction than I expected – she’s totally on board her self. Interesting stuff.

Who wants to help with a test?

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Hi there, would some one outside the US please text me XXXXX? I need to make sure my phone will take SMS from outside the US. And make it funny if you can, ok? Thanks.

Update: Ok, so Verizon can only accept text mssgs from 3 countries in Europe and like 15 countries around the world. Not from wherever the wonderful looking service Rasasa.com comes from. Holland is not on the list. As, I presume, one of the largest vendors in the world I would hope they would accept a technology standard that works for everyone everywhere. But they appear not to and deserve to suffer a horrible fate as far as I’m converned. Word – ask about this before you buy a contract for a phone. If there are alternatives, I know I want to be able to get SMS from more countries than this. Bad Verizon.

Seven uses for Share Your OPML

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Dave Winer, a key player in the development of RSS, podcasting, OPML and goodness only knows what else, released yesterday a very interesting new service called Share Your OPML. OPML, or Outline Processor Markup Language, is simpler than it might seem. It’s a format for any information that can be expressed in the form of an outline. The most common use of it so far is for bundles of RSS feeds. Any number of RSS feeds can be imported into or exported out of an RSS reader in OPML format, with the levels of the outline being the feed name, the URL of the feed, it’s home page URL, etc. See also the Grazr box on my right side bar for another example of an OPML file being displayed.

So, Share Your OPML is a place that you can upload the list of feeds you read and do all kinds of other interesting things. You can see who else reads the same feeds, who reads any feed at all, who reads feeds similar to your list, etc. The more people who contribute, the more helpful the system will be. I can’t encourage you enough to: go to your feed reader, find the “export feeds” option, save your list of feeds onto your desktop and then upload them to the Share Your OPML system. You may want to open the file on your desktop with a text editor and delete any particular feeds you don’t want to share first.

There has been some nay saying about this system, but I think it’s great. After the following “more” link I’ll detail some of the possibilities I see. Note also that the Share server may be a bit taxed because there’s a huge wave of interest right away.

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