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.

Technorati Tags: email, Firefox

Anyone have any experience setting up a blog of content aggregated from elsewhere, via tags, that posts each tagged object as a unique blog post, with onsite comments enabled? I need to figure out how to do that.

Technorati Tags: comments, aggregators, blogs, tags, attention_streams

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)

An important, developing part of the online world that you should know about is what’s being called “attention.” It’s related to what you’d probably intuitively associate with the word. Attention-minded folks discuss the future of our “attention data.” Examples include:

• Your click-stream, or web browsing history
• Your bookmarks
• Your online purchases
• Your content posted and consumed (which podcasts have you listened to, how long did you spend on this blog, the tags you’ve applied to your photos online)

There’s a great potential for evil here – I don’t want the government watching where I go online (already being done to some folks, I’m sure), and I don’t want this data of mine to be controlled by some company that won’t let me grab it, use it or move it over into another company’s database. There’s a great potential for good in this data too, though. I would really like to know how I discovered all the web pages in my archive (the referring URLs) and I’d like to know how readers use the articles I post here on this blog (have you emailed this to someone else? Do you click on the links in my sidebar?). Much of that is already available, but the attention folks are working to make it more solid, easily accessed and usable.

Towards these ends, a great group called The Attention Trust is working to make sure that our interests as end users are protected. One of their projects is The Attention Trust Wiki. On that wiki (a web site that anyone can edit, like Wikipedia) I’ve started pages for an attention wishlist and a list of places you can read more. Check out the attention trust and their wiki. This is going to be very important stuff that you’ll hear about a lot in the coming years.

Technorati Tags: attention

Wed the 12th is my 29th birthday, so I’m checking out until Thursday. I insist that it’s Monday (Columbus day observed) that marks 500+ years of American imperialism – Wednesday the 12th is my birthday.

Technorati Tags: birthdays, work_stoppage