Interview with Gary Price

Online researcher Gary Price was gracious enough to do a long IM interview with me last week and I’ve posted it over at the Net Squared blog. Price is the editor of ResourceShelf, a news wire of databases and research resources, and the News Editor at Search Engine Watch. Lots of good info shared.

We focused on the following topics:

  • Libraries and Google
  • General Web Search Beyond Google
  • RSS and Email
  • Web Site Watcher, ResourceShelf and Research Methods
  • Consulting, Speaking and Inspiring New Learning
  • Building Organizational Support for New Web Tools
  • Some of Gary’s Favorite Book Search Engines

I hope you’ll check it out and look around the rest of the Net Squared site and conference info while you’re there. Interview with Gary Price

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RSS: Icons, Bloglines and More

I think that’s a very nice RSS feed icon, found via Dragotown and ultimately it seems via FeedIcons.com. FeedIcons.com is dedicated to spreading a standardized feed icon, and I like the idea. No need for a slew of one-click subscribe buttons any more either now that Feedburner includes exactly that on the page for each feed.

News item number two: Have you changed your blog’s URL lately but kept the same Feedburner RSS feed? This is one of the best things about Feedburner (oh, the list of wonderful things is long though). I moved my blog over to this URL about 3 months ago and thought I was bringing all my old subscribers with me and that the transition would be a smooth one.

Bump in the road: Bloglines didn’t fully register the change, complicating my readers’ experience and somehow not including many of my Bloglines subscribers in my circulation numbers. Many were included, but it turns out that many were not. I was just getting ready to celebrate my 200th subscriber some time soon when a Bloglines reader notified me of the problem, I emailed the company and now I’m proud to say that I’m getting ready to celebrate my 300th subscriber sometime soon! You were there all along, but I had no idea. Shucks. (I still know almost nothing about nearly anyone subscribed.)

Anyway, if you are in similar circumstances (having just changed blog URLS but kept the same feed) you might go over to Bloglines and try subscribing to your feed. See what it looks like, and if you notice anything funny you might send them an email. They were very helpful and nice when I emailed them about it. Since Bloglines is one of the biggest feed reading services online, and Feedburner says that keeping your readers and numbers when changing URLs is one of their best features – you’d think these two companies would put their heads together about this.

I Need Help With WAV to MP3 Conversion

Is there somebody out there that can help me figure something out about audio file conversion. Here’s the things I’m dealing with:

1. Gizmo Project records in .WAV format
2. I have a Mac
3. Audacity works fine until I try to export to mp3 and then all versions I’ve found of LameLib crash the program with an error mssg.
4. Drag and drop into Garage Band sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks, who I have not interviewed.
5. I cannot find any WAV to MP3 conversion software online for Mac that works.

I’ll bet some body out there can help me figure this out. If so, please send me an email at emailmarshall@gmail.com and I’ll get back to you after New Years.

Speaking of which have a good one. And my partner Mikalina sends her regards.

UPDATE: Woo hoo! I think I figured out how to do it! The Gizmo Project forums contained advice to use iTunes to convert to MP3, and I downloaded Cacophony to do the editing with instead of Audacity. I’ll have to see how awesome that is, but it sure looks like it works. Without converting the file to any obscure formats, most importantly! Yay!

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Wow! Wikipedia=Edit This World

So Wikipedia has faced a lot of criticism lately (most of which is silly in my opinion as it presumes that readers ignore the page history in wikis) but continues to prove its worth in many ways.

But the point of this point is to reference a discussion going on elsewhere.

This is a long story to summarize, but I’m going to try:

Kick-ass anti-sexist technologist and blogger Shelley Powers was discussing with Rogers Cadenhead the fact that Wikipedia includes many biographical entries on male bloggers and other technologists, but far fewer women. (“Ladies, Wikipedia is Ours“)

In response, Cadenhead does something really cool (the original inspiration for this post, to be honest) and posts a biographical entry of Susan Mernit, super-technologist, member of the inspirational consulting firm 5iveMedia Group. You can see Mernit’s blog here.

Meanwhile Powers also requested in her original post that someone create a Wikipedia entry for her. Sure enough, Shelley Powers on Wikipedia got a “vote to delete” in a hurry. Within 2 fast days there was so much discussion (overwhelmingly supportive of her inclusion) that the “vote to delete page” on her entry was frozen and archived. That one’s for posterity, you’d better believe. Some people (very few) said Powers’ entry wasn’t of legitimate encyclopedic interest. But she, amongst other things, contributed to a book called Essential Blogging 3 years ago. And she’s still going nuts, blogging about a lot of things both technical and political at Burning Bird.

My take-aways:

  • Wikipedia is media that you can change, and if social justice is important to you – you can change it in ways that still meet the requirement of Neutral Point of View.
  • There’s not enough biographical entries about women in Wikipedia. Anyone can write more.
  • I’m going to make sure I’m subscribed to the feeds of all 3 of the bloggers discussed above.
  • I’m going to tag several of the pages above WebJustice2.0. (Check out that tagstream. Items submitted are slow and subscribers to the feed are way down this month. Is the idea not going to fly?)

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Email Promo/Spam: Where does the line get drawn?

Corey Pudhorodsky, creator of the absolutely fantastic 501c3 Cast (a podcast about non-profits with really good interviews and news), asks over at the Net Squared Blog:

I’ve been thinking about beginning to more aggressively email people and organizations that I find on the web who I think might be interested in my podcast. The conceived email would just include a short introduction and invitation to check out the show. I’m sensitive about the unsolicited emails that I receive and this has me thinking, what is spam? If I take the time to find people that I think might be interested in something that I am doing, and send an email to the person, should that exclude me from junk mail category? What if I personalize each email? What if I don’t and just bcc every address? If the email is readily available on the web, does that mean that the person is open to receive solicitations?

My response was that emailing bloggers for coverage (as well as print publications) and then having people learn about your project there, perhaps email their friends about it etc. was a better way to introduce your work to people than unsolicited emails. I’m really not sure, though.

I pointed readers towards a list of the best articles I’ve found on pitching bloggers (http://del.icio.us/tag/pitchingbloggers)
and suggested that subscribing to the RSS feeds of searches for both links to your site and key terms was an important way to engage with the conversation.

What do you think? Is unsolicited email to introduce your project to people you think would be interested – is that spam? Any other thoughts on promoting a podcast about non-profit work? I hope you’ll go over Corey’s post at Net Squared, put in your two cents and check out the conversation (as well as Net Squared itself). I also hope you’ll listen to or subscribe to Corey’s excellent show, the 501c3Cast.

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Site Mod Rockstars – Who’s Your Favorite?

This morning I discovered Swedish programmer Johan Sundström’s EcmaNaut Blog and am still marveling at the sheer beauty of what he’s done with it. As if that weren’t enough it’s a Blogger site! Have you made fun of anyone lately for having a blog on Blogspot? Well go check out EcmaNaut and you’ll want to repent. It’s not just the use of several Google Maps to show his home and his most 100 recent visitors on multiple scales that’s impressive. Look all over the site and you’ll be impressed. The text will probably be unreadable to all but the most tech savvy (I had to stretch to get the most basic idea of what’s going on there) but it’s basically about a part of the JavaScript programming language family that Sundström used to modify the site. If you’re technically inclined, it seems very cool. Jon Udell wrote an article about how cool EcmaScript is yesterday on Infoworld.

Also in the Site Mod Rockstar category – check out my buddy Justin Kistner’s MySpace profile. See especially the blog post there on the top of the list “ATTN MySpace: Please Don’t Delete My Account.” He’s got a real interesting discussion there about how and why he’s changing the MySpace profile code, how he’d like to work with them on it, and how he doesn’t want to end up like his inspiration Tim Benziger. Benzinger’s MySpace account was shut down after he modified the heck out of the code.

Anyone else have sites in mind from code mod rockstars?

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