It's easy to get carried away with all this Web 2.0 nonsense. So while you are trawling the blogosphere, desperately looking for invites to CoComment and seeing whether 30 Boxes does indeed live up to all the hype, pause for a moment and look at two of my favourite blogs that offer a slightly different perspective on Web 2.0.
Go Flock Yourself - Witty, incisive, opinioniated comment. Always worth reading. The blog title alone still brings a smile.Squash - Phil Sim also has some interesting, thought provoking views from Down Under, albeit with slightly less profanity. I have to say I find myself agreeing with Phil's recent assessment of 30 Boxes.
Yesterday, I stumbled across
Newsvine which is a very impressive news aggregator. Until now, I didn't much care for these type of sites.
Digg left me a little cold with too many irrelevant, repeated articles (not to mention flame wars) and
Slashdot hurt my eyes.
I currently use
My Yahoo! with various news feeds configured and was starting to experiment with a similar, personalized Google
portal with feeds from
Google News as an alternative.
Newsvine is more focussed on news with feeds from Associated Press, tagging, watchlists, personalisation, discussions and your own news column (articles, links). The interface is well thought out, fast, easy to use and I quickly found myself exploring many different topics of interest.
Newsvine is yet another of those Web 2.0 applications currently in beta and needs an invitation to sign up. I anticipate Newsvine supplementing rather than replacing
GreatNews as my RSS reader (for personal and technical blogs) but it is certainly a very impressive and interesting application.
I stumbled across Newsvine on this
blog and the author was kind enough to issue me with an invite. If he has none left, I also have some Newsvine invites available if you are interested in trying it out.
I have been thinking (yes I do a lot of that) recently about managing my personal calendar more effectively. Ideally, I would like a simple Web based calendar that could also sync to my Palm.
I don't really like the Yahoo!
Calendar that much even though it can sync with Outlook and the Palm. I simply don't enjoy looking at the Yahoo! calendar. I just think the interface is ugly and there are distracting ads liberally scattered at the top of the screen.
I am following the development of
Sunbird with interest but this project is still in development and I think Sunbird only runs locally.
I have an outstanding, low priority ToDo to evaluate
Remember The Milk but keep forgetting.
So, I was interested to read
Matt Mullenweg speaking in glowing
terms about the calendar functionality from
30 Boxes rapidly followed by similar sentiments from
Scobleizer.
Mental note. Forego 'Songs of Praise' for just one week and remember to sign up at
30 Boxes on Sunday 5 February when it enters public beta.
In fact, add it to your calendar with an SMS alert so you don't forget.
After briefly evaluating
Furl,
del.icio.us and
Blinklist, I finally decided to ditch Furl and spurn the advances of del.ico.us in favour of Blinklist as my preferred one stop shop for all my social bookmarking needs.
Furl was my first experience of 'social bookmarking' but, as I became more comfortable with the idea of tagging Web pages, I found the Furl interface is simply horrible. There are simply too many key clicks required to add a single tag let alone two ! And if you want to add a brand new category, it takes so long that you have almost lost the will to tag the page and forgotten why it was of interest in the first place. It looks like the tagging functionality was added on as an afterthought.
I then experimented with del.ico.us as loads of people seem to rave about it and it appeared to be the longest established technology. After all, 50 million Web 2.0 officiandos and satisifed del.ico.us users can't be wrong, can they ?
However, just imagine that you are a first time user and you encounter the del.ico.us home page for the first time. The initial impression of the home page is absolutely terrible. What is it ? What does it do ? How do you use it ? How do you get help ? Where is the FAQ ? Or the tutorial ? Also, there is the confounded sub-domain - del.ico.us - and the oh so clever pun which I took three weeks to grasp.
After my previous post on social bookmarking, a nice gentleman from Blinklist spammed - sorry commented - on my blog to tell me about the existence of Blinklist so I felt obliged to evaluate Blinklist as well.
Blinklist's interface looks modern and clean, well designed and thought out as though they employ proper Web designers who actually use the system themselves ('eat your own dog food'). Contrast that with the initial page presented by del.ico.us which looks like an undergraduate knocked it up during a lunch hour and a manager said 'Looks good - let's run with it!'
It is true that I had some teething problems with Blinklist; for example when the tag editor kept insisting on SHOUTING AT ME and the odd tag got duplicated. However, I used the feedback form and tried to provide some constructive feedback to the Blinklist development team. Almost immediately, I found myself in direct email contact with a lead developer (well he could be the CEO for all I know) who passed on my suggestions and got them addressed very quickly. Sometimes they appeared to be making releases as quickly as I was providing feedback.
One of the best features of Blinklist is the tagging of pages is really quick and intuitive. Suitable tags are suggested automatically (which are usually adequate) and it is trivial to add as many new tags as you want - quickly. Blinklist also has a facility to import del.ico.us archives which worked fine for me when importing my massive archive of 15 pages. Your mileage may vary if you have 5,000 del.ico.us pages.
Although Blinklist doesn't keep a Web archive of the saved pages (like Furl) this doesn't really bother me as I can use the Internet archive if it really comes to it.
Of course, Blinklist has some disadvantages. I presume that Blinklist are a small startup and they are the new kid on the block in what is already a crowded marketplace. Worse, it is obvious that those clever people at Google labs will inevitably be entering this space (RSS Reader, My Search History) in the not too distant future.
Secondly, Blinklist has a relatively small user base (compared with Furl, del.ico.is,
spurl et al) although this is compensated by the more intelligent, discerning type of people using the service and subsequent higher quality of the Blinklist content.
When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs.
However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily.
I then looked at
Writely and
Writeboard which fit the bill but are really intended for collaborative writing on the Web and don't have any integration with Blogger.
The
Qumana Blog Editor also looked very interesting as it includes integration with Blogger and built-in support for Technorati tags but still was essentially a cut-down Word lookalike interface.
Then I realised I had the perfect blogging editor sitting right under my nose all the time - Emacs. I can use all of Emacs powerful text editting features and simply save the draft text on my Web server using ange-ftp.
Adding Technorati tags is easy using Marshall Kirkpatrick's
BlogTags bookmarklet.
The only thing Emacs is missing is the ability to seamlessly publish to Blogger and another minor irritation is the fact that some whitespace gets jumbled when pasting the text into Blogger.
However, Emacs being Emacs, some kind person has created a Lisp package (
weblogger.el) that provides integration with Blogger although I haven't actually tried it yet.
And please don't ask why I don't use the Blogger for Word
extension. I can simply think of nothing worse. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies.