blog before you think!

I feel sad that Bloglines continues to deconstruct itself. Feedreaders are like a relationship after all. There are plenty of them out there, each one with its own bundle of strengths and weaknesses. But at some point you’ve got to choose and then better stick with it. Since we spend a lot of time with them, even the shortcomings become likeable. At least we arrange ourselves, develop little hacks and workarounds, and learn to live with them.

Over the last couple of weeks Bloglines has had a few issues. Feeds have not been updated, sometimes none of them for a couple of hours, sometimes the site was just down. But stuff happens and every site has problems every once in a while. What I don’t get though is the communicative stealth mode of Bloglines regarding these problems. There is no blog, no section indicating current issues, nada.

A simple search on Twitter shows that a lot of users – hundreds, probably thousands – are jumping ship and switching to Google Reader. Is this what they want? I believe many of them would have stayed, if they simply gave us a nod that they are aware of the issue and working on it.

lovely idea: Tiddly Backpack – reinterprets the metaphor of Backpack (notes, pages, drag & drop) as Tiddlywiki. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work for my setup yet.

More (a tad outdated) TiddlyWiki fun here

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Twitter has added a useful parameter (in_reply_to_status_id) to its API which lets you indicate the specific tweet you are responding to. This is pretty cool since it also lets you reply without using the @username prefix.

It probably won’t take long until Twitter clients will pick it up, in the meantime: fire up a terminal and type:

curl -u username:passwort -d status="text of the message" -d in_reply_to_status_id="123456789" https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

(you can find the status-id of the tweet you want to respond to at the end of its URL, see the screenshot below, and you need to use your username and password, of course)

At the end of the day all you need to manage your life is a single text file – and _ MyTextFile will give you no more and no less.

MyTextFile is a minimalistic online text editor for a single plain text file. If you want to go fancy you can chance the typeface/font size or the color scheme. MyTextFile also has built-in revision control and will autosave your document every five minutes. And that’s about it. I love it.

Well, this blog has been sleeping for a while. But sometimes the world throws a coincidence at you, and it makes sense to pick it up and run with it.

In my very first post back in December 2004 I mentioned how del.icio.us and Gmail changed my work- and infoflows for good, and oddly enough they still do. Since del.icio.us was able to rejuvinate itself as shiny new Delicious, this might be a good trigger to relaunch Blog before you Think! too.

I’m not entirely sure where this will take me, but the topics should be about the same: useful new webtools, hopefully clever hacks on how to use them, a few links to interesting stuff, etc. I’m involved in a few other blogs and I contribute my fair share of cool hunting at the Museum of Modern Betas so the posting frequency here probably will be relaxed, but hopefully consistent.

One of the overlooked productivity features in Google Reader are those little trash can icons in your personal Reading trends (home -> trends -> Reading trends). Just hit unsubscribe for the feeds which consumed most of your time and make room for an extra hour each day.

Not as cute as Asirra but an excellent example of how to get microtasks distributed done: reCAPTCHA (stop spam. read books)

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Brilliant idea: reCAPTCHA mashes up the shortcomings of OCR software when digitizing books and the shortcomings of the web when fighting bots and spam. It extracts value from CAPTCHA systems by sending 2 distorted words: one of them not read correctly by the OCR tool, the other one already known. If the user has the known one right it is assumed the other one is right too.

(via hotlinks)

This is the Wiki Clock — a clock that runs on Wiki technology!
Please update this page with the correct current time (UTC).

(via hotlinks)

Google announces Authors@Google (informal talks with authors centering on their recently published books):

We’re delighted to share our digital library of events with you, and will continue adding to it. We hope you’ll bookmark this page and check back often.

I’m no fan of the checklist approach to measure usability (RSS, API, Microformats, good, no RSS, no API, no Microformats, lame) – but they obviously put some effort into this, and they obviously will update this series regularly, and they obviously do want interested folks to stay in the loop, so why not throw in a feed for the updates and eliminate the need to check back often?

Check out RSS in plain English for why this would be useful.

current snapshot of my next action balls basket

Holy crab, the last entry in the Next Action Balls series was written 8 month ago.

Basically back to paper. Paper rules.

Google has a very weak incentive to “support” content of quality. Put another way, Google’s incentive to “support” content creators diminishes in quality.

Think about this intuitively: the more crap there is, the more stuff you have to wade through – the happier Google is (at least in the short run).

Let me put this even more succinctly. Google doesn’t care about absolute levels of quality – it only cares about relative levels of quality. And the more media it indexes, the stronger this dilution of incentives gets.

Umair Haque

Joyent (the longest lasting beta test I’ve ever participated in) just announced Slingshot, a lightweight framework which allows Ruby on Rails applications to run offline on your PC/Mac and to easily sync the data between the online/offline versions. A desktop release of the Connector is scheduled for the end of next month. I can’t wait.

see First Impressions: Joyent and Bookmarks

urlTea is another URL-shortening tool with a nice twist: it let’s you annotate the shortened URL [http://urltea.com/9x?urltea-tiny-urls-with-semantics], and it also has a simple API.

Make Link – a useful Firefox extension which speeds up the process of creating links. It’s configurable, so you can create your very own link types (e.g. for Textile)

Cute project from Microsoft Research (who knew?): Asirra

Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) refines captchas by asking users to identify photographs of cats and dogs and is offered as a free web service.

They’ve partnered up with petfinder, who provided Asirra

with over two million images of cats and dogs, manually classified by people at thousands of animal shelters across the United States. In exchange, we provide a small “Adopt Me!” link beneath each photo, supporting Petfinder’s primary mission of finding homes for homeless animals.

del.icio.us just added Tag Descriptions which let you annotate your tags to provide some sort of explicit reflections on your tagging heuristics.

I really admire Joshua Schachter for his ability to innovate (sometimes seeing the obvious first vs. adding features), for his resistance against popularity contests (i.e. digg, Technorati WTF) and for leaving out the crap.

Now this is seriously cool: critically acclaimed Dabble DB announced a free version – the Dabble DB Commons

You get the same sweet features as their paid service (check out the 7 minute demo), the only difference is that all data are publicly accessible and licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Gee, only two days after the release of Useless Account – somehow the conceptual nirvana of Web 2.0 (currently more than 6000 people are euphorically doing nothing) – Yahoo! released this weeks second major milestone of the web: pipes

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

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Usually I try to avoid IM, too noisy, no polite way to schedule responses, ... but IMified is a slick tool which might boost the productivity quotient quite a bit.

Once you’ve added the imified-buddy to your contacts in a messenger of your choice (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber) you can trigger various functionalities (notes, todo items, reminders) by sending messages. IMified even lets you access external services like Blogger, WordPress, Remember the Milk or Basecamp:

Sparklines meet del.icio.us: sparktags