I love a good bathroom. When I look at office space, the bathroom is one of the first places I check out, as it can tell you all kinds of things about the place you are at. I’ve been trying for over five years to get a bathroom at MIT named after me in exchange for a financial donation (some people name buildings – my aspirations are much more (im)modest.)
Chris Wand sent me a copy of the page from the June Wallpaper* Magazine with their top 10 list in the world. If you find yourself in any of these cities, take a pit stop to check it out.
Felix Restaurant, Hong Kong
Bar 89, New York
College Hotel, Amsterdam
John Michael Kohler Arts Centre, Sheboygan, Wis.
Seattle Public Library
40/40, New York
Grand Hyatt, Rappongi, Tokyo
3D Gold Store, Hong Kong
Red Bar, Moscow
Public loo, Rothesay, Isle of Bute, Scotland
I’ll be in Seattle next week so I expect a trip to the Seattle Public Library is in order.
It was a fun physical/digital dislocation to find myself sitting next to Wade Roush last night in Palo Alto, after having read and commented on his emerging Continuous Computing story just that morning. It was one of those nametag doubletakes for both of us, and it turned out we had a lot of shared context in place despite never having met before (even going back to mediaMOO in 1993 where Wade designed the STS Center and I got my first real taste of virtual community). If you haven’t checked out Wade’s bold experiment in collaborative journalism yet, he has now posted parts 1-3 and is actively seeking comments. Go over there and grab your place in blogging history while you can (I think he’s getting tired of hearing from me anyway
Everyone has their favorite RSS reader. There is HUGE polarity on what tool is the best. Many base it on what other A-list bloggers use. Others base it on the core tool they use for reading email or browsing the web.
But I have a favorite reader which has nothing to do with the technology I use, but HOW I USE the technology. Does that make sense? Let me explain.
I am a man on the move. In my regular day-to-day operations I move between 3 primary internet enabled devices:
My primary dual head development desktop system
My Acer TravelMate C111TCi-G TabletPC
My Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone
I use one tool to manage all my feeds across all my devices. And that tool is Bloglines. Now let me explain WHY Bloglines works so well for me. I never have to sync myself to know what feeds I have, and have not read. I have about 250 distinctive feeds in Bloglines (well tuned over the last year… I used to read over 400 until I found some good link blogs that manage cross posts well), on average giving me about 500 to 1000 entries to review each day. I have grouped them in a way that lets me look at important stuff (friends blogs, competitor information etc) on a regular basis, and catch up on the rest when I have time. And what makes this work so well is I can literally keep up to date ANYWHERE that I am. What could easily take me 6 to 8 hours a day to read and manage typically takes me less than an hour or two.
Bloglines works well across all my devices, being smart enough to know when I am “mobile”, even giving me a simple interface when I am on my phone. The Audiovox SMT5600 uses Pocket IE which renders Bloglines layout and text amazingly well and allows me to review feeds while I wait in between meetings, or pretty much any other extra time that I have available, maximizing my productivity. When I am at a wireless hotspot, my TabletPC easily picks it up and shows me the feeds I haven’t read yet. That’s right. I can be reading a feed on the phone, and the TabletPC is automatically updated and aware of what I haven’t read yet. Then when I am at my desk, FireFox just carries on and continues where I left off while on the road. Wondering if I am keeping up with your latest podcast feeds? No worries, Bloglines has enclosures built in nice and neat, allowing me to easily keep up as I need to.
Then there are the times where I try to free myself from the shackles of this sort of technology and end up over at a friends. If I am bored I can always sneak into their computer room and continue catching up as I need to.
Now you know how I can stay so informed. I have streamlined my feeds to give me the information I truely care about, and use Bloglines to organize, manage and present the information in a useful manner that keeps up with me. I need not worry about software tool updates across my devices, nor do I have to manage OPML feeds as I subscribe, unsubscribe or tune my feeds. It just works. Across any device out there. And THAT’S an effective use of technology to maximize productivity.
Now, before I end this I must point out that Bloglines is not PERFECT for mobile reading. I really wish Bloglines had a way to collapse the individual feeds when in “mobile” mode, so you could read complete categories without having to scroll through all the subfeeds. In the full mode Bloglines this exists in the “My Feeds” pane. Hopefully someday that will exist in mobile mode.
But that is a small complaint in comparision of how useful Bloglines is. Many thanks to Mark Fletcher for making my life easier. Now take some time yourself and subscribe to Bloglines. It’s absolutely free. Tell them Dana sent ya!
A new Monad build is up on betaplace. To get it, go to beta.microsoft.com, sign in (yes, you need a Passport account), then give the guest ID “mshPDC”, and follow the directions for the Microsoft Command Shell preview.
This is a pretty nice build of Monad. I use it every day and it’s extremely stable. When you sign up for betaplace you can also join a non-public newsgroup which is monitored and responded to by everyone on the Monad team, as well as other betaplace users.
Tom’s Hardware tea-leafed this release. The article says it was “released on schedule to a select group of invited developers”. Don’t worry, you’re all invited!!
Wow, I tell you it’s an exciting time to be a Skype user. Seems like every few days I’m hearing about something new and cool totry.
So we now have two competing Skypevideo tools. vSkype (I’ve installed, but not really tried) andSpontania’s video4skype (downloaded, not installed).
I haven’t read a review of video4skype, but Michael and Neville have both talked about it. It looks promising to me. Theunbelievable number of participants (200) is mind boggling and beingable to app/screen share is cool. Couple problems with bothsolutions, Windows only and the other party has to have both Skype and that plugin for it to all work. Now that QumanaLE is out, I think I’ll be doing online training for it—not that you needany training to use it—and I think I’ll stick with my sponsor ConvoqASAP because all the participate needs is a browser that supports Flash.
The other interesting new tool coming out of beta—thanks for the sneak peak Andrew!—is Jyve—Skype Portal - Jyve. This has been out in beta for a while with the Jyve card. WellAndrew and his team have some pretty darn cool things up theirsleeve. Their new plugin is sure to be a hit. Don’t thinkits public yet, so I’ll keep this close, but I’ve been running it allweek and if you’ve IMed me while I’ve been away, you’ve gotten a littletaste.
Not long ago the announcement that Google had developed AdSense for RSS feeds was greeted with both enthusiasm and maybe a little caution. I put in my request to have them for my View from the Isle feed (via FeedBurner), it took an inordinately long time to get a response and then it took me longer to get the right AdSense ID in place.
Looking at my ads, I thought, jeez these are lame. Well I guess most of you agreed. With roughly 510 impressions not a single click, not one. But I’m not alone in this. Robin Good, same thing but on a grand scale 10,000+ impressions and something like 3 clicks—Bad RSS? Issues And Problems In Feeds Future. T.L. Pakii Pierce is having the similar results— How To Blog For Fun & Profit! — Bad RSS, and so are Arieanna and Ianiv on BloggingHelp.com.
Seems to me then, that these ads aren’t effective. Sure, they appear, but if no one is clicking on them it doesn’t do either the advertisers or us any good, does it?
The consensus I’ve read is that ads in RSS, or in posts/articles are okay. People don’t mind. But I think the skip-able text ads Google is providing are just plain boring. They don’t catch the eye, nor were the ones I saw remotely relevant—T.L. says his were more relevant, so mileage varies, I guess.
I’ve had good results with the ads within my posts here and on my other blogs. Even thought they contain only text, they are functionally images that can be arranged within the text to catch and draw the eye. I put a good amount of thought into where I place my ads. It isn’t random or automatic. Not all my articles get ads. Sometimes I put them in for one site and delete for another, then back in for a third. It’s about control. It’s about reach. It’s about effectiveness. And most of all, it’s about money.
I checked in with a reporter and blogger I know at Fast Company to ping them on the Clip-n-Seal/NASA story and see what was shaking with them. The response was somber. They don’t know if they’ll have jobs or not and are awaiting their fate. The magazine is being auctioned with bids arriving this week. The editor has made his case, FC Now is blogging it, and another blogger is pleased with their struggles.Fast Company wrote about Clip-n-Seal in their March issue and it was great press for us. I wish the staffers well and good luck. They were a pleasure to work with and it’s a great magazine.
For six months now, [Coverville’s Brian] Ibbott has been talking to the Recording Industry Association of America and individual copyright holders about making this process easier and unambiguously legal. Now he says there are signs that the big labels are listening and are seeking ways to put podcasting DJs on more stable legal footing.
Dan nails Scoble… I’m with Dan. You are either for free speech or you aren’t. By blocking the word democracy anywhere - in fact any word, anywhere… Microsoft is moving against freedom of speech.
Penn State has initiated a pilot program of 10 wiki-based composition classes… They found that the self-governing ecology of the networked wiki format creates a fruitful environment for discussion and debate. - IfBook
