Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
Glue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/29/2008 - 12:49This morning, I sat down at the computer and fired up pandora.com and started listening to songs that it associates with other songs I’ve expressed interest in. I’ve started flagging the songs that I like there. It struck me that it would be nice if that information could be exported to last.fm. A quick search revealed PandoraFM. So, if you check what I’ve been listening to on my last.fm profile.
Of course this is available as an RSS feed, so I could pipe it into various sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Spock, Plaxo Pulse, etc. Yet there are so many items, I worry about it being overwhelming.
Nonetheless, it got me to think about all the different feeds I generate and how they interrelate. So, I started mapping out various feeds I produce.
Orient Lodge, Flickr, Facebook Statuses, Last.fm,
Bloghud, Blip.TV, Twitter,
Jaiku, de.icio.us, StumbleUpon, ma.gnolia.
As noted before, they are interrelated. My Orient Lodge feed updates my Twitter Feed. It, together with my Twitter feed updates my Jaiku feed. Facebook updates a bunch of feeds as well. One of these days I, or someone smarter than I, will come up with smart tools for pulling all these feeds together.
To further complicate things, I bothers me that if I find a good site, I may want to bookmark it on several social bookmarking sites. With that, I found a blog post that talks about how to set things up so when you tag a page in del.icio.us, it also tags it in StumbleUpon. First test are very positive. Now if only we could add in ma.gnolia as well.
Slowly more of these things will get connected and linked together. Until that time, I’ll play with different types of glue to tie together all of my digital social media.
Attention Data
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/25/2008 - 16:03718 unread emails. Following 183 people on Twitter. 467 friends in Facebook. 102 of them have recently updated their profiles. 145 unread messages in Facebook. 567 unprocessed updates and requests. 298 RSS feeds in Bloglines. 128 friends in Second life. 58 friends and 179 admirers in MyBlogLog. 70 friends and 40 communities in BlogCatalog. Spock, Wink, Plaxo, Pandora. The list seems endless.
I remember years ago teachers asking for my complete undivided attention. Now, everyone wants my constant partial attention. It seems unmanageable. Beyond that, I want to get as much constant partial attention from others as possible as well.
To get other people’s attention, I make sure that when I do something, it gets out to various places. I send text messages from my cellphone to Facebook and Twitter. Facebook also feeds twitter, in the event that I put something on Facebook directly. Both of them feed jaiku. Twitter feeds MyBlogLog, Spock and Plaxo. When I put up a post on Orient Lodge it feeds Facebook, in a couple different ways, as well as Twitter and Jaiku. When I take a picture with my cellphone, it goes to Facebook and Flickr. From Flickr I can send it to Orient Lodge. When I shoot video from cellphone, it goes to Facebook, Youtube and blip.tv. Blip can send it on to Flickr and to Orient Lodge.
There are probably a lot of other connections I’ve established that I’m overlooking right now. Confusing? You bet it is. It makes it even harder to track what is where.
So, what gets my attention? Well, this shifts frequently. I’m doing a lot in Second Life right now. I have TwitterBox running so I stay on top of my incoming Tweats and Second Life IMs. I’ve been playing a bit with Spock recently. Mostly I see tweats there that I’m already seeing in Second Life. However, I do see people’s updates in Spock. My experiences with Plaxo Pulse are fairly similar.
Right now, the feed that probably gets the most data is my Plaxo feed. However, since it is listening to a bunch of different feeds, it gets redundant data. So, as an example, 18 hours ago, I put up my post about Clinton, Edwards and the FISA legislation. 17 hours ago, Twitter picked it up. Then Plaxo Pulse picked up on both the link on the blog, as well as the link in Twitter. Four hours ago Jaiku picked up the feed from Twitter and then three hours ago, it picked it up from my blog directly. So, the same key piece of information shows up in my Plaxo Pulse four times.
This illustrates a few different things. One is the latency that it takes for information to get out through the network. It illustrates the duplication of messages. Yet not all the messages are duplicates. In some cases I post a quick message in Twitter without posting a message on my blog.
So, how do we aggregate, sort, filter, and make meaningful all this information without introducing more latency? How do we add something new so that, for example, if I find a new friend, I can get him added in all my social networks, get his statuses on Twitter, Facebook, track his RSS feed and so on? And for that matter, how do we plug it into other systems, like Pandora so that if my friends twitter or write blog posts about music, I can hear related music? I don’t know, but it does look like as the data that comes at us starts coming more quickly, we need to come up with better ways of processing attention data. Perhaps most importantly, how do we do it in a way so that people don’t simply turn off their computers and communication devices and walk away?
Look, there goes a squirrel
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/22/2008 - 19:05When I have something important to work on and need a distraction, there are several places I go. BlogExplosion provides a never ending list of websites to visit with the promise of sending people back to your own blog. MyBlogLog provides ample blogs to visit. When you visit them, if they have the MyBlogLog widget up, it leaves your picture on the blogs you’ve visited, and if you’re lucky, people will click on your image and visit your blog. If I want to check sites that I’m following more actively, I check the approximately 300 blogs that I follow with Bloglines Then there are Twitter’s to read, conversations in Second Life to join in on, and if all else fails, you can always read your referrer log.
A New Writing Endeavor
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/14/2008 - 22:56Over the past few months numerous people have approached me about writing for their site about Second Life. I’ve had protracted discussions with many of them about writing style requirements, what sort of compensation I would receive, what the considerations are about me posting the material to my own site, or writing for other sites as well. In just about every case, the discussions just sort of petered out, or the expectations were higher than the compensation justified.
However, recently I’ve had some good discussions with Garret Bakalava of SLNN.COM. We haven’t nailed down all the details, but I have agreed in principal to write for and edit the business section of their website. I will focus primary on inworld business and another editor is likely to focus on real world businesses in Second Life. To me, the RL/SL division always seems a bit artificial, but so do many other ways of categorizing business or other topics as well.
My goal will to be write and/or edit approximately two articles a week, with another two or three announcements each week as well. To do this, I will be looking for writers interested in Second Life writing. By a normal writers pay scale, the salary sucks. By a normal bloggers pay scale, the any sort of income is nice and by Second Life standards, we’ll do what we can to be fair.
It will be an interesting challenge for me, since news articles should be in the AP style; a style that I’m not completely comfortable with. My normal blogging style is first person with an ample sprinkling of my own opinions. I will need to keep that in check as I write for SLNN
One of the conditions that has been important to me with whatever Second Life site that I write for, is the ability to cross post the stories to my own site. To the extent that I am writing an opinion piece in my blogging voice, I will post it on Orient Lodge, and allow it to be cross posted to SLNN. To the extent that I am writing a news piece for SLNN, it will go up on SLNN first and at a later point, I will add it to Orient Lodge. These posts will be mostly for archival purposes and are unlikely to appear on the front page of my blog, although they will occur in the Games section. The first story that I wrote specifically for SLNN is now cross posted here with a link back to SLNN.
Meanwhile, I continue to strive for at least one or two blog posts a day on Orient Lodge, running the gamut from the political to the personal, with technology, games, social networks, poetry, and whatever else thrown in. Stay tuned.
Don't just blog about it, do something!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/06/2008 - 13:00Yet again, I'll step into my role as the old curmudgeon that has little use for the bickering little hit diaries that go back and forth here on DailyKos, or even for the campaign diaries pushing a particular candidates position on one issue or another. We need to get beyond the circle of DailyKos. We need to be in the streets.
The Obama campaign did a great job of getting people to the caucuses in Iowa. The Edwards campaign's message beat out the Clinton message, even though he was vastly outspent. What we need is everyone to step away from the computer, and get out and phonebank, canvas, do visibility or whatever else you can to get the best agent of change elected.
Me? I'm staying with my brother-in-law in Hanover, NH. I wrote a blog post about my activities yesterday on BlueHampshire. Mike Caulfield writes about phonebanking with John Edwards' parents. Mike Hoefer writes about Obama supporters phonebanking in New Hampshire. AJ WI has a DailyKos diary about canvassing in Derry, NH.
The mainstream media is picking up on this as well. The Hartford Courant has an article up about Jeff and Adam Talbot heading up from Connecticut to campaign for Edwards. The Talbots where incredible Lamont supporters back in 2006.
So, whomever you are supporting, get out and campaign. It is a blast, and this is a great opportunity to work for real change, whichever change agent you think is best. I'll be offline for the next several hours as I canvas, but I hope to get a chance to write more in the evening.
(Cross posted at DailyKos)
