Category: Tools

Sign me up! I’ve been looking for something just like this to get more leverage out of the material I find coming into my aggregator. Roland, put me on the list for this.

Roland Tanglao and I and a couple of colleagues are working on a new blogging, content-publishing tool that we’re calling LinkFest for now.

LinkFest is – for now – a client application that works in conjunction with a Browser. It functions as an interactive visual and textual workspace that allows for:

• the rapid assembly of links, files, data, images and other relevant items of interest,
• subsequent easy manipulation of the collected data and text,
• simple addition of annotations and commentary, and finally
• quick one-click publishing.

The main elements of LinkFest s functionality (drag-and-drop content that automatically creates linked clusters of related, annotatable material that is saveable, sendable, re-usable, formattable) allows end-users to use RSS feeds better, to connect and combine them (along with other content) any way they want to or need to, to build a story, themes, briefings, and so on. They can build and publish their knowledge, their content, and their services their own way. [wirearchy News]

Blogging About Blogging LXX. Blogmapper takes us one step closer to true mapblogging. By associating blog posts with points on an online map, you can create a physical visualization of your movement and location online — and offline. The process involves embedding GPS data as hidden [Heath Row’s Media Diet]

Another take on the intersection between blogs and maps.

World-Island as a Blog. Oh cartographic bliss! Mikel Maron has added an alternate world-view to his suite of blog-mapping visualizations with the World as a Blog – dymaxion edition to show the latest pings across our… [TeledyN]

IIRC, I signed up for Mikel’s original blogmapping exercise. I like the notion that he’s now mapping posts onto a dymaxion format map. Seems appropriate somehow.

Skype: joined the club.

Just to let you know – I installed Skype. Talked to Dina, Phil and Ton. Loved it.

I have no idea how to write CALL tag properly, so you have to look for me under mathemagenic.

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Thanks to Dina, I know it now – <A href=”callto://mathemagenic/”>Call me on Skype (please, make sure that I recognise your name or you have a nice autorisation message – I tend to decline calls from people I don’t know 🙂

[Mathemagenic]

I want to join the club but our corporate firewall appears to be too locked down. Skype locks up on me when I launch it at work. Not sure that being able to use it from home or the road will be enough to justify it. Time to go chat with the folks in IT again.

Kimbro’s science experiment.

Kimbro Staken’s new science experiment, Syncato, is bubbling right along. I just used the new comments feature to post a comment to an item. In the comment, which is well-formed, I “transcluded” the result of an XPath query of Syncato’s XML database. I also quoted Kimbro in the comment, and used my own blog’s convention — <blockquote cite="..."> — to do so. Now watch:

Comments I’ve posted.

All blockquote elements.

All quotations of Kimbro.

Comments, written by me, that quote Kimbro.

XPath code fragments contained within comments where I quote Kimbro.

Awesomely cool. Kimbro writes:

In reality Syncato is much more then just a weblog system, it’s an XML fragment management system. [Syncato]

Great description. And what a powerful concept!

[Jon’s Radio]

Of course, knowing how and when to turn from learning to action is no easy task when these sorts of goodies keep flowing into your field of vision.

duplicate pings from radio weblogs. Apparently Radio is now offering trackback tools for its weblogs. I know this because I ve gotten pinged by several of them today. This would be a Good Thing, but for one problem most of them have been duplicate pings. Some pinged me twice, some pinged me as many as four times. Ick. I ve manually deleted a bunch of the extra pings from the entries, so that they don t clutter up my pages. But if anyone from Radio is reading this (like Jake Savin, maybe), I d be grateful if they d look into what it is about either the infrastructure or the interface… [mamamusings]

While Trackback is now available it would seem that all the bugs aren’t quite worked out yet. I’ve passed this report on to the Jake at Userland.

Review of WiFi Finder. Bob Rudis reviews Kensington's WiFi Finder and finds it wanting: Bob wrote in with some information about his earlier experience with the credit card sized device from Kensington that reports with one, two, or three green LEDs the signal strength of nearby 802.11b or g networks. I asked him if I could share his thoughts, and he agreed. Bob wrote: Just received a Kensington WiFi “Finder” in the post today. I usually am not too disappointed being an “early adopter,” but in the case of this product, I wish I had put the money in the iPod piggy bank instead. … [Wi-Fi Networking News]

I have to agree with this review based on my few hours of experience with this toy. Good idea, abysmal execution. Sometimes being an early adopter doesn't payoff. Put your money elsewhere for now.

quickSub: making feed subscribing easier. “Jason Brome's RSS feed feed button on your web page. Just roll your mouse over the example above, and you'll be instantly greeted by one-click subscription links to the most popular aggregators.” Think I'll have a go with this tomorrow, looks neat. I'm surprised by the large number of RSS readers. [Steve Hooker: cyberSaps business]

Here's a clever addition to your weblog to make it easier for visitors to subscribe using a variety of RSS aggregators. I expect I'll be adding it later in the week when I'm back from a few days R&R.

Here is a link to the test trackback post at backend.userland