www.josschuurmans.com

Mobile Internet sucks (= conclusion of 3 wks without ADSL)

I've been without broadband Internet at home for about three weeks - I was "between providers", so to speak.

Must say that, while I was still able to consume some of my daily Internet fix - browsing RSS feeds on my mobile phone -, it was at the same time a sobering experience of how embarrassingly ill adapted the applications on my Nokia N95 are to mobile Web 2.0 participation.

I'll probably remember this period best as the time when Doc Searls went in and out of hospital and blogged  it all. Good health and happiness to you, Doc!

Data speed is not the bottle neck. It's the lack of mobile client-side participatory software.

With my Nseries device and 3G coverage I could browse and email, but that was about it. No tagging, no digging, no blogging with any level of convenience.

So what I ended up doing was to bookmark the URLs I would have liked to tag, digg or blog and thus collect them in my mobile phone's browser for future reference.

I hope to catch up blogging some of those bookmarks over the coming days.

'Channels' does not sufficiently describe the dynamics of distributed online conversations

Interesting conversation about "channels" developing here with Bill French.

Totallly agree that people create channels in efforts to create order from chaos. The way I used "channels" in my post on 'The End of Channels?' was with the traditional notion of, if you will, media titles, in mind: TV/radio channels or shows, zines, newspapers, websites, blogs, forums...

I suppose what they have in common is that they all have a name, an address, and usually a more or less defined scope. They are often furnished with editorial policies and they may be designed to further particular political or commercial interests. Also, most often they have a brand identity.

But if we look passed the keeper of the gate and over the garden wall, I am willing to accept that channels - as in "meta-handlers" - are not necessarily disappearing, but rather evolving into new forms, such as distributed conversations connected by tags.

The point I am trying to make is that old-style channels are designed to contain conversations within them. Sure, they are helpful as meta-handlers in creating order. And, agreed, the new meta-handlers are facilitated by social media, e.g. through tags. However, I hesitate to go as far as to call those tag-connected (micro-content contributions to) conversations, ehm, "channels".

In Dutch, we use the same word for channel and canal: "kanaal". So it won't surprise you that I quite strongly associate the word channel with a human-made, one-directional, controlled flow.

Bill writes:

"(...) People tend to prefer the benefits that channels provide - they create the notion of a "meta-handle" that makes it easier for them to understand, know about, and share. (...)"

Well, I won't deny that people find channels convenient. Still, to me, even "virtual channel" or "conversation channel" doesn't quite sufficiently express the dynamic nature of distributed online conversations. These conversations do not have ONE name, ONE address or even a defined scope.

Tags are useful in searching and navigating these conversations, - in particular because they add social filtering to the mix - and "tag cloud" is a metaphor that helps people venture into the Web 2.0 era.

And yet, even tag clouds cannot contain or accurately scope conversations. The Web, and in particular the social media web, makes our culture and economy more "probabilistic", as Chris Anderson puts it in The Long Tail.

So, why not liberate the conversations from their channels and simply call them "conversations"?

(See also: 'www.josschuurmans.com: 'The concept of "conversation" as in the Long Tail of Conversations')

Thank you, ADay1983!

Well thank you, ADay1983, for stumbling upon my blog! :-)

Inbound traffic increased dramatically over the past 24 hours.

Apparently, my personal top-7 music classics caught your attention.

direc.tor offers a richer UI for browsing del.icio.us

Johnvey Hwang's del.icio.us direc.tor is a client-side web service broker for del.icio.us.

As he puts it:

"(...) del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records. (...)"

After installing the del.icio.us direc.tor Javascript bookmarklet for Firefox or Internet Explorer, browse any page on del.icio.us, click the bookmarklet, and your browser will show the del.icio.us data in an entirely different user interface.

As it happens, the thingy is an AJAX application. Wikipedia says about AJAX:

"(...) Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to shift a great deal of interaction to the Web surfer's computer, exchanging data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. (...)"

Now, if I understand Johnvey's explanation, while a standard web service broker intermediates the traffic between the user and a service on the Internet, a client-side web service broker like del.icio.us direc.tor lives on the client browser, which cuts out the middle man and therefore saves a lot of data traffic going back and forth.

Be it as it may, the result is an entirely different experience at browsing del.icio.us. Through direc.tor, it's clearly easier to browse through larger sets of bookmarks, narrowing down searches tag by tag. Me like!

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• How does BlinkList compare to del.icio.us, really? (February 10, 2006)
• Observations about (social) bookmarking (February 9, 2006)
• Rashmi Shinha's cognitive analysis of tagging (November 28, 2005)

Technorati Tags: Johnvey Hwang, del.icio.us direc.tor, del.icio.us, AJAX, social bookmarking, client-side, web service broker, javascript, bookmarklet, UI, user interface

del.icio.us import (to BlinkList) successful

On one of my next attempts, importing my del.icio.us bookmarks to BlinkList worked. :-)

My BlinkList can now be found at http://www.blinklist.com/josschuurmans/.

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• "Fatal error" importing to BlinkList (February 17, 2006)
• How does BlinkList compare to del.icio.us, really? (February 10, 2006)
• Observations about (social) bookmarking (February 9, 2006)

Technorati Tags: BlinkList, del.icio.us, social bookmarking

"Fatal error" importing to BlinkList

So, now that I've discovered it, I'm trying to import my del.icio.us bookmarks into BlinkList. Not so nice:

[STARTS]
Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/blinklis/public_html/User/Import/importxml.php on line 58
[ENDS]

I managed to login to del.ico.us' API through BlinkList, and export my bookmarks, saving it as an .xml file on my hard disk. Importing it to BlinkList returns the error message above :-(

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• How does BlinkList compare to del.icio.us, really? (February 10, 2006)
• Observations about (social) bookmarking (February 9, 2006)
• del.icio.us' daily links suddenly work (January 3, 2006)

Technorati Tags: BlinkList, del.icio.us, social bookmarking

How does BlinkList compare to del.icio.us, really?

Ran into BlinkList, who call themselves "(...) the little guy, the scrappy startup trying to fight of the giant that is Yahoo! (which owns del.icio.us)"

BlinkList offers an entertaining comparison to del.icio.us. I gather that their main selling points are (1) a more pleasing graphical user interface and (2) a feature that lets people "star" links and tags, and subsequently rank them by popularity.

The question then is: in which areas does del.icio.us outperform BlinkList? User base / critical mass / network effect, perhaps? I'd love to hear some second opinions on the comparison.

Apparently it should only be a small hassle to import del.icio.us bookmark to the BlinkList system, so I decided to give it a shot. Not giving up on del.icio.us alltogether, I'll try and use both services alongside for a while.

Oh yeah, one thing that rocks and caught my eye is how the BlinkList bookmarklet for Firefox lets you select ("paint") a piece of text on a web page, which it then copies straight into the description field when you bookmark the URL. Very slick!

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Observations about (social) bookmarking (February 9, 2006)
• del.cio.us' daily links suddenly work (January 3, 2006)
• Rashmi Shinha's cognitive analysis of tagging (November 28, 2005)

Observations about (social) bookmarking

(1) Capturing ranks rather high among my ten most pressing reasons to blog. Especially with the daily links now working, social bookmarking is becoming something of a "blogging-light" to me. It's a very time-efficient way to capture sources, references, information that I've read or scanned. I interpret the notes field in the bookmark popup as a mini blog entry. The space is limited, you can't insert links or images, and the headline of the "daily links" post is meaningless, but nevertheless. It's an economical way to blog.

(2) I've wondered about standardization of tagging before. Wouldn't it be oh so Web 2.0 if search engines, social tagging sites and online blog tools standardized on exchanging tags in the background? At present I'm typing categories and keywords in TypePad, tags on del.icio.us, and then there is Technorati drawing its own conclusions. Slightly frustrating. (although I heard Burks Oakley mention a slick tool called the Magical Sheep Bookmarklet in his podcast on Technorati and the Blogosphere - I'll have to test that.)

(3) Maybe I'll post this one on the LazyWeb: I'd very much like a searchbox on my blog that lets me search not only the full content of my blog (like the Google and Technorati search boxes on the left), but which also indexes the contents of all the URLs that my blog links to. One vision of blogs is that, as they evolve, they will contain (links to) most of the information a blogger has come across and found relevant. It's that vision of a memory prosthesis. So, as a blogger, I want to be able to search that repository of my own collected knowledge.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking

Can I "claim" my del.icio.us page on Technorati?

Here's the Plan:

1. Post this entry on my blog.
2. Bookmark this blog entry on del.icio.us/josschuurmans.
3. Paste Technorati's blog claiming javascribble ino the del.icio.us bookmark's notes.
4. See if del.icio.us/josschuurmans appears on my Technorati profile.

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Technorati blog claim succeeded (finally!) (February 2, 2006)
• del.cio.us' daily links suddenly work (January 3, 2006)
• Blog dev stuff that needs doing (December 26, 2005)