0xDECAFBAD - Tag: web20

Social Media Cyborg

2011-11-04T21:12:34+00:00

TL;DR: Since Google Reader lost it's sharing, I've decided to revisit my "social media strategy". I'm plugging lots of things into other things. I feel like maybe I should write about this stuff.

Started diagramming all my social media flows on LucidChart.

This is what I do for fun

Since I've mentioned in a few places that I'm a weirdo, I thought I might spend some time explaining exactly what I mean by that. You see, one of my hobbies is turning myself into a human content filter for friends on the web.

And, honestly, having my sharing habits shaken up by the Readerpocalypse makes it fun again.

The image over to the right is an attempt I made to diagram some of my social media flow. It's incomplete, though: I'm a cheapsake and ran out of free objects in my diagram. So, I had to leave out at least a half-dozen more services and a dozen additional connections. (LucidChart is very nice, by the way.)

In other words, ifttt.com is awesome

In particular, I've finally spent some time with ifttt.com. It's like Automator for the social web. It lets you define event triggers from one site that cause actions on another site.

So, I've gone crazy and created a bunch of tasks that make things like the following possible:

Pinboard bookmarks based on favorites from Twitter, identi.ca, YouTube, Last.fm, and my Kindle highlights. I'm turning my Pinboard account into both my personal social media archive and a Google Reader sharing replacement, and I don't even have to beg for new features at Pinboard.
Tumblr photo posts based on Reddit up-votes, Flickr favorites, and Pinboard bookmarks tagged "to:tumblr". Since creating it, I've left my Tumblr almost entirely neglected—but now with ifttt.com, I can route almost every nifty image I find over to that thing. It's the right side of my outboard brain to the Pinboard left.
Published items from from my private installation of Tiny Tiny RSS end up shared on Pinboard. This pretty much scratches my itch for feed reader sharing, since Google nixed those features from Reader.
Starred items from tt-rss get sent to Instapaper, so I can read them on my Kindle later. If email delivery of documents start working, then I'll have a personal long-attention span newspaper delivered regularly to that gadget.
Posts from Google+ get copied over to Facebook, because I don't want to pick sides.
In fact, almost everything I do everywhere eventually ends up posted to Facebook, because I almost never post anything in person over there. I do have friends and family over there and respond to comments, though.

What's the point?

The important principle here is that I'm lazy. If there's a single button to click somewhere that expresses my happiness about a thing, I'd like to click it and have that happiness shared and archived elsewhere without me doing much (or anything) more. The scheme I have now feels pretty good for that, and ifttt.com does a huge amount to help.

The other important thing is that I am at the center of these connections. I don't live entirely on any single service, and anything I care about is archived where I can easily grab it for backups or mashups. Should any particular service node in this web fail, I can probably do without, find an alternative, or build one myself.

My goal is to eventually replace as many of these nodes as possible with self-hosted or at least Open Source derived services. (Though, of course, I'm also lazy and my friends are where they are. So, that goal will take awhile.)

One more thing...

I've got an idea for my next book simmering. And, since I've so far managed to write books about the major things I've done for fun, I feel I'd be remiss if I skipped this stuff. I mean, I sort of covered the same ground all in my first and second books, but things have progressed since then.

What this means is that all the above feels like a warm up for the coding and prosing I'll need to do. I just need to get my shit together and carve out the time to make it happen.

Improving my Delicious command for Ubiquity

2008-09-07T05:20:20+00:00

After writing up my first stab at a Delicious command for Ubiquity, I planned to continue revising it based on feedback and to work on exploring more of what Ubiquity enables. I started looking into writing my own nouns for tag suggestions, as well as playing with page load and browser startup hooks. And, I also started poking at a little bit of deeper extension development, which took up most of my time today.

I've updated my UbiquityCommands page and checked in my latest revision of the Delicious command.

The main new feature is a status bar item reporting bookmarks for the current page:

As you can see above, the command now comes with a status bar panel powered by the Delicious URL info JSON feed, providing bookmarking info on every page visited. It shows a bookmark count, a tooltip with further information, and sends the user to the URL info page on Delicious when clicked. It mostly works, but it could use some looking at. This is my first time really cracking open the hood on Firefox and XUL, and so I'm feeling around in the dark.

Specifically, I'm using Ubiquity's page load hook—but I'm also trying to augment that by tracking tab selection events, in order to keep the status bar info updated for the active tab. But then, that leads me to trying to track new windows, to attach the tab selection event handler for every newly opened window. Or I could just be barking up the wrong tree entirely. At any rate, the code is probably brain-dead dumb, so I hope someone can clue me into a better way.

Archived Comments

Gen Kanai
2008-09-07T08:10:39

Les, you may want to let R/RW know about your new command.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_ultimate_list_of_custom_ubiquity_verbs.php
Abimanyu Raja
2008-09-07T08:55:52

I disagree... Your command doesn't fit on that list. It's way too good for that list. :)
Jeton
2008-09-07T21:56:43

Well, i was having problems understanding the "tagged" and "entitled". Didn't knew it was without brackets....

But i gotta say, it actually replaces the delicious firefox extension for its easy way of posting links on delicious.

Well done, and seeing that it's only the begining i don't doubt that it will improve much more!

Oh, and i had a WTF when i first saw that delicous icon on the status bar of Firefox. Didn't knew it was from your command ;)

Thanks for making this.
Jeton
2008-09-07T22:20:09

One question: Is there a chance to remove the quotation marks (i meant the same on the above comment as well, not brackets) when saving a note about a bookmark?

Everytime i bookmark a page via this command, it quotes the note.
l.m.orchard
2008-09-07T22:41:20
@Jeton: I guess the quoted thing is something I do by habit, to discriminate between what's my comment and what's summary straight from the page. One way you can force it unquoted is with the "noted" modifier. So, select some text on the page, and you can do something like:
```
sha noted this tagged foo bar baz
```
That should use the selected text without quotes. Also, you can just type arbitrary stuff:
```
sha noted These are notes entitled A title goes here tagged foo bar baz
```
l.m.orchard
2008-09-07T22:44:59

@Jeton: Actually, I just made a check-in that flips it around. There's now a "quoted" modifier to wrap the notes in quotes, leaving it unquoted otherwise. I might be the weirdo here in my quote usage :)
Jack Mottram
2008-09-09T10:04:12

I'm a weirdo too, and now I can't quite work out how to get quotes around stuff I'm quoting from a page. I assumed this would work:

sha this quoted

but it just adds the word 'quoted' to the end of the quoted text, without quotes.

Similarly:

sha quoted this tagged test

adds the words 'tagged' and 'test' to the end of the quoted text, though this time everything _is_ in quotes. (So it seems I can get quotes, but lose the ability to tag in the process.)

sha this quoted text

puts the word 'text' in quotes, but drops the selected text...

So, I give up - what's the secret to getting quotes around quoted text?!
Jack Mottram
2008-09-09T10:11:59

And of course I worked it out immediately after leaving that comment:

sha tagged test monkey whatever quoted this

works just fine (but feels the wrong way around to be tagging before quoting). And now I can't work out how to quote and note, so to speak. I tried adding

noted These are my comments on what I just quoted

but it doesn't work, it puts 'noted These are my &c.' inside the quotes...

(I should say, despite all this moaning, I really have been enjoying using the command - it's very slick compared to the official add-on.)
l.m.orchard
2008-09-09T14:30:06
Huh, weird - that's exactly how I use the command:
```
sha quoted this tagged foo bar baz
```
One major difference, though, is that I'm using a bleeding edge checkout of the Ubiquity extension. I wonder if there's a bug in the parser for the last release. :(

The definition of the modifiers is pretty simple, so there's not a whole lot of debugging I can do in the command itself. Ugh.

Oh, and also: RIght now it's either plain notes or quoted notes. Presence of the quoted modifier clobbers plain notes. But, how that I think about it I wonder if I should make those work together.
Frank
2008-09-09T17:40:39

Hello,

I was wondering if there was any chance you could put together a post annotating/explaining the changes/additions to your improved Delicious command. In particular, some explanations of the code dealing with the statusbar would be helpful for us beginners. Thanks.

Frank
Tony
2008-10-22T05:12:52

Not a big fan of things adding stuff my status bar. :/ Ubiquity commands should just focus on Ubiquity, not XUL changes in Firefox.
l.m.orchard
2008-10-29T16:04:28

@Tony: Actually, commands are just one of the goals of Ubiquity. Easier XUL hacking, ala Greasemonkey, is another goal, albeit under-explored so far.
http://dy-verse.blogspot.com/
2009-04-27T14:50:43

Here is a share-to-delicious ubiquity command that automatically generates tags using YAHOO pipes. It also uses the text selected on the page as notes and the page title as the title of the article.

http://gist.github.com/26425
l.m.orchard
2009-04-28T05:25:58

Auto-generating tags via Yahoo Pipes is a neat trick, but it's unfortunately very much frowned upon by delicious. Not that anything negative will happen to you, but it defeats the purpose of tagging altogether.

Try searching for "Lazy Sheep Bookmarklet" and possibly read:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ydn-delicious@yahoogroups.com/msg00853.html

In particular - "People add metadata so that 1) they can find things and 2) other people can find things. You are removing the step in which people add the tag metadata, thus making the system less valuable to themselves and others."

The key word repeated there is "people"

Outsourcing creativity via APIs

2007-11-01T18:17:21+00:00

Tim Faulkner at Valleywag: "I blame Twitter. It's not enough to be a website anymore. Oh no. You must be a platform. Have an API. Court developers. Build an "ecosystem." Whatever. You know what an application programming interface really is? An admission that you're too poor, cheap, or uncreative to build all the features your website needs."

Welcome to Web 2.0, Tim - we've been doing this thing for most of a decade or longer now. I know this is coming from Valleywag and fine-tuned as trollbait and all, but this just struck me as particularly dumb.

It's probably because most of my job right now is working on APIs and feeds for delicious, and I'm partial to the concept in general. Because, yeah, really: An API is an admission that you haven't the creativity or time to build everything your website needs. No one does. Anyone who doesn't make (or denies) that admission is either lying, clueless, or sadly mistaken. Anyone who starts with that admission and manages to open up to let users fill in their own gaps has a chance at hosting something really interesting.

And, yeah, thanks to the swooning hype over Facebook and others, it's a little over-exposed right now and tickling curmudgeonly snark-emitters. But, that doesn't mean the concept's a bad one or that it's going away.

Archived Comments

Aristotle Pagaltzis
2007-11-01T21:46:19

Obviously he is waxing nostalgic about the days when people screen scraped HTML rather than having a formal API. That, or he’s too naïve to realise that every web site is a service, by definition.

Twitter's Mojo Bubble

2007-10-18T02:36:55+00:00

Michael Gartenberg: "First, it's another queue to check. ... It looks like I could add Twitter into the flow of RSS feeds but do I really want to do that?"

No, you don't want to do that.

If you're "checking your Twitter queue" - you're doing it wrong. You should be using something like Twitteriffic or a good IM client that semi-unobtrusively surfaces recent Twitter activity in the periphery of your screen. Things either catch your eye occasionally, or the messages pass you by. It's okay to miss things. In fact, it's mandatory to miss lots of things at a fully attentive and conscious level.

And, if you think "I'm going to post to my Twitter Blog now" - you're doing it wrong in that way too. You should be absentmindedly emitting something barely edited and pondered from your stream of consciousness every now and then. Maybe drop something a little more well-considered every now and then. But, spend any more than 3 seconds or so at a time spewing something into the ether, and you've likely missed the Twitter magic.

This stance toward Twitter interaction is where I find the mojo. Outside of those fine lines, the Twitter soap bubble bursts and the magic smoke escapes.

Archived Comments

seth
2007-10-18T08:23:34

Be still my beating heart! Three posts in a single day to your classic blog. Go!
l.m.orchard
2007-10-18T14:34:42

Yeah, I know - like, I think I almost hurt myself. :)
brian cors
2007-10-18T15:48:04

I actually use Twitter more than I "normally" blog. But I do, in fact, have Tweets for each day archived on my WordPress blog, for archiving—in case a nuke-yuh-luhr bomb hits Twitter HQ, etc. All in all, it's working out quite well for me.
Edward Vielmetti
2007-10-22T11:25:17

Semi-conscious twitters are amusing,but remember that if you can't twitter something nice, don't twitter anything at all.

bookmarking outlier

2007-10-09T16:18:56+00:00

I've amassed 9681 bookmarks on del.icio.us as of right now. Quick napkin calculation: I post an average of 7 bookmarks a day, over my lifetime of 1353 days using the site. Within the next 45 days or so, I should reach 10000 bookmarks at this rate. I wonder if I should throw a party?

Invites to the delicious preview

2007-09-28T18:12:05+00:00

Update: Oh! And since even I missed this link in the original blog post, you can request to be invited. Not sure if that results in an email, either, though.

Update #2: Also, we're trying out Vanilla forums as an alternative to the delicious mailing list. If you're invited to the preview, your login should work there too. We might even launch public forums once del 2 is out.

In case anyone's forgotten: I work on delicious. Since I've had a steady stream of friends and acquaintances asking me about how they can get into the invite, I thought I'd mention this:

You may already have been invited! :)

Unlike most Web 2.0 sites that open up a preview or invite-only thing with a mysterious sign-up form, we can't fire off an email when we create an account for someone on our preview. It's thanks to our privacy policy - although we have the email addresses of most everyone we've been adding to the preview, we're not allowed to send anything other than password recovery emails. Weird, I know, but sometimes organizations try to follow things like that.

So, the problem is that we have many more people invited to the preview than have actually started using it. As briefly mentioned in the blog post announcing the preview, you need to check your "Links for You" to see if you've been sent a link to the preview.

But, if your invite has possibly been buried in other links from friends - you might just try signing into the preview with the username and password from your existing delicious account! It might just work.

Archived Comments

chryss
2007-09-28T19:58:43

Sniff. Cry. I'm not.
slackorama
2007-09-28T21:12:20

Wah. Nor am I. We are network buds and everything? What's up with that?
Kevin Severud
2007-09-28T22:27:55

So if I haven't gotten my invite yet and I log in trough the preview link (which I did) should my bookmarks still have been imported? Currently I have none of my bookmarks from the original site.
D. Archibald Smart
2008-03-05T03:56:24

if i promise to use the preview, can i get an invite, please?

optimized for thumbnailing

2006-08-17T01:41:24+00:00

Now that del.icio.us has made steps into the list of social bookmarking sites that render thumbnails of sites, it suddenly occurs to me: Will Web 3.0 sites be optimized for thumbnailing?

Archived Comments

George Hotelling
2006-08-17T15:11:19

I thought big fonts were the hallmark of 2.0 design. Web 3.0 will be optimized for vector graphics drawn with lasers. It is the future, after all.

FeedMagick gains an RSS-to-JSON filter

2005-12-19T03:01:51+00:00

So, I put some more infrastructure behind FeedMagick and lifted a RSS-to-JSON idea from John Resig to transform from MagpieRSS parsing to JSON output.

Here's a spiffy JSON-enriched demo. It was surprisingly easy, all told.

I'm not sure how much time I'll have to really put into this project, but this is the first decent effort I've put into a URL-line suite in a long time. I'm trying to throw in some bits to make it easy to build, document, and use these feed processing commands.

Working on a Tripkodoo business plan tonight

2005-10-28T14:32:29+00:00

Your company name:
Tripkodoo
Your company product:
opml-based collaborative document editing via microformats

Oh, hell. It looks like Web Two Point Oh! has nailed me on one of my stewing projects, Micronian. Sorta. Minus the OPML, really.

Though, hey, Tripkodoo sounds like a cool name...