Friendfeed and Social Objects May 28, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, internet, social objects, tools , 5commentsIn this second screencast video about Friendfeed, I talk about the way Friendfeed uses social object theory to add stickiness to imported feeds. There’s also a discussion of Friendfeed rooms, and a reply to Linda Hartley’s question about the first video in this series: Friendfeed for Microblogging.
Warning: This screencast is hosted on Google video Blip.TV because I overshot the length limit of ten minutes for youTube - oops.
Social Object theory or Object Centred Sociality has been explained by Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku.
If you are trying out Friendfeed yourself, you might subscribe to mine here: Andy Roberts Friendfeed
Blogrush phase 2 is active October 31, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, blogs and community, web2.0 , add a commentAfter testing my patience for a little too long, Blogrush phase 2 is now active. This means that the silly “under construction” notice has gone from the dashboard and been replaced by some nice graphs and stuff. To me, the statistical charts seem pretty self explanatory but blogrush members are urged to watch a rather long screencast video which explains it all, feature by feature, and promises some more future developments.
So rather than take the blogrush widget off from this blog, as I was getting close to doing this week, I decided to keep it for a further extended trial period, in fact I’m almost impressed with some of the extra thougt which has now gone into this service. If you have a blog which is focussed on a particular niche topic, then you may have some considerable success in attracting new readers through this widget, so if you haven’t already, you can sign up to blogrush here and become part of my extended referral network.
Backtracking: I first wrote about blogrush on September 16th in mybloglog romlet or blogrush and Linda also wrote blogrush or blogroll
Experimental Wordpress plugins deactivated September 23, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress , 1 comment so farI just deactivated two experimental WordPress plugins.
- Jiglu autotag widget
- Amazon Links Pro
A brave attempt to add “intelligent” tags based on some kind of text analysis of blog content.
The tags map made a change from the usual tag cloud, and the overlay display is manageable, but the results for ‘people’ and ‘dates’ were irrelevant and the same 5 posts kept popping up for nearly all tag searches in the overlay window. To be fair, Jiglu is a very new application and probably worth another chance when it’s more mature.
Less profligate than Jiglu, the Amazon links were hit and miss, based on people’s names and phrases. No sales, but the the plugin only works with amazon.com and not amazon.co.uk.
With both of these I soon felt uncomfortable with the idea of automating the insertion of hypertext links into an article, which is after all, a piece hand crafted author written text even if it’s only a blog post. I think it clashes with the perception of the author’s voice coming through the text when the deliberate insertion of a link can happen alongside some others which are machine generated and therefore differently motivated.
This means I also have to consider very carefully the use of SH-Autolink which is a simple time saving search and replace type of hyperlink generating plugin. For that one, I need to tweak the php code so that only the first instance is hyperlinked in each post containing that string. That will be better than having to avoid using my source phrase more than once, which kind of undermines the whole point of being able to just write and let something else take care of the commonly linked phrases.
I’m now going to try and avoid temptation to test any more experimental Wordpress plugins until at least after the upgrade to version 2.3 has settled down, with all the backward compatibility problems threatened by that procedure.
MyBloglog, Romlet or BlogRush? September 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress, blogs and community, web2.0 , 6comments
In this post I am going to review three similar on-blog widgetised linking services. All three are currently in my sidebar here, displaying links of one sort or another and tracking visits. I also use the excellent Facebook application “Blog Friends” but that works a bit differently, and was covered earlier.
Blogrush is the newest, being released only yesterday, and at the time of writing it’s temporarily broken.
I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is the oldest and best established. I like it for the simple idea of displaying visitors faces, which can creep up as a loose sense of community eventually, and also for the three column layout of the stats page. It flows naturally from left to right, showing where visitors came from, what they viewed, and where they left for.
For a quick glance analysis, this is so much more intuitive than for example Google Analytics. Disadvantages are that it can often take three clicks to make a reciprocal visit, navigating the pages at MyBlogLog itself. With practice you can get this down to two clicks, by paying careful attention to the links as illustrated below:
ROMlet
I was invited to Romlet beta via MyBlogLog with whom they are really a direct competitor.
ROMlet is a brand new blog widget that incorporates the best aspects of a brag badge, stats counter, bookmarking tool and popularity booster. JOIN THE COMMUNITY now and then sign up take part in the beta release!
As a beta product, it’s not at all clear where ROMlet is headed for now. The service is so simple that it hardly seems to do anything. The so-called “brag badge” is a collection of icons which give out a certain amount of referral stats data, which is not really something that I consider adds value for my visitors, nor particularly for myself. I did have a little trickle of traffic when one of my articles was popular enough to appear on their front page for a while, but if the service becomes at all well used then I would expect this to be an increasingly rare occurrance, thus undermining its own success. So all a bit baffling really, and I’ll probably take it off in due curse.
BlogRush
Blogrush is the newest, currently getting a lot of attention from marketing bloggers, which betrays the origin of the service. There’s a multi-level referral scheme which is supposed to favour early adopters so if you are interested in these type of things then it’s best to get set up with BlogRush sooner rather than later. The only danger I perceive is that with all the multi level marketers jumping on board from the off, the service could well prove Hugh’s Law to be correct right from the start.
Conclusion
Hmm, do I need to write a conclusion? It’s fairly clear that MyBlogLog is providing a lasting service which slowly helps to build some level of blogging community and relationships, as well as the handy stats. Linda pointed out that in some ways it’s a shame that these automated and uncontrolled systems have taken over from the manual blogroll to some extent, and I can see that personal choice may be diminished. With Blog Friends, you can choose to filter your reading of friends of friends blogs ( I’d rather read my friends‘ blogs unfiltered ) and with BlogRush you can choose which category to associate with, and you can also choose to take it off altogether - something which is very easy and non-destructive with widgets for Wordpress 2.2
At last google reader has a search box September 6, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, web2.0, tools , add a commentPossibly the most annoying inadequacy of Google’s news feed reader has at last been remedied. Hoo ray. It was alway confounding that the company which made a name for itself out of search couldn’t find a way to provide search on their own idiosynchratic implemention of a newsreader. I also wondered frequently why I stick with it instead of reverting to bloglines or the freestanding NetNewsWire. But I do, and it has a search box now, so there are only a few more annoying inadequacies left.
Apparently we have to thank Ben Chris and Jemma for finding the search box.
Couscous Recipe August 24, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : couscous recipe, internet, Long Tail , 3comments
During the month of August I’ve been undertaking an intensive online course about the commercial internet and web 2.0. This course is called the Thirty Day Challenge and it has covered aspects including the crucial importance of market research, methods for measuring potential traffic, immersive learning, ethical writing, targeted posting, and authentic voice authorship. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster with unexpected community side effects and suchlike but the learning opportunites have been enormous and the potential application in a wider context cannot be overlooked.
One of the exercises for example has been to write three articles every day about a chosen topic, with the topic having been chosen not because of any familiarity with the subject matter, but from a purely quantitative set of metrics. Many have found that extremely difficult or given up.
On day twenty three of the challenge it was suggested that rather than write to a preconceived formula it would be better simply to tell an authentic story. This is how the best copywriting is achieved apparently.
Anyway, I decided after a while that rather than use a pseudonym or pen name, I would continue to publish all of my own writing under my own real name.
So here, as per the topic title of this post, is a piece of gonzo journalist cookery writing, which I produced yesterday afternoon as a response to lesson 22. I’ve no idea whether it fulfils certain criteria or not, but I enjoyed writing it a lot more than some other stuff, and that’s probably a good sign.
Here’s the article: Couscous Recipe
If you enjoyed that you might like to add it to one of the social bookmarking sites liested below under “share this”. Whichever you normally use or comes naturally.
Oh yes, if you are actually looking for a practical couscous recipe then you might be better off going straight to couscous recipe page or else visit the couscous recipe bookshop at amazon UK.
**update**
There’s now an illustrated Rabbit in Mustard with couscous and Quinoa recipe page up on the couscous recipes blog as well.
Amazon UK couscous recipe bookshop
Working around the limits of geolocation August 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, Pajamanation , 1 comment so farI had some queries over the reliance on Geolocation for managing the local aspect of ‘glocal’ in pajamanation. The logistical problems are well expressed in mediajunk:
When Geolocation Gets Too Clever - mediajunk
Geolocation works in two steps:
1. A script detects the user’s IP address.
2. The script looks up a database of IP addresses and their associated countries to tell where the user is located.There are potential problems with both steps:
1. Many users go through proxy servers, so the IP address that appears to be associated with their computer is, in fact, the server’s IP address, which may be in a different location.2. There are many databases of IP addresses and their associated regions (some free, some commercial) but none is even 90% accurate. For example, look at this table of accuracy for city geolocation, from one of the leading providers of such databases, Maxmind.
The solution that we will be able to implement is one based on giving priority to user choice, which is always a good thing in my book. So there will be two ways to determine location :
- registered users - they choose where they are .
- visitors - GeoLocation is the only way to know where they are coming from
Tim B-L says “This is serious” June 22, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social media, internet, theory, web2.0 , add a commentI tend to have a kind of “faith” that once the technology has been invented, then it generates a momentum of its own which will obey certain natural laws regardless of individual human motives. So once the internet existed, it was pretty much inevitable that people were going to communicate and collaborate across international and corporate boundaries, and that any attempts to stifle or steal ownership of this could always be circumvented, sidestepped or innovated around. If somebody did manage to completely clamp down on the present internet then we’d just set up another one wouldn’t we? Well maybe I’m being over optimistic. Tim Berners Lee says it’s serious:
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.
Net Neutrality: This is serious | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs
Frankie Roberto - Citizen journalist January 22, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers, social media, wildlife, internet, Flickr, London , comments closed“All in all, a good few days for citizen journalism, if not so great for the whale.”
So concludes a lengthy blog from Frankie Roberto who has taken a big interest in citizen journalism and wikinews recently. No doubt he has his reasons for doing so.
frankie roberto blog - Citizen journalists report on the London whale
photo by Mr Jaded
Tags: London, blogging, citizen, journalism, media, news, websites, whale
Blummy October 30, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet , add a commentblummy - The bookmarklet management bookmarklet
blummy is a tool for quick access to your favorite web services via your bookmark toolbar.
It consists of small widgets, called blummlets, which make use of Javascript to provide
rich functionality (such as bookmarklets).
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
