Archive for February, 2007
The South African Braai
Friday, February 9th, 2007
Technorati watchlists need work
Friday, February 9th, 2007Watchlists are an important part of the future of RSS feeds. Unfortunately the Technorati implementation is quite poor though in fairness so are all the other watchlist systems I have used.
An example will illustrate this best. For ego and practical use I have a Technorati watchlist with the following query; “Paul Watson” -pirate -captain -whale
Looks odd but there is a good reason for it. My name is quite common and in particular there is an infamous Paul Watson who receives many blog and news entries per day. Without the -pirate -captain and -whale I’d get a lot of irrelevant results.
Recently though Japanese and French bloggers have started blogging about Captain Paul Watson and my watchlist is once again becoming useless.
Technorati either needs to let me specify “English only sources” or translate my query as best it can (unlikely). They already have the former functionality with their main search engine but I haven’t seen the option for watchlists.
There are other problems with Technorati watchlists. One clever blog spams by subtley updating it’s feeds so fooling Technorati into marking the RSS item as new or updated when to my eyes there is nothing new about it. It is very annoying and I eventually unsubscribed from that watchlist. You also cannot edit a watchlist once you have created it. You have to recreate it with your query change, unsubscribe from the old one and subscribe to the new one. There is no blacklist system to block out sources you are not interested in. Nor is there a whitelist system which would be useful too. Duplicates are a problem too. Please, anyone working with RSS needs to implement deduping, it is a basic and fundamental requirement in my opinion. Clustering would be useful too, such as TechMeme does.
Programmers out there will tell me I can do all of this by refiltering my watchlist output using some other system or a bit of unix piping or Yahoo! Pipes etc. etc. No thanks. Watchlists need to be fast and easy, they need to be flexible and usable.
So, I’d really love Technorati to get going on improving its watchlist system (maybe spare a developer from the WTF team? I don’t use WTF.)
Selling your personal recommendations
Friday, February 9th, 2007Up until 5 minutes ago the various online shop providers didn’t interest me. Why would I want to set up my own online shop and attempt to compete in a tight market?
Then I read Read/Write Web’s write-up of Zlio and it hit me; selling your personal recommendations.
There are people out there that you know-of and admire; friends, co-workers, family, friends of friends and even, god forbid, celebrities. Some are widely admired while others only you may admire. You think they have good fashion sense or they always seem to buy the right car or the right digital camera or read the right books and buy the right mobile phones. Call them influencer’s if you wish.
These are the people you want to ask for recommendations on products.
That is what I think Zlio and the others can capitalise on. By allowing anyone to setup an online shop they give power to the influencer’s. An influencer could setup a shop that only lists the products that they have bought and used, that they recommend. You, the admirer, can then go along to the shop and satisfy your desire to be like them or at least shop like them. What pen does Philip Roth use? What coffee maker does Jamie Oliver buy? What camera does Michael Reichmann shoot with?
I hesitate though and think this can get ugly quickly. It encourages facile celebrity worship and is easily gamed by celebrities bought out by companies pushing a product.
On the other hand though I think it can enable genuine people to. Think of someone you admire that is unlikely to be a sell out.
Really it is a recommendation system with a product supply chain and checkout functionality.
So Read/Write Web has setup a shop, the Ruby on Rails guys can do so too and you can too.
Your brain, your tastes and common sense, your sense of what works and what doesn’t, you can sell that with Zlio.
Getting GTalk working through Adium
Thursday, February 8th, 2007Sadly there is no GTalk client for Mac OS X. So when I swapped to OS X I switched to Adium which worked great with our internal IM (jabber based), with my old MSN Messenger buddies (you dinosaurs!) and supposedly my new GTalk contacts.
Except GTalk didn’t connect at work because of firewall restrictions. The MSN Messenger connection in Adium has a handy “Connect via HTTP” option which works fine. But the GTalk options don’t have that.
Instead I found this little gem which tells you how to use port 443 (HTTPS, normally open on firewalls) and voila! GTalk now works at work.
Ain’t computers grand?
eNom vs. RegisterFly
Thursday, February 8th, 2007Seems like I am unfortunately in the middle of a tug of war between eNom and RegisterFly.
For the past few years I have used RegisterFly and it was fine. Not great but then I didn’t have many domain demands and RegisterFly did the job.
It turns out though that RegisterFly didn’t actually do the registering. They passed it on to eNom. So if you do a whois on one of my domains it says that eNom is the registrar.
Who cares, right?
Well eNom are now severing their relationship with RegisterFly and so the domains I normally manage through RegisterFly won’t be available as they are actually registered by eNom.
RegisterFly sent me an email saying if I pay for the transfer from eNom to RegisterFly then I get $7.99 from them which I can use next year when domain renewals are up.
Frankly I don’t want to pay any money for my domains right now, they were renewed recently and I paid for them then. I am a bit angry RegisterFly took that money but actually were using eNom and so now I have to pay RegisterFly more money. I don’t care that they are giving me a free year (from next year only), that isn’t the point. RegisterFly should absorb the cost now and transfer my domain from eNom. Instead they are trying to get $5.99 out of me.
So I think I’ll just ditch RegisterFly and go with eNom who it turns out are the second biggest domain registrar around.
Getting Joosted
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007(Apparently we are allowed to blog about Joost, just no screenshots as of yet. If I got that wrong then tell me and I’ll yank this down.)
I got a beta invite to try Joost out today and was pretty stoked. Finaly, I’d get to see what the hype was about.
I downloaded the 9mb file to a Windows XP VM in Parallels on Mac OS X. The installation was pretty good, even doing a system requirements check which the VM passed. The app installed but when I tried to run it it said it could not access the 3D hardware. Fair enough, nothing can do that in Parallels yet.
So I booted into Windows Vista Ultimate, downloaded it again and installed it. Running it though gave me a nice big error message. Fair enough I guess, it does say Windows XP with SP2 only (though there are apparently ways of getting Joost to work on Vista. I am just not going to bollocks about with that.)
So I grabbed my girlfriend’s laptop which had Windows XP SP2, installed the app and… you guessed it, it didn’t work. No dedicated 3D hardware in her work laptop. OK.
So I grabbed her other laptop, an Acer with a 256mb 3D graphics card. It installed and to my delight it ran. The screen went dark and then the strange but oddly cool Joost crystals whirled about the screen. Pretty.
I like the interface, clean and simple though I do worry about the average computer user being able to figure it out. Some of the icons are not intuitive.
So, what about the video?
It didn’t work.
I could list the channels, view the item entries, see the thumbnails, do searches, install plugins, check out the chat forums and everything else, except watch video. Sometimes Joost would tell me it couldn’t load the video but most of the time the crystals just whirred and nothing played.
Is my home broadband not fast enough? Joost says it will average about 320mb per hour download and 120mb upload per hour. I’ve downloaded 1gig files in about 45minutes and uploaded a few hundred mb in an hour.
I suspect something is up with the bandwidth but I wish Joost was a bit more informative about what was happening.
I’ll find a Windows XP machine at work (which has mega-bandwidth) tomorrow and see if it works better.
100 Days of Earth Shots
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007I am really happy as Earth Shots has included one of my photos in their 100 Days of Earth Shots video slide-show.
To be honest my photo pales in comparison to many of the photos in the list. Here is mine:
Snap Preview redux
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
So it seems the whole Snap Preview outcry is having some effect. TechCrunch has modified how Snap Preview works on their site. Before, any external link would pop-up a little window previewing the site on hover. Now they have moved that feature by inserting an icon to the right of any external links and showing the pop-up on hover of that icon.
Is it an improvement? Yes. Is peace and tranquility restored to the interwebs? No. You can’t take a well intended but bad idea, shift it ten pixels to the right and declare the problem fixed. The idea was bad in the first place; admit it, kill the idea and move on. Now when I read paragraphs on TechCrunch the flow of words is broken. Typography is important. Readability is important. Preview links are not. The icon is meant to be subtle in contrast (it is off-white) but it still takes up 16 pixels of width which throws off gaps between words which is a big no-no in typography and readability.
Ah well. You can still disable the damned thing, until you clear your cookies and have to go disable it again.
