bitdepth

Bitdepth Year 6

Six years ago I started this blog and it’s been my online home for that time as everything changed around it. Now everything is spread out much more and overall it’s a lot easier to do this stuff and you don’t need to get your hands very dirty with HTML and SQL and CSS to have a blog. As I write this, I’m not even using my own laptop and not having my laptop with all of the files also gives me the opportunity to reflect on how things have changed over the past few years with the technology that I use to communicate with you and how everything ties together.

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May 19, 2008 43things, bitdepth, blog, blosxom, flickr, history, marsedit, twitter, wordpress

Home is Where Your Friends Are

Sometimes I feel that I’m spread a bit too thin online, but I can’t seem to stop myself for signing up to new things because it’s just so much fun. So in an attempt to widen the web and to break out of the patterns that I’ve been in with lots of newer tools, sites and communities, it’s time to step back, get a bit of perspective and write on the site which really should be my home base.
Over the past few years my posting and surfing habits have changed a bit, but there are two communities that hold on to me after joining and participating continuously over several years. The oldest is Flickr, where I first joined and posted my first photo on August 26, 2004. Now I have 6,333 photos uploaded with 112,536 views of my photostream. On 43 Things I made my first entry on December 31, 2004 and since then I’ve written 317 more. On both sites I love sharing photos and goals, but the critical reason for sticking around so long are the comments. It’s the sign of a community that the connections you make with people are the glue that keep you coming back. When you start getting comments on many of the things that you share, it keeps you coming back because you know that someone is there and you start looking for and commenting on things that other people share.
At first with both 43 Things and Flickr I didn’t really know that many people, but it grew. The first people that I became friends with are people who I may never meet as they are in faraway places and I only knew about parts of their life. It wasn’t until the last year or two that some of my real world and Flickr friends started to overlap. So now I’m able to keep in touch with friends and family through photos and comments. Now I share at least one photo every day, since it’s habit and I also know that people are watching. It’s not about the numbers, but that there are real people who I care about who are watching.
With 43 Things the collection of friends has shifted and grown over the past few years, but the most significant shift happened last October when I adopted the goal of Daily: Reflect on 5 things for which I’m grateful and now it’s accounted for about half (and probably more soon) of the entries that I’ve made on the 43T site. I came to that goal via the Data Janitors group (which I’ve not been that active on) on 43 Places and primarily thanks to my online pal David, who is known as NYCinephile.
While much of my online activity now revolves around the 43 Things cluster of sites from the Robot Coop (43 Places, 43 People, All Consuming, Lists of Bests, and the Morale-O-Meter), the newest blogging that I’m doing is with newer tools such as Vox which is easy to use and has a great community that is supportive and fun. My other fun blogging is happening in my tumblelog thanks to the fine folks from Tumblr. In thinking about the 43 Things and Vox and Tumblr sites, the very significant link between them is how they allow me to combine my presence together through the way that I can cross-post or import from one to the other. So I post Flickr photos and I can use them on the other sites very easily. I’m also now starting to have friends that overlap with 43 Things, Flickr, and Vox, which hasn’t really happened before.
But the latest thing are the social networking sites and (should I even say this?) Facebook and Twitter (but I started using it when it was still Twittr). With Facebook I find my usual online world inverted where I only have friends who I know in the real world and it’s a way to stay in touch with what they’re up to. I still find Facebook strangely intimate in that I know all of my friends, so in an odd way I seem to share a bit less there than I do publicly, since the people there already know more about me from me than from what I’ve shared online.
So now we’re at the level of microblogging with Twitter and status messages in Gmail. The sign that the whole microblogging thing would stick came to me when I realized that my Mom and Dad were able to keep track of what was happening around me with the status messages in Gmail. So now I’m writing against the current with a longer post and I have to say that while I like microblogging, I hope that it doesn’t take me away from longer things like this. But the best part of all of this is that while everything has become easier, the simple core of everything is connecting to people that I care about whether they are next to me in the same room or are around the world. That’s reassuring and it’s why I’m still here.
tags: community, blogging, 43things, flickr, tumblr, vox, facebook, twitter

March 25, 2007 43things, blogging, community, facebook, flickr, tumblr, twitter, vox

Bitdepth is Four

bitdepth is four Looking at the date I realize that I’ve had this blog up and running for four years now. It’s the beginning of year five and I looked back over some of what I had written. I tended to ramble more in the past, but the focus more recently on this site has been on films. My posting times tend to be variable, but I’m still using the same tools. The site is served up with the same Blosxom script by Rael Dornfest that I’ve been running for a few years and I still write the posts in BBEdit. I am planning to move over to Typo, which I like very much, but I have to import all of the entries first, so I’m waiting until I have time to do that.
What has changed is that I’m posting more online in other places. Flickr has added a whole visual dimension to what I do online and the Blogger-hosted Bitdepth Digest is a place to post shorter things. A more frequent presence is also maintained through 43 Things, and then 43 Places, and 43 People and especially All Consuming, where I now keep track of (mainly) the films that I consume. The other big change is the podcast that my son John and I do at Bad Metaphor. Podcasting didn’t exist when I started this, but it’s definitely around now.
Thanks for reading, stay in touch, and I’ll write more soon.

May 10, 2006 43things, allconsuming, badmetaphor, bitdepth, blogger, blogging, blosxom, flickr, writing

Technorati Tags

One of the signs that things are maturing with information on the Web is that things are becoming much more closely linked together. A few days ago I was thinking that Technorati‘s watchlists were cool and today they unleashed their tags. I’m very impressed. One of the things that I’ve been wanting for a little while is a way to tag blog entries. Categories are good, but after using del.icio.us and Flickr I’ve started to realize that having more than one way to classify is a good thing. But having multiple tags doesn’t really do a lot for you unless you can do something with it and now you can. I’m sure that blogging systems will quickly evolve and you’ll choose tags and categories (there are already plugins), but it’s fascinating to watch the development of folksonomy happen so rapidly. It was neat when I was able to see my Flickr photos show up beside my things on 43 things. But that’s nothing compared to looking at Flickr photos, blog entries and del.icio.us links all together on the same page. I really fell in love with tags when I looked at the view of tags on Flickr where the font size of the tags reflect their popularity. Technorati has the same thing and as more people tag stuff it will be a great way to visualize what people are talking about. It’s developing so rapidly that Technorati Tags have rolled out before it was completely done, so there aren’t RSS feeds yet.
Another example of how fast things happen now: from the time the first notice I saw in my feeds (on Joho) to the afternoon, Matt from Oddiophile whipped up a bookmarklet to create tags (and I have to change my stylesheet to incorporate this new class). I used it for my first tagged post over at bitdepth digest and I’ll use it to paste the code in this entry as well (which I’m writing in BBEdit). Tags and Technorati – this rocks so hard.
technorati: tags, folksonomy, web, blog, technorati

January 14, 2005 43things, blog, del.icio.us, flickr, folksonomy, tags, technorati, web

Weaving a Web

One thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m increasing my presence online. I don’t know if the quality is increasing or if it is just more stuff, but I think that one of the reasons that I’m more prolific now is that is easier. I love using Blosxom to blog because I can create the entries with any text editor, but I always use BBEdit to write for bitdepth. But the bitdepth entries aren’t as frequent as I wanted them to be, but now with my increased use of Blogger for Screen Arts and now bitdepth digest, I blog more often using Blogger. The other things that I use often are Flickr and, increasingly, 43 Things. One thing that all these sites have in common are their fairly flexible and open APIs, which allows the information and the sites to interact with other applications and sites. What it means practically is that I now am able to blog using Flickr and 43 Things and to have Flickr images automatically show up on my 43things page as well as here on bitdepth.
Very exciting things are also happening with Technorati adding watchlists where you can follow discussions in the blogosphere based on keywords. I keep track of just about all of this stuff using NetNewsWire as if there isn’t an RSS feed, I’m not as interested in it as I don’t want to spend the time looking around to see if anything has changed. While Flickr and 43things are very fun and aren’t technically oriented, Technorati is a geeky data-rich backend that is starting to have some very cool applications built on their API.
So the exciting thing now is that we’re moving away from needing to use one application to view and share and just find and create and share. It’s exciting when you don’t have to code or understand how to code to use things (but if you can, it’s even more exciting now as you have a lot more to play with).

January 8, 2005 43things, bbedit, bitdepth, blogger, blosxom, flickr, netnewswire, screenarts, technorati

What Happened and What’s Next

The online world was very exciting for me in 2004. Blogging kept plugging away and I rediscovered Blogger which Google purchased. The great thing with the evolution of the Web is that finally CSS started to be embraced. With Blogger there was some great Javascript that made blogging even easier and faster. They also removed the ads on the Blogspot hosting, but opened the possibility of revenue from Google ads if you want.
The other cool Google-related discovery for me was Gmail, which has changed the way that I look at email. I try to keep everything organized and I’ve been using email for a long time and I don’t easily switch email programs. While I use Apple’s Mail a lot, I find that I’m using and loving Gmail a lot now and I think that I’m starting to use Gmail more than Apple’s Mail program. The Gmail beta is fascinating as it is viral. You can’t really sign up, you have to be invited by someone who has it. It’s an interesting way to beta test something like a mail service as you want to have people who use it and the alpha geeks who are testing it will tell other alpha geeks about how cool it is.
The biggest chunk of my time online recently has been spent in the completely addictive Flickr. When I started it was just to share a few pictures with family and friends, but when some of the public photos that I posted received comments I started to get more of a sense of the community that was there. I didn’t think that I would like the social component of it, but I started to realize that I shared a lot in common with the people who were looking at my photos. It’s a great way to communicate visually and I notice that the community is more international than many communities that depend on language as the primary means of communication. The response to the photos that I post shape what I now choose as a subject. While I only joined Flickr in August, I posted 1424 pictures last year. My posting (and photography) increased dramatically as the year went on to the point where I posted 700 photos in December. I don’t think that I’ll continue at that rate, but I will probably post over 2000 images in 2005 I gladly paid for a Pro account which gives me a gigabyte of uploads every month (and my 700 photos last month got close to 50% of the capacity). I just realized some of how Flickr works thanks to the antenna blog which points out the Flickr is based on online gaming code. It’s like a game where the object is the share your photos. You have quests with fellow group members and share your triumphs. It’s great to be part of the community.
The tags on Flickr enable lots of connections between the images that you have uploaded and the images that others have classified in the same way. The tagging on Flickr is based on the tagging that takes place on del.icio.us where you create your own tags to classify links. It’s been called a folksonomy and now I store a lot of my bookmarks in my del.icio.us space to keep track of things. The next step for me is to use my del.icio.us bookmarks with some of the other stuff I’m doing on my blog.
Viewing the web and keeping track of what’s happening on sites and especially blogs has been made much easier with NetNewsWire, which continues to evolve and is the other program other than Mail that I constantly run. Now if I site doesn’t have an RSS feed, it isn’t as interesting to me. While there are many options for RSS readers, I love how NetNewsWire works and as MarsEdit (a weblog editor) evolves I think that I’ll use it more and more as well.
The combination of RSS with audio enclosures caused podcasting to burst out onto the world. It’s an exciting development that is really only months old, but is evolving incredibly rapidly with Adam Curry at the forefront with his Daily Source Code podcast setting the pace for what a podcast is, as well as highlighting what is happening in the podcasting world which is a close cousin to the blogging world. It’s changed things so fast that the latest beta of NetNewsWire supports podcasting and now I’m using it to download podcasts. Podcasting will be very big in 2005.
Yesterday I began to explore 43things, which I looked at before, but now it really clicked as I became a member. 43things is like Flickr for to-do lists. You share your list of things to-do and things you have done as well as leave messages and comments about what you want to do and what others have done. With gentle prompting and an understated interface, I realized right away that I’d be spending a lot of time there. It connects you with people through tasks and tags and collaboration seems to be built into the DNA of the site. While I just started yesterday, I’ve already connected with strangers and realized that the whole thing is a way that people who may not blog or want to blog will be blogging without knowing it. I’ll write more about 43things later, but I think it will be another big thing in 2005. Exciting times ahead online as we focus less on the technology and more on the people and community.

January 1, 2005 43things, adamcurry, blogger, del.icio.us, flickr, folksonomy, gmail, google, mail, marsedit, netnewswire, podcasting, tags