bitdepth

Wordle and del.icio.us

Thanks to Carolyn for pointing out the very lovely visualization tool Wordle from Jonathan Feinberg. It allows you to either paste words or use a del.icio.us username to generate a rather beautiful visualization of the words and their frequency. The image with this post is the collection of my del.icio.us tags, so you can see what I bookmark most frequently. I love being able to see things in different ways like this.

June 29, 2008 del.icio.us, visualization, web, wordle

It’s the Little Things That Count

Now that I’m safely back on my MacBook Pro with just about everything set up, I have to say that it made me again realize how much of a creature of habit I am and how small changes can make a big difference. Sometimes we come to rely upon something so much that it starts to fade into the background and we don’t realize what we’re missing until it isn’t there anymore.
While the applications that I missed the most came to mind right away, there were some things that jumped out in unexpected ways. I found myself constantly using the keyboard shortcut for the fantastic Mac utility called Quicksilver, which is an application launcher that has dramatically increased my productivity. At a basic level Quicksilver lets you use a keyboard shortcut and launch an application by starting to type the name of the application. The power of Quicksilver is that it creates a catalog of just about everything on your hard drive and you can then combine things together. You can select a file and then move it somewhere else while never touching the mouse.
Things become even more interesting when you do things like add the Social Bookmarks plugin which gives me access to all of my del.icio.us bookmarks. So I just need to start typing and Quicksilver searches through the bookmarks and then I just hit return and go to the web site. All of the files on my hard drive can be included in the index as well, so I can find a file I need and open it up (or copy it or open it with a different application). Even fancier things are possible such as starting and stopping iTunes while it’s playing or playing a specific track. I can even adjust the volume on my MacBook Pro or do things like restart the computer or look a list of recent documents that I had open in Pages, for instance.
I first found out about Quicksilver thanks to Merlin Mann and his 43 Folders site. It was a bit confusing for me at first, but the more I used it, the more I came to depend on it. Quicksilver also keeps track of what you’re doing, so it knows that when I start to type something and then choose what comes up that it’s more likely that I’ll choose that same thing again when I type the same letters. So I only have to type “f” to have Firefox come up, but “fl” will let me launch my web browser and go to Flickr. Quicksilver is incredibly configurable and simple, so you can make it look different and make it do just about anything you want in any way you want. It’s been in beta for a few years and now it’s probably the thing I use the most that I never think about.

May 21, 2008 43folders, del.icio.us, merlinmann, quicksilver, software

Favourite Software of 2007

I’m not a fan of big expensive applications (with the notable exception of Final Cut Pro), but I love open source and shareware that is the product of small companies or individuals. There is something satisfying about sending money to someone who crafts something useful and affordable. Over the past few years I’ve come to rely upon a small collection of applications to read, write and create things for the web. With many of them I didn’t realize how much they have become part of what I do until I switched to my newer MacBook Pro and there were a lot of things missing.
Essential software for me would be NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Pukka, Twitterific, Flickr Export, Graphic Converter, and Transmit.
Continue…

December 23, 2007 del.icio.us, flickrexport, graphicconverter, lists, marsedit, netnewswire, pukka, shareware, software, transmit, twitterific

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

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.