Sometimes, the best thing you can do when blogging is to get out of the house and go somewhere peaceful to take in the sights and sounds. Thats exactly what I did Monday evening at the beach. Take 50 seconds out of your day, your evening, wherever you are, site back and enjoy this moment of tranquility.
Video taken with my Kodak Easyshare camera at Lakeview beach in Lorain County Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie.
Simonne from the Reader Appreciation Project has published an interesting post which questions whether or not, readers are going to kill off guest blogging. I’m not going to re post my comment but, if your blog is maintained by a single author, let’s face it.
Your feed subscribers along with your audience are there to read your content, not everyone else’s. Be sure to head on over to their blog and read the post in question. Chip in some feedback if you have time.
Tumblr, the service that makes publishing to your blog a breeze seems to be showing signs that the service is dead. Granted, there have been no official announcements and the following is only my opinion based on observations that anyone can make. Upon visiting the official blog for Tumblr, the last post to be published – Tumbling Towards 2.0 was back on April 27, 2007.
The post goes on to describe the development of Tumblr 2.0 and what to look forward to. Since today is August 28th, many Tumblr users are beginning to scratch their heads, wondering what is going on. Take a look at the comments on their last blog entry and you’ll see users are already starting to ask if Tumblr is dead.
No one seems to know where Tumblr is heading. Wouldn’t that be interesting if Tumblr, tumbled into it’s own demise? As I said, it’s not for certain if the service is dead or not but all of the signs I’ve seen point to that observation. What do you think? Am I just blowing smoke?
*UPDATE* It would appear as though I’m not the only one who has brought this subject up within the past few days. Amit published a post a few days ago where Marco, a Tumblr team member responded to his post with the following comment:
Tumblr and Davidville are both doing great and we’re hard at work on Tumblr’s next release. We’ll have something to say on the blog when it’s ready, I’m sure.
This is not the Tumblr forum – it’s my personal site. Official Tumblr news will never be posted here.
But your comment is duly noted. Thank you.
Revmarkmak has posted a YouTube video which contains instructions on how to make Netvibes your start page and then, use NetVibes from your desktop. I’m not sure if this will work on anything other than Windows, but the end result is awesome. If you don’t want to know how to make Netvibes your browsers default home page, skip to 5:45 in the video to check out how to put Netvibes onto the desktop.
I’m pretty sure that this is not restricted to Netvibes. You can probably do the same thing with IGoogle, Pageflakes or any other start page service. Think about it. You can free up hard drive space and make your browsing experience richer by using these start page services along with their associated modules. For instance, instead of using a stand alone Twitter client, add the Twitter module to your start page.
At this point, I’m still a virgin when it comes to start pages. I don’t use any of them because I use FeedDemon as my feed reader, and FireFox extensions which cover just about everything else. I may create one just for the sake of having a familiar environment when I can’t access my desktop PC or my Notebook. At any rate, thanks for the tips Revmarkmark.
PCWorld has put together a list of 25 websites worth watching. The list includes sites such as ClipMarks, Meebo, Spock, Pageflakes, Approver.com and others. Out of the sites PCWorld covers, the one that I am the most excited about is probably ClipMarks. ClipMarks is just an overall cool service that allows me to clip various portions of articles I discover across the web. It’s almost as if I’m creating my own search engine based on my ClipMarks which is then shareable to the public.
At any rate, give the list a read and when your finished, please leave a comment letting me know your thoughts.
I just wanted to take this oppurtunity to thank mGarret for linking up to this site. Michael Garret is a contributing editor for Profy.com, a web 2.0 focused blog that seems to be gaining in popularity everyday. Michael is also the Senior Guide for Mahalo, a human powered search engine. As you can already tell, this guy is in the heart of the 2.0 world so if you enjoy the content on my site, be sure to check out his own blog at http://mgarrett.xeroclix.com/
This is actually a few months old but it’s news to me. DezinerFolio has released 131 Web 2.0 based Photoshop Layer Styles. The layer styles give designers a head start when it comes time to create slick, new Web 2.0 based graphics. The layer styles were created using Adobe Photoshop CS2. I’m not sure if the layer style is backwards compatible or not. If you get the file to work with anything before CS2, be sure to let us know.
The following image is a preview of the various types of styles that are found in this style pack. Click on the image to visit the download area. Thanks to NavDeep for putting this together.
Frank Gruber from SomeWhatFrank has finally got his hands on his Moo sticker book. Moo is a UK based company that specializes in printing things based on user’s stuff. I’ve been meaning to check them out and create my own sticker book for my girlfriend, but I haven’t had time. Once I do and the sticker book arrives in the mail, I’ll be posting my review along with a slew of photos.
Here is an interesting site I came across the other day. It’s quickly being referred to as the internet suggestion box. SHOULDdoTHIS resembles Twitter with unique spin on the micro-blogging idea.
This is one of the few services I have come across that supports logging in by using my OpenID user account, which made creating a registered account a breeze. I wish more sites would include this type of login access. In my opinion, OpenID will play a big role in creating a unified login across multiple sites. So the more sites that support OpenID, the better.
While Twitter provides an avenue for you to tell the world ‘What Are You Doing?‘ SHOULDdoTHIS allows you to give your opinion as to what should be done, and who it should be done by. For example, in the ‘Someone Field‘ I typed in EA. In the ‘do something great field‘ I typed in ‘Should release one last major patch to Battlefield 2‘. Unlike the 140 character limit found on other micro-blogging services, there doesn’t appear to be any limit to the amount of text that can be placed within the ‘Do Something Great‘ field. After I clicked the submit button, my suggestion was published to my account where users can do a number of different things.
On the right hand side of the site, users can choose whether or not the suggestion is likely or unlikely to happen. Underneath of that, users can guesstimate when the suggestion will take place. Suggestions can be tagged but as I was browsing around, the tags feature didn’t appear to be used by quite a few people. Just like Twitter, each user has an RSS feed attached to their account. After adding a suggestion, there is a text area which appears at the bottom of the post which lets users give a detailed explanation as to their suggestion. I believe this is a nice touch as quite a few suggestions can not be explained in a short amount of detail.
Everyone has an opinion, and this service let’s you get your opinion out in the open. If Robotcoop releases a public API for SHOULDdoTHIS, I see no reason as to why sites and services, especially those with actual products wouldn’t use something like this as a suggestion box. SHOULDdoTHIS is not a Twitter clone as I feel the service has taken the micro-blogging idea and put a very nice twist to it. Considering there are sponsored ads that appear on user account pages, this site already has a monetization model, but if they charged a price to use their service for commercial use, I think they would do very well.
If you sign up and give the service a try, let me know what YOU think.
Typically, if you want information on a particular subject, you fire up your favorite browser and type in your search terms into Google. Depending upon your method of searching and the popularity of the specific topic you are searching for, Google may or may not provide you with the most helpful results. Cagora hopes to change this by creating a site where hundreds of communities and special interest groups will be able to provide you the information you need.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 