I’d like to extend congratulations out to all my friends over on the Google chat team. They just announced a set of improvements to the web based chat clients in both iGoogle and Orkut. If you haven’t been there in a while, Orkut is Google’s original social networking site that was born around the time [...]
...full articleAn example of the trend towards information democracy is the democratization of culture. “Participatory Culture” is the modern trend of many individuals contributing to the mass of popular culture rather than culture being broadcast from a small elite of performers. By analogy, Hollywood’s hegemony over movies and television represented a communist politburo where a small group had the power and responsibility to control the cultural experiences of the masses. Today’s information technology is tearing down this monopoly that broadcasters held, and thus democratizing culture through three mechanisms: easier content creation, distribution, and a better editorial process. We’ll look at each…
...full articleExcuse my newbie exuberance, but OMG Rhapsody.com finally launched profile pages!!! They’ve been up for a while now, which makes me think they’re for real this time. A couple of you might remember that this feature was live for something like a week in early 2007. But it was very slow and didn’t live long. Sniff. I worked hard to make this feature possible when I was working at Real. The fact that I couldn’t get it re-launched was a big motivator for me to move on to greener pastures. I saw making Rhapsody social as an important evolution of…
...full articleMy girlfriend has a kindle that she very much enjoys. One of the biggest benefits from it she gets is having a large amount of content in a very small device. She is a scientist who is very much an information worker. Having access to a great many research papers in searchable form is very useful for her. (If only the PDF import worked on multi-column papers!) She also tends to live out of a backpack, so being able to have several interesting things to read at any give time is very appealing. So she’s often reading her kindle on…
...full articleI spent the day yesterday at XMPP Summit #5 alongside OSCON in Portland. It was a great chance to catch up with old friends and meet a few new ones. But my favorite part was the break-out discussion of XMPP PubSub as it relates to micro-blogging. We discussed what hopefully will emerge as a standard way to associate an existing Atom/RSS feed with an XMPP PubSub Node. First some background on the relevant technologies. Feel free to skip ahead if you understand this stuff. PubSub 101: Push vs Pull PubSub is short for “publish subscribe” which is a common design…
...full articleA new feed digestion service FeedHub is attempting to solve RSS Infoglut. By RSS Infoglut, I mean not being able to keep up with the all the posts that show up in your feed reader. I recently posted a proposed solution to subscribing to more feeds than you can keep up with after rumors that Google might have hit on the same solution I had been thinking about building. FeedHub is promising in that it is explicitly trying to solve this exact problem that I’ve identified. Scoble refers to it as a Custom Techmeme. But I’m fairly sure FeedHub won’t…
...full articleAlmost every information service can be made more valuable by the addition of social networking metadata. So if you’re thinking about launching a new information service you currently have three choices in this regard: Build your app without social networking data Start from scratch with your own social network Integrate your app with Facebook The third choice is so simple, it is the obvious best choice for most new information services. As I see it, this is the fundamental power of the Facebook platform and why they’re going to go very, very far.
...full articleThis morning Scoble linked to a leaked video out of google describing some new features to be added to Google Reader. I don’t like re-reporting other-people’s news here, but I can’t leave this one sit because it strikes so close to home for me. The ideas they describe sound exactly like what I’ve been thinking the world needs out of a feed reader — features to manage infoglut using the social network. What I’ve been thinking about building in my copious spare time is a web-based feed-reader that assumes you over-subscribe to feeds. That is, it expects you to “subscribe”…
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