When 140 characters is just too much to read or furnish, there’s the new 26-character, nano-blog alternative. Flutter. Take a peak, leave a Flap:
If Flutter’s too much, take peace of mind in knowing we’re months away from Flutter intern Laura’s new 10-character service Shttr. All the benefits of Flutter, but without the vowels. Talk about quick, efficient communication. No longer will quips be outdated by the time you finish reading them!
All seriousness aside, "share your thoughts – brie"
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I’m a fan of OpenDNS .
It’s true. My mom thought Latitude was the greatest thing. Not that she’ll ever use it, but that she could load up the web page and see exactly where I was. Very handy, so as to avoid multiple phone calls asking "have you arrived safely?" (Yes, my parents love me. Be jealous if you must.)
Back story: It wasn’t anything I had originally thought of when the Latitude service from Google was first announced earlier this month , but adding my parents and my sibling was probably the best thing I could have done. The idea came to me as I was packing to leave for a 3 day vacation to snowy Truckee, CA. (Which supposedly had more than 4 feet of snow in 4 days.) The road conditions to and from were far less than ideal, and I figured if anything were to go wrong, at the very least my family would know where I was last registered by my cellphone.
New story: While I’m still not entirely sold on location-based advertising (only because I don’t like advertising, not because I don’t like efficiency), Latitude is a great idea for parents. It won’t be long before children everywhere are hearing, "if I’m paying your cellphone bill son, you’re damn well going to load some form of tracking service so I can find you whenever I want." Not that it should be looked at in a negative way. Safety first.
Truckee, CA Photos:
Cabin — 
Snow on Truck (one day of snow) — 
The first feature I’d like to see added to sites isn’t one that I’d probably use, but there are still a couple places I’d like to see it implemented, and that’s the option to opt out of the social aspect of the site. Which probably makes very little sense in most cases, but could be useful on a site like Wesabe which is useful for tracking my spending habits, but not something I necessarily want to share with other folks on the site, or anywhere on the web for that matter. I would like for my Wesabe account to be invisible to all other users, or I at least want the option to opt out.
The second feature, and far more important, is that control to block the accounts of minors . I don’t want to see them nor do I want them to be able to see my account. There’s no reason I can think of for minors to interact with my social pages. (The one exception being a relative.) This seems like it should already be the default setting, when a person sets his age to under 18 that account should automatically be invisible to any adult figure who is not specifically listed as a family member. (Lying about age is the parents’ burden.) Which isn’t to say that every adult is a pedophile, but only to say that social websites should be doing more to protect minors, and this seems like a reasonably easy fix to implement.
Let us all play prevent from the get go. Change our default settings so we’re not forced to opt out completely from using your service. Thank you.
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One of the coolest things about maintaining a blog, or any web space for that matter, is using an analytic software that let’s you know which search terms people use to land themselves in your written space. (I don’t want to list the words here, so as not to skew any future searches.) I find myself asking, "really? you entered that combination of 3 or 4 words and you landed here?" How strange and curious.
I almost can’t believe how people are starting to jump on the Twitter pipe, but it’s not the individual users that surprises me. No, not at all. People do that sort of thing. It’s that businesses are not only signing up for accounts but that they are also actively Tweeting. Sure, anyone can use an automated TweetFeed to share new posts with followers, but it takes a real life person to carry on conversations and respond to fellow Tweeters. (I can only imagine it’s the daily duty of an intern, but still. Someone is getting paid to Tweet.)
I’m particularly pleased with @News10_CA and their posting. We’ll see how long it lasts, though. I’ve found that a lot of these company accounts don’t last long when it comes to updating regularly. Time will tell.
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I’ve been using both Wesabe and Mint for a little over a year now and still I’m not ready to give a full review. Each service manages my money and spending habits a little differently, but mostly the same. The one very big difference is the Social experience available at Mint, but it’s not a feature I use. If we were to measure my use in minutes, we’d find that I probably log more hours using Wesabe than I do using Mint , but at the end of the day it’s still the Excel sheets I created some ten years ago that I rely upon to keep track of my money and spending habits. It’s not nearly as automated as the online servcies, but I have way more control over how the data is manipulated and that’s truly what I’m looking for.
Someone had to say it, right? Hahaha…I know.
I want people to calm down over Google’s latest app Latitude . The privacy advocates specifically. It’s not like anyone is being forced to install or use the application. (Although, it does come bundled with Maps for the mobile phones.) Even if Maps is installed, someone still needs to sign in with a user name and password to allow Latitude access to the phone’s GPS information. Even still, a user can specify what amount of location based information is available (near exact, city-wide, or not at all.) So please, dear everyone who is upset, please calm yourselves.
Not that I’m a fan of advertising, but location based advertisements seem like a cool idea. I can only imagine walking through town, Google knowing exactly where I am and alerting me to a nearby Happy Hour deal. Stellar move, Google. And I don’t have to share my actual location with anyone, which I already am willing to do with services such as Brightkite . (Again, only to select people.)
I want all these services to continue improving, so I hope Google doesn’t cave and shut down its Latitude service. I think Google did a pretty good job preempting the privacy nuts with a lot of privacy-control features already built-in, but we’ll see what happens. In the meanwhile, you can catch my Brightkite updates through Twitter or Friendfeed. Feel free to buy me a coffee if you’re in the area.
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I first started following Slashdot back in 1997, right around the time pop music was popping up on file servers across the US in college dorm rooms for thousands of audiophiles to download illegally. Sure. And ever since then the RIAA has appeared in many a topic and been the subject of many debates over on Slashdot for any and every step they’ve taken to combat/thwart such activities online. Even in 2009, the RIAA continues to crawl the web looking for folks to fight, and they continue to show up in Slashdot conversations, which would almost be fine, except nothing has changed. When it comes to talking about the RIAA, we’ve been having the same conversations for twelve years. Why?
Of course we have to talk about it on Slashdot because the RIAA continues to make decisions that a lot of folks want to complain about, at least those of us who know the actions are taking place. Which many of us probably wouldn’t know if we weren’t reading Slashdot, and I can guess with certainty that it’s why I stopped reading daily for a couple years. (It’s in my feed reader now.)
I’m not really interested in collecting music because I can’t be bothered to make time for it, and I have SiriusXM subscriptions. I have plenty of legal music. (I did buy two CDs last year, which I wrote about here .)
How can we get the RIAA to spend its time plotting to help consumers rather than hunting them? I don’t have the answer, but I sure wish someone would figure it out so we can stop having to hear all the negative chatter on Slashdot. It’s only a matter of time, right? I don’t know about you, but I can’t take it anymore, and I’m disappointed that the music industry hasn’t found a whole bunch of ways to keep making money in the digital world. In the meantime, I’ll just keep skipping those articles.
There are only a couple of things needed, and really only one of them is essential, but the second is greatly appreciated. The first and most important being a notification mechanism to updated comments since the last comment. Meaning, if my comment to your post garners any responses, I want to know about it without having to spend time continually clicking back through your page. Not only would that waste my time, but it would artificially inflate your stats. Neither of us wants either of those things. So please take the time to add a plugin, or some other tool, that enables this capability. Else, don’t expect too many comenters to leave words on your posts.
The second, and maybe less important but still appreciated feature, is closing out the comments after so many days, be it 15 or 30, it doesn’t matter too much, but it definitely needs to be something reasonalbe. Receiving a notification a year or so more past the post date isn’t terribly relevant. Typically these trail off, so it’s not as big an issue, but the more posts to which you comment, the more likely you are to receive unnecessary notifications. At some point we need to stop talking about old topics. Thankfully WordPress 2.7 was smart/kind enough to make this option standard, with a default setting of 14 days. Very handy.
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