Recently I learned that there has been podcasting already a hundred years ago, and now Martin Lindner highlights a few spooky structural similarities between the Web 2.0 and American Folk Music around 1930.

Brilliant and sublime: Rocketboom: IE or Firefox?

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Comments:

You could turn this episode into a game for the family: turn off the audio and try to guess what the answer of the person is going to be by just looking at the way they look/are dressed etc.
posted by Pierre : 12/06/2005 10:27:32 PM

You really could ;)
It actually would be interesting to find out if there is a correlation between using a browser and scoring high in this game.
posted by Saurier : 12/10/2005 10:16:53 AM

If you love tags and if you use lots of them in del.icio.us, chances are good that you have to wait for 10 seconds or more until your pages are displayed in your browser. If you use del.icio.us on a regular basis this can become a royal PITA.

A little experiment: open the page of http://del.icio.us/notmuch (uses about 3000 tags) and then the page of http://del.icio.us/katiesays17 (uses about 130 tags) in a new tab or window (otherwise you might not come back.)

Your mileage may vary, but for me 100 tags seem to delay the rendering of the page for a second or two, and waiting for the page of notmuch is an exercise in patience.

Less tags equal a better browsing experience, so here are a few techniques (a.k.a. no brainers) you might consider for reducing the number of tags (if you’ve got lots of ’em) without deleting any informational value and without changing your basic tagging mode (you can conveniently rename tags under http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourusername]/tags):

get rid of typos

( Michael Arrington http://del.icio.us/marrington is the undisputed champ of creating variants on techcrunch: tecchrunch, techcruch, techcrunc, techcrund, techcrunhc, techrunch and tehcrunch.)

get rid of synonyms

Many del.icio.user apply web2.0 and web20 and web2 to a bookmark to cover each possible tag others might use for searching. Choose one and stick with it. Others will fill in the synonyms for you.

get rid of tags with only one attached resource

- if it’s not within your area of expertise or special interest – and use a broader term instead.

I’ve used 20 tags for describing various flavors of XML for 15 links I’ve bookmarked. As long as I won’t start heavy bookmarking in this field again, xml will just work fine.

Using these three simple filters I was able to tame down my tags from 750 to under 500, and del.icio.us just feels nice again.

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Comments:

(Michael Arrington is the undisputed champ of creating variants on techcrunch: tecchrunch, techcruch, techcrunc, techcrund, techcrunhc, techrunch and tehcrunch.)
Ahah, that’s hilarious.
Nice work on the tagging tips! I have trouble with the Synonyms myself. I’ve started to pay attention to that now though. :)
posted by Brian Benzinger : 11/26/2005 05:59:16 PM

thanks, Brian.
I’m actually no fan of howtos and guidelines on how people should tag, and synonyms do have their merits (I hope Michael isn’t homogenizing his). It’s just sth. to think about if your tag-count is exploding.
posted by Saurier : 11/27/2005 01:28:41 PM

Ah, but I like my 3000 tags – just wish there were tools other than one at a time to spruce them up.
I am finding the Mac app Cocoalicious very helpful in tag hygiene since it uses cached data and thus doesnt’ suffer from so much lag.
posted by Edward Vielmetti : 1/30/2006 11:11:27 PM

memepool [was memepool.com] – the grandpa of del.icio.us

GetToZ

Easy to play and hard to master.

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Comments:

I can’t get to Z but I can get to Y… :D
posted by Anonymous : 5/31/2006 08:25:37 PM

Technorati Mini [technorati.com/mini/]

Technorati Mini may be habit-forming. Do not operate a motorized vehicle while using Technorati Mini. May cause excitement and/or nostalgia for Web 1.0. Minors should discuss using Technorati Mini with their parents. Technorati Mini may annoy popup-blockers. Do not taunt Technorati Mini.

Part of my jobdescription at the MoMB is to keep an eye on webapps which are not public yet. Some are pretty much in stealth mode, some are in closed alpha or beta, but most of them encourage you to leave your email address for being notified if they go public. None of them offers a RSS or Atom feed for this notification though, and I really wonder why.

What could be more convenient to the interested user than to subscribe to a quick and dirty feed which is dedicated for the announcement of the launch of the product, put it in a folder cool stuff to check out, and then forget about it until the good news arrives?

I don’t think anyone likes to spread his email address around, and I bet many of us use dedicated dummy addresses for these kind of scenarios, so the chances are pretty good that the notification email actually never will be seen by the recipient (killed by some ambitious spam filter, waiting in an abandoned email address,…)

A few examples, the list goes on and on:

DigitalBicycle (Sign up to receive an update when the site launches, and for possible inclusion as a beta tester. We’re good, honest folks, and we promise not to spam you or sell your address to the highest bidder.)

Blogbeat (Enter your email address below and we will notify you as soon as the service is publically available. And without sending you any spam.)

flagr (Enter your email and become the first to flag your spots.)

Buzzage (Register to participate in our upcoming Beta.)

Socius (Fill in your email address below to receive information about the development of Socius and to find out when it becomes publicly available. We promise not to spam you. And if you’re lucky, you might receive an invitation to the private beta.)

Republic of Blog (get invited to our Web 2.0 beta. if you’re cool enough.)

Free Time Zone Beta (Please enter your contact info if you would like to be notified of anything we might come up with.)

Newsvine

Plum (Come back in a few weeks or leave us your email address and we will notify you when we launch.)

Sprout (Enter your address below and we’ll let you know when Mailroom is available. Be among the first to know when our new Ruby on Rails product is launched.)

CourseCafe (Sign up below and we will notify you when we launch.)

MyTella (Private Beta Sign Up)

agnda (Mailing List Sign-up)

dabble DB (Feel free to sign up for our mailing list below. We’ll send you a note as soon as it’s ready for you to try out.)

3bases (enter your email address and click ‘submit’)

Ma.gnolia (If you’d like to be one of the first to see exactly what we mean, just enter your email below. You’ll be notified of our launch and become one of the first members of the Ma.gnolia community)

Cha-Ching! (Enter your email address below and we’ll keep you posted.)

Sphere (your email address)

edgio (.. please give us your email address ..)

sixtyspots (Put your e-mail in the box and we’ll make sure you’re in on the fun…)

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Comments:

In the case of Buzzage, I really wanted a mobile number since our service is geared toward mobile users. I thought people would be even less likely to share a number (this is actually one of the things Buzzage has a solution for). So I went with e-mail addresses. So why not offer an RSS feed instead of asking for an e-mail address? Well if it was just an RSS feed, it’s not as obvious to me how many interested beta users I have, what day they became interested, who they might be, and what might have prompted them to our site in the first place. So the basic answer is we can do our jobs better this way..
posted by Michael Cerda : 11/27/2005 09:07:43 PM

Just thought I’d point out that even though Republic of Blog is actually a joke placeholder page for an eventual project, there is a link to the RSS feed if you put your email address in.
posted by Anonymous : 12/05/2005 02:12:36 AM

If Google has problems (as it seems to have today) a zillion of webpages has problems too. Many pages try to load Ads or stats or what not, and – depending on your browser and settings – often you won’t see the page displayed (even if it might be loaded already) if the adserver is not responding.

Emergency treatment 101: turn off JavaScript in your browser (usually under Preferences).

(recursive sidenote: I tried to remove the code for Google Analytics from this blog (it runs on Blogger = Google), which means I need to change my template and republish the blog, but I was not able to change my template, because the site was calling Google Analytics, which was not responding)

Google Base on Google Base

Brilliant idea: Forty Faces – an aggregator displaying the most recent blog postings via the photos of the author’s faces. (Currently only about 140 bloggers are listed – with Jeff Jarvis being one of them. He actually was there whenever I took a peek).