Yo, me too, now I also flickr!

Ok ok, this was long overdue... ;-) Ta ta ta taaaa! Happy to announce: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vorburger/ - for you!

Kaboodle

So Kaboodle is what Keiron has been up to lately... Looks interesting!

It's basically a very simple "blog", specialized for bookmarks, but unlike del.icio.us and friends, the idea is that you create (some) topical pages and have a group of "items" on it - so your pages on Kaboodle become a "bag" of related things you want to share. Visitors can Vote and Comment on items on your Kaboodle pages, and your can keep your Kaboodle pages private and invite your friends only into it.

I have created two separate pages as a quick test. Am curious to see if I'll continue to actively use this... I'm... not sure. Actually, it depends for what, I think. This is just perfect to e.g. list a couple of... places to go, gifts, God knows what - and then ask friends, family, co-workers to have a look and comment and vote. I'll use it for that - only that, sorry, I don't do that every day! As a bookmark sharing social software, I think I'll probably stick with my del.icio.us for now though, and tags, search, clicking other users, etc. -- Interestingly, at least some of the pages you see on the Kaboodle homepage today show one item bookmark-ish kind of usage.

Others have blogged/written about more features that could be added, I am going to refrain - but I'm curious which direction they want to take this to... Clearly aimed at more of a "consumer" audience, and positioned somewhat differently / more specifically than general social "bookmarking", I'd expect them to add new features such as Searching, RSS, Tags etc. more conservatively, I mean slowly, if at all. Grandma doesn't tag - and doesn't need to, when creating a page with suggested dishes for the week-end get together.

I gathered from blogosphere that stuff like http://wists.com/ and http://www.clipmarks.com/ is the competition. On a very quick superficial look, Kaboodle UX seems simpler & neater - didn't check it out any further though.

Finally on a more technical note, I was skeptical when I read that when you click the "Add to Kaboodle" button you can add to your browser, Kaboodle would extract a headline, image/icon and a short summary. I have to say I am surprised how well this seems to work. Particularly the extraction of a Short Description - ignoring titles, menus and apparently trying to pick the first phrase seems reasonably robust. Can I get this method built-into an RSS reader - you know when fetching feeds with no content, get the page, strip stuff around, and just show the article's real content? ;-)

I'll leave it at this for - time to get some sleep. Keiron, best of luck with Kaboodle!!!

PS: Actually, here is one minor feature idea I ran into just while playing around: I added something to the wrong my page, and couldn't "move" it - so deleted and re-added it. Minor certainly.

i7: Outfoxed follow-up - is it "relevance" not "trust" ?

Actually... in my mind a somewhat related topic to Outfoxed & Co. is one "ranking", but more in the context "information relevance" than this "trust" business... I am hoping to spend some time on looking into if there is a good RSS Reader that helps decide which posts (not just which feeds) I may be interested in reading...

This article What's Wrong With: Feed Readers has some similar thoughts that I share. I'll post some extensions and further thoughts separately another time - but essentially: Is there such stuff?

I looked around a bit tonight, gave Findory a try - somehow not convinced; particularly unhappy that I can't make stuff "hide", like "done, not this, go away". Am now using RSSOwl with its integration with AmphetaRate ... probably need to train it further; would prefer it to rank My Aggregated Favorites though, not suggest new ones from additional feed. Using RSSOwl Rating I also realized that I spend too many seconds on "uh, 1 or 2, 4 or 5" - maybe a simpler binary "thumbs up, thumbs down" (like in Temboz [not tried, looks too alpha]) works better?

Then found NewsMonster and BlogBridge, both of which look promising... update to follow after some expierence using them!

PS: In my mind, some of the "ranking" idea itself have nothing to do with RSS as a format... I have been wondering how useful data for ranking, prioritization and personalization could be similarly "mined" from e.g. My Documents kind of files on my desktop, through general watching my surfing practices (outside of Personal Search - just what I click on, how much time I stay on pages, etc.) as well as maybe all what emails I get/write.

Comment spamming on blogs

Wow! This (and this) didn't take long... "comment spam" is what they call it apparently. (I hope by simply enabling an option to "show word verification for comments" this will be a one time newbie blogger thing.)

PS: I have always thought about spam with a mixture of disgust and "amazement" - I mean, that professional spammers would go to such great length to... but I hear it really is big business, I guess that explains it? Although, I am not sure what's worse, the fact of spam or that some people apparently (still, today!) presumably click on "MAKE MONEY NOW". What a world. Anyway.

I was blogged, six months ago!

I thought it was fun to notice that somebody blogged a page on my homepage (now very old) a few months ago... Actually, that's not a blog entry, that's just a copy/pasted bookmark! Well, I guess that's not such a big difference - or is it? If it isn't, then why haven't people come up with a combined technorati and del.icio.us, why do we think of these as different things? ;-O

PS: Sure, cauz it's just SO easy to del.icio.us something that you do it potentially many times a day - while you probably blog (properly) less frequently. Still, why two systems?

Outfoxed

I gave Outfoxed a try the last few days ... its quite interesting, probably the early incarnation of a new class of functionality that we'll find self evident and built-into our future applications (and OS?) some day in a maybe not too distant future - it certainly makes a lot of sense, and is a logical next step, to map real-world interpersonal relationship into our today still crude digital world. (See also this article; more general, but in my mind related in this context.)

Having said that, once understood and played with Outfoxed, I found it of limited practical everday use to myself as of right now... just uninstalled it again. Maybe its community is also still too small. I'll probably revisit when the version numbers have gone up a bit and there are more users... By the way, I found Stan's Comparison to Existing Systems quite useful... I do regularly use now three of the systems mentioned on that page!

PS : If you want to try out Outfoxed, make sure you go to its download page using a release version of Mozilla Firefox (currently, 1.07 Stable) - I had some trouble/confusion most probably cauz I visited the site with Firefox v1.5beta2.

Comment on Floyds "Thoughts on JAOO and various interesting things I heard"

Floyd Marinescu's Thoughts on JAOO and various interesting things I heard was an interesting quick read...his prediction about "in the next 5 years we are going to see investments in core open source infrastructure on a national scale from countries like Brasil, and eventually China and India" certainly is an exciting idea.. I wonder about the timescale though In my view of the world, OSS is a precursor to a much larger social phenomena that I believe will unfold... in the "medium to longer term".

Argh, missed JAOO although I was hoping I could make that conference this year... - was on holidays, between changing jobs! Anybody knows where to find/how to get Slides, Transcripts of it? I am just too dumb or do they really not make it available?

PS: Help, I'm all new to Blogosphere... is this way of commenting in one's own blog about another post the way to go? Put the URL of the blog in the Link field in Blogger and start writing? Or do I have to "talkback" somehow - how? Hm.