Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Yes folks, it is the end of an era -- or at least, the end of this blog as we know it. Our Social Software coverage has been subsumed by a larger entity, although without the usual acquisition rumours, inebriated launch party (complete with Flickr RSS feed) or sudden influx of VC money. Our own Download Squad will be proudly taking over coverage of news in the social software space, so tune in over there for your daily fix; set your new bookmarks to the Social Software category or the main Download Squad site, and reorient your voracious newsreaders to the Social Software RSS feed and/or the Download Squad main RSS feed.
OK folks, I figure if anyone can tell me if such a thing already exists, it's you. I love NetNewsWire like it wuz my own chillren, but it kills me that I have to
categorize all my feeds singly. This is bad. I have to decide whether danah goes into "friends" or "web 2.0" or "women
in tech." She needs to be in all of them! Does supr.c.ilio.us belong in
"friends," "web 2.0," "tech commentary" or "snark" (which, luckily, now
warrants its own category)? You see my conundrum.
Web-based readers are out for me because I track too many
feeds and performance quickly becomes an issue. Does anybody know of a desktop newsreader for the Mac that allows me to
tag my feeds and see them in multiple places? Thanks in advance!
The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has filed suit against Craigslist, citing the appearance on the site of discriminatory housing ads that
violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Such ads are illegal in newspapers and other print publications, and the housing
group maintains that online publications like Craigslist should be held to the same standards. Craigslist CEO Jim
Buckmaster counters with two arguments: one, that the site is a "user-controlled commons" and as such should
not be treated exactly as if it were a newspaper; two, that mandating a manual screening process for all two million
free housing ads (of unlimited length) submitted per month would be unreasonably burdensome for his company of 19
employees to implement.
His second argument is pretty weak. What about the first one? We're still taking
baby steps in the process of applying legal structures from the offline to the online world, and a case like this could
set legal precedent with far-reaching ramifications for online publications. What happens when the wisdom of crowds
isn't so wise, after all? Who is then responsible? IMHO Craiglist is benefiting from the "wisdom of crowds"
and should in turn bear the responsibility that comes with it. It seems to me they can't have it both ways -- reap the
benefits of the crowd's wisdom, yet turn around and scapegoat the crowd's ignorance. I think the housing group has a
good case, and should they win, we may see the cost of social advertising rise dramatically.
I am happy, excited and pleased as punch to be welcoming Marshall Kirkpatrick to the
fold here on The Social Software Weblog. Please look forward to morsels of goodness coming your way, and to more
frequent updates (yay!)... without further adieu, I will leave Marshall to introduce himself. Welcome, Marshall!
Finally, a highly pragmatic Web
2.0 service -- Extratasty is a social drink recipe site that lets you find new
mixed drinks (or remember the ones you learned and promptly forgot) by search or by tag, see what newfangled
concoctions your friends are trying, and rate recipes you've tried as well a see others' ratings. It's got a cool
feature that takes the list of ingredients in your bar and narrows the search subset to drinks you can actually make
with the materials you have at hand. I vote this tool Most Likely To Be Accessed Repeatedly At Web 2.0 Launch Parties.
Mapwow.com uses the Google maps API to provide an interactive map of Azeroth, the world
in which MMO World of Warcraft is set. You can zoom in and out and drag to move locations just as with Google maps.
Unfortunately/fortunately the site has received so much buzz and traffic that they had to turn off resource points for
items like mineral ore, herb and treasure locations until they raise the cash for more hosting bandwidth -- if/when
they do, this will be a fantastic resource for WoW players.
Marshall asks if there's a way "you could create unique channels within this glob of feeds
like "give me a feed of items containing the word 'RSS' or 'environmentalism' across all of these feeds'" --
there is if you have the good fortune to be using NetNewsWire on a Mac
(now owned by Newsgator). You can create a Smart List that will aggregate any items
out of your feed collection that contain term X. I believe Shrook has this
functionality as well. Anybody have equivalent solution for the Windows folks?
I have been totally digging on the spate of MMO-themed mashups I've been finding lately that animate in-game characters
and avatars to act out music videos or DIY scripts. Here's a nice one that mashes up Second Life with Michael Jackson's Thriller:
I had a chance to sit (virtually) down with Marshall Kirkpatrick and have a
thoroughly enjoyable discussion about the state of social software and Web 2.0 and its relevance to social change
organizations -- please feel free to check out the results on Netsquared (which you should also check out!). Thanks to Marshall for the
thought-provoking questions (and for the really cool tag cloud Table of Contents).
I return to any of you dear readers still left ;) after traversing the burning
fires of the Hawaiian sun (I swear I put sunscreen on but I
think I forgot to tell my face about it) and the crowded, gadget-infested hallways of CES. Now that I'm back, you'll have to put up with my blogging once
again.
Just caught wind of this as I was guffawing over this
World of Warcraft mashup video -- it appears that MySpace is blocking
YouTube, not just embedded videos but all YouTube URLs and even any references to the YouTube service. Apparently
MySpace hasn't responded to any inquiries from YouTube staff or MySpace users who also use YouTube. Considering the
overwhelming amount of strange and random multimedia crap I have seen embedded
into MySpace profiles, I find this a little odd. Anybody know what's up?
So I am truly psyched about the advent of Performancing, a Firefox
extension that integrates a full-featured blog editor right into the browser. Just hit F8 to call up the editing
window, whip up a post, and shoot it right off to your Wordpress, Movable Type (which includes Typepad and LiveJournal)
or Blogger blog. I don't have any blogs running on MT anymore but I set up several Wordpress blogs and an old Blogger
blog in all of about 2 minutes -- it's dead easy. Then, you can choose to author in WYSIWYG or source mode, quickly
switch over to a live preview and back again, add it to whatever appropriate categories and push the post out to your
blog when you're finished. It does what it's supposed to do, simply and well. I absolutely love it.
It
also finally fulfills my desire for a quick browser "scratchpad" where I can jot notes and links and send them
off to a blog I keep just for personal notes and ramblings. I love that the editing window lays over the bottom of the
page and sticks around until I close it again, so I can switch back and forth between a bunch of tabs and cut and paste
bits of each. This fits exactly how I work when I'm researching something: I'll do a search on del.icio.us or Google, etc. and open a bunch of tabs, then go through and check out each
page. Performancing is a great way to dump whatever I want to remember into a blog post and save it for later. One
wishlist item: it would be absolutely fantabulous if I could save a post as a draft to one of my public blogs, so that
I could hack up a bunch of post stubs and then go back at the end and polish them off into finalized posts.
You can drag and drop text and images into a post... I think I'm in love.
Well, dear readers, we're picking our way through the rubble around here and there may yet be some rough edges (it was
one hell of a massage),
but comments are back and bad and so are we. We did drink some minimalist design Kool-aid but we'll see about hiring
some elves interior designers to spruce the place up a bit. In the meantime, content is (insert
your favorite power-hungry official here), right? Thanks for bearing with us.
One thing to note is that the
source links usually found linked to "Read" at the bottom of each post seem not to have made it over the
great divide. We will restore the linklove as soon as inhumanly possible...
It's not that we don't thoroughly adore your contributions to the conversation here on the Social Software Weblog
(wouldn't be social without ya), but we need to close comments on the blog this weekend because we'll be, um, having a
massage. A real nice one with oil and new age background music, accompanied by a sento bath. So store up your musings
and we'll all have words with each other again on Monday. As long as they're not words like
squick. Thanks!
