Getting into this online stuff: Part II - A better way to bookmark and favorite links on the web using del.icio.us
This is the second installment of posts I plan to use for the class I'm teaching at Fordham. It's probably a little remedial for hardcore techies, but it might be the kind of things you send to friends who might not be as tech savvy. See the prior post at the bottom...
So, you've been surfing the web for 10+ years now.
How many bookmarks or favorites do you have? 5? 10? 50? So in 10 years you've only seen 25 things on the web worth saving?
What about discovering new things? Are you one of those people who gets stuff sent to them or are you always the first to find something?
I want to share a really useful tool I use called del.icio.us. It has a screwy name because it's actually at the "icio.us" domain... You can get to it from delicious.com, but that just takes all the novelty out of it.
del.icio.us is a better way to remember, discover, and share URLs. It may not seem compelling at first, but I guarantee once you use it a few times, particulalry the first time you retrieve or discover a new link, you'll be hooked.
What is it?
del.icio.us is a way to store your links online. So, right off the bat, anything you save can be easily retrieved from other computers that you use? New computer? Home computer. No problem. And no searching through e-mails for links anymore either. Welcome to 2006.
All of the del.icio.us links are saved with your own keywords. No more trying to figure out if the Barry Bonds story goes in the sports folder or the steroids folder. (If you even have folders for links.) Just "tag" it (attach keywords) using words that will help you retrieve it later... Just "jerk" or "jerk, baseball, juice, BALCO, SFGiants, and Bonds." You'll never lose a link again, because you stored it using any and all of your own words. I never lose the Central Park softball field finder because I have it tagged "central park, maps, and softball".
By default, links in del.icio.us are public. You might freak out at first, but keep in mind the following... You don't have to have any personally identifyable information displayed in your account. If you want to be metsfan06 in del.icio.us, no one will really know who you are. Also, you can make any of your links private. In my year and a half of using del.icio.us, I think I've done this twice, and I actually set my name to be viewable in my del.icio.us account. Look at most of your bookmarks. Would it matter if any of them were public? Maybe a handful, but I doubt that's the case for most.
The value of the public default in del.icio.us is that you can discover new links tagged by the community of other users, and there are over a million. You can check out the most popular links tagged PHP at del.icio.us/popular/php or the most popular things tagged funny at del.icio.us/popular/funny. Because there are over a million del.icio.us users, most of these tags are pretty deep in their content. You can also check out combinations (but just a chronology...it doesn't do popular for combos) of tags. Check out links tagged nyc and food at del.icio.us/tag/food+nyc for a good restaurant recommendation. There's no rating system on del.icio.us, because, as the founder put it, links only have two settings... "stuff worth saving" and "everything else". Plus, you can discover other users who have similar interests. I found a guy who was tagging cool Brooklyn restaurants and places "naveen" at del.icio.us/naveen/hangout. I didn't even know who he was, but followed what he was tagging hangout.
One last thing and then we'll get to the how. You can tag links for specific people right at the moment you save it for yourself. If you find a link you want me to see, just tag it as usual, but also add the tag for:ceonyc. When I want to tag something for Shaival, our biz dev guy here, its for:sshah06 or for Kristina, our Oddcast intern, its for:kw11. You have to know your friend's screenname...there's no user search.
Oh, you can also subscribe to any person's links, any tag, any combo, or the popular lists, by RSS.
Here's how to use it:
First off, it's much easier to use it in Firefox, because they've built a really nice little extension. Plus, you should be using Firefox anyway....less bugs and holes, plus webpages pretty much display the way the auther intended. IE does screwy things to the web.
1) Register here.
2) Get the firefox extension.
3) Restart your browser.
4) Now you've got these two buttons on your toolbar. One for tagging pages and one for retreiving your tagged pages.
5) When you tag a page, use space seperated keywords that make sense to you. For me, I always use a combination of general subject tags and ones that intidcate to me why I tagged them. So, this post might be tagged "del.icio.us howto web bookmarks favorites fordhamclass". You can use as many or as few as you like and it doesn't matter if they make sense to anyone else but you. So, someone looking for better ways to manage bookmarks would find this post through the "bookmarks" tag, but no one would ever care about or look for something tagged "fordhamclass". That tag is for my purposes. The neat thing about tagging is that I just did something for myself...tagged a link so I can find later, and others still benefit.
There are lots of other neat features of del.icio.us, like creating linkrolls for your blog or automatic once a day blog posts of all your links from that day. Take some time to explore it. I guarantee that if you get into the habit of using it, you'll find it really useful and you'll never forget anything you saw on the web.
Other "Getting into this online stuff posts":
Getting into this online stuff: Part I - Blogging as the Industry Cocktail Party
Artificially intelligent avatar: And he's even local!
So we just blogged about our new AI skin on the Oddcast blog. I'm so impressed, b/c when I just asked him where he lives, he answered and returned the question.
I answered "New York City."
He responded, "Which borough?"
I'm proud to say that Oddcast is hiring local avatars who know their way around NYC!
Bicycles do not fit with the kind of image New York Sports Club is trying to project... WTF?
It is beautiful out in New York City today... currently 58 and expected to get up to 67. It will probably be 22 by Monday, but what can you do.
Anyway, I biked in this morning and made my usual stop at the gym first, to workout and and cleanup. The NYSC on 35th and Madison, unlike the other ones I've been to, has no poles in front of it... no parking meter, streetlamp... anything. The only place to lock my bike is on the corner of 36th against the walk/don't walk sign... which is a little ways down. I'm not totally comfortable with that, and so I asked at the gym about a place to put it inside.
So, the woman at the desk said that I couldn't bring it in because they couldn't be responsible. I wasn't asking for that... I just felt safer if it was inside. And, actually, if they had a bike rack inside, and someone came in with some clippers, I'd imagine she'd at least call the cops or something, just to be nice. She suggested I talk to the manager.
The manager said there were some places around the corner, which of course, defeats the purpose. He also said they tried to get the city to put in some bike racks across the street, but they didn't get anywhere. "What about a rack in the club here?" The club has a double entrence and in between the inner and outer doors, there's a perfect space for a small bike rack.
This is where it gets ridiculous.
"Oh, we can't have that because this is a high visability club."
I knew what he meant, but I just wanted to get him to say it.
"High visability?"
"Well, it's a nice location that a lot of people come to so we can't go messing it up with a bunch of bikes that people can see."
"Umm... doesn't biking sort of fit with the whole gym concept? You know... exercise. Just seems to me a gym, of all places, should be bike friendly?"
"I see how that might make sense, but I don't think that's something we're going to do here."
The ironic thing is that, every year, New York Sports Club sponsors a team in the Five Borough Bike Tour.
They're all about biking, so long as it's not near one of their clubs, because bikes are aestheticly displeasing. Let me tell you, bikes are pretty far down the list of aestheticly displeasing things I've seen at the gym... I wish they would ban the hairy naked guy that towels off next to me with one foot up on the bench.
Virtual Sales or Virtual Advertising?
Soon, you'll be able to buy Coke in Cyworld.
Good for Cyworld, but is it good for Coke?
Now that I'm in the virtual biz, I've been thinking a lot about the promise of virtual goods.
It's certainly a very attractive idea... put something up there that cost you peanuts to create, get lots of people to buy it, and voila.... 99% margains.
But let's think about it for the brand. Cyworld has 20 million users worldwide. Let's say that half of these are active users, as oppossed to people like me that check out a lot of stuff and come back to very little.
Also, let's say that they could get 3% conversion rates on the Coke bottle, which even then is very generous, because not all of these people are active users.
So, that's 300,000 Cokes. Now, unlike regular Coke, you only need to buy one digital Coke, assuming the technology isn't there for you to drink it and need another. 300,000 virtual Cokes at what? Fifty cents? $150,000 in revenue for Coke plus the branding awareness within a closed network.
For a company that made $23 billion in revenue in 2005, I don't really think that's going to move the needle.
What if, instead of trying to sell these things, they paid Cyworld that money at a $10 CPM to put Coke vending machines in Cyworld for free.
That would be 15,000,000 impressions of Coke among a lot more than 150k users.
Personally, I think Coke would benefit more by spending the money to push (or have users pull for free) their way into these virtual worlds than trying to get into the business of selling virtual goods. Coke's business is to sell real drinkable soda, not 1's and 0's. If you're a brand thinking of selling virtual stuff, I think you're going to be sort of underwhelmed with the results compared to the buzz you could generate by freeing up your brands within these virtual spaces and letting them play.
Radar Love: Newsgator Go!
"When I get lonely, and I'm sure I've had enough
She sends her comfort, comin' in from above
Don't need no radio at all
We've got a thing that's called radar love
We’ve got a line in the sky, radar love"
I just installed Newsgator Go! on my Pocket PC-6700 and I love it. I had been falling behind a bit in my feed consumption and I definitely caught up this morning. I sync on my walk to the subway, read underground, and sync up again so that the web version knows which posts I've read. Very easy... very fast.
I do have a couple of feature requests, though:
- When I'm done reading posts in a feed, I can hit "Mark all" with a thumb button, but then I have to it OK in the corner to close out of a feed. I want a "Mark all and close" or a "next feed" button.
- I'd like to sort my feeds (and this is Newsgator-wide) by number of unread posts.
- Clipping doesn't really do anything for me. Its an extra step. I clip stuff, then I have to go back to the web to either tag it in del.icio.us or blog about it or get rid of it. I'd love to tag and/or blog about it right from my phone.
Do you brush your teeth on the way to class?: Always being ready for luck
When I was in college, my roommate and I got into a discussion about brushing our teeth before we walked across campus for class, whether we even needed to.
In our stupid male brains, we thought there was some chance, no matter how remote, that someone might want to makeout with us on the way... I mean, it was highly unlikely, but what if that hot girl in our English class caught up to one of us and just couldn't resist herself from planting one? Hey, you never know.
But if it ever did happen, wouldn't you want to have the freshest breath possible? How awful would it be if she pulled back because she tasted garlic from your lunchtime chicken roll. The small incremental cost of brushing our teeth far outweighed the huge, but infintessimally unlikely, downside of that awkward moment.
That's what I think about when I manage my digital self. You might think it's sort of unlikely that anyone might want to hire you from your blog, Facebook profile, etc... but I just encountered a situation the other day where a friend's personal blog actually went a long way to helping her connect with her potential employer, b/c of shared music tastes and just her overall familiarity with technology.
So, if you have an outdated blog, don't manage your LinkedIn bio, or have some "not ready for primetime" stuff on a social network, take a moment to update it. Hey, you never know.
King Nothing: When you want to connect, but not commit
I had a great brunch with Hannah and Laurent from SubMate on Saturday and it really got me thinking about how people connect online and offline.
At first, when I thought of connecting with people based on my commute, I have to admit, I didn't think it was such a hot idea.
Then, after talking about it with them, I realized that commutes were just an excuse... a way to do local. My commute not only defines where I live, within a reasonable arm's length, but it also goes a long way to defining my lifestyle... an actor from Bay Ridge would have a very different commute than I would.
On top of that, I started thinking about connections to the group of people who commute with me. Maybe I wouldn't want to date any of them, but I definitely want to talk local politics with them, because I hate to admit, but I don't know any of the hyperlocal candidates.
But, I'm not really a very political guy. So, I'm not likely to join a politically based social network. I'm like that with a lot of things. I blog about baseball sometimes, but I don't have a baseball blog... or a kayaking blog... I have a variety of interests, none of which I feel the need to fully commit to joining a community about.
That's why I like Last.fm... I listen to music, and stick the widget on my blog, and now I'm listening to music based on what others with similar tastes like. I don't feel the need to blog about music or go to shows with these random people. MyBlogLog is great, too... people show up to read and now we have a connection.
MyBlogLog is like today's version of a webring. Webrings were great... you read something you liked, you clicked and got another similar blog to read.... very simple.
I don't think I have a fully formed thought here... but to me, there's just something missing in all this. I post about things I sort of care about... and that should connect me in a loose way to others who sort of care about those things or really care about those things.... a web where everyone is a dynamic and loose hub and spoke.
Here's where I have questions and where things haven't quite settled yet... here I'm just thinking free form....
Will the web move more towards del.icio.us or MyBlogLog? People based or subject based. Am I going to consume based on microniche topics screened socially, or am I could to consume based on people whose microniche topics are of interest to me? I don't actually think its the same thing. It makes me think that MyBlogLog should beef up the consume and publish data... who writes like me... not just who reads me... Actually there's four categories of web connection I'm interested in:
Who reads me: MyBlogLog, coComment
Who writes me (reposts, tags, etc): Technorati, del.icio.us, Icerocket, Google Blog search
Who reads like me: Rojo tried this... I wish RSS readers would do more of this...
Who writes like me: Sphere?
And how much does this world have to offer the things I really don't write a lot about, like the Mets, kayaking, and politics... Is that what social networks are for?
Facebook lets me put my RSS feed on my profile, but not much else. I guess Gather was more of a publishing social network, but I don't want to publish on there. I publish right here and consume close by... so connect me.
Ok... that's it.. .I think I'm done. I had an idea for this post this morning in the gym and I let it get away from me w/o really coming to much conclusion on anything.
Subway Laptop
I'm pretty sure the rule is that you can only take the laptop out when you have a seat.
Subway Thumbing: Such Great Heights and Old Guy Pants... and How much I weigh
I'm listening to the Pretenders on my iPod singing the theme from the Living Daylights, which is a Bond movie I'm always torn about, because it has no sex and Timothy Dalton, but it has one of the best car scenes. I could use skiis, tire spikes, and a rocket motor on my Mustang...that would counter the rear wheel drive. You know what I just realized? Old men whose pants keep creeping up their torso as they get older aren't buying longer and longer pants...they're shrinking into the same size they've always worn. They're pulling 'em up that high so their 34" lengths aren't bunching up at the bottom. It's not so much a fashion problem as it is a posture and calcium deficiency issue. The Godfather theme is now playing. There's a really tall woman standing next to me...she must be 6'3". She's the tallest person in the car except for this one up front. If you're a guy who is really tall, it's like you got to some level in a videogame that no one else can get to. This woman is like the secret bonus level that all us normal sized guys can never get to. I was 5'11" at the end of my freshman year of high school...figured I'd get at least another two inches...nada. Didn't grow an inch after that. One more would have been nice. I was also 152 pounds. I don't remember feeling like a skinny guy, but I guess I must have been. I've always weighed myself. My grandmother has a bathroom scale that I would rush to everytime I got to her house. Kids love growing. I remember distinctly weighing 77 pounds, 85 pounds, 115... Right before I got to Union Square I was 192, but that was before I started biking to work and playing in all these leagues. By the end of that summer, I was down to 176, which I didn't like. Now I'm about 185. David Byrne playing My Fair Lady now. Canal St. Everytime I pass Canal, I think of how cool the ATTAP (Riffs) offices are. I need to move back into the city...and work right next door to my apt. I stopped to look around to find some thumbing inspiration... No one looks or is doing anything interesting at the moment. Actually, it's a really unremarkable subway crowd this morning. Lots of su doku and sleeping. Just caught the cover of the News...didn't some high school kid dress as Hitler last year. Don't we go through this every year? Didn't someone get eggshell in the eye or something more newsworthy? Either way, whether he gets punished or not, the kid is an idiot and so are his parents. Now, when you Google his name, forever, he'll be the Hitler kid. Have fun getting a job, loser. Its chilly in this car...the a/c is on. I'm excited to go to the gym...really love the NYSC on 35th and Madison.
Pumpkin Carving 2.0
So I wound up having a somewhat traditional Halloween last night... wound up watching some scary movies and pumpkin carving. All the stores were out of pumpkins, so I headed over to my mom's house first to steal hers. She called after I left and said, "Did you take my pumpkin??" hehe. I decided to make my pumpkin a pumpmoticon... :)
links for 2006-11-01
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Is it possible that Indeed's traffic edge over Simplyhired is due to Fred's blog?