beatnic - just wondering

Before the internet, dying was a simple business.

What you said, wrote, created in your lifetime lived on in people’s memories, passed down the generations and turned to myth. And sometimes these had more tangible manifestations, in letters, books, works of art, buildings and of course children.

Nowadays more and more of us have digital identities, and in many cases multiple digital identities. Every time we create a new profile on a website we’re creating another instance of ourselves, sometimes who we are, sometimes who we want to be.

What happens to all those accounts we’ve set up, frozen in virtual time?

What will your virtual legacy be? What will your last blog post say? Your final tweet on Twitter? Was it your turn in Scrabulous? Will your Flickr photographs gradually fade and curl at the edges?

Should we, as a friend of mine wondered, put all our login and password information in our will? And what then?

This series of short articles explains some simple and free ways to use the internet to keep tabs on the subjects you’re interested in. I’m using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Previously: Part 1 - Google Alerts, Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking.

This article is about following Delicious bookmark tags using RSS.

In a nutshell: use your RSS reader to notify you whenever someone adds a bookmark to Delicious and tags it “eastdulwich“

Delicious

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003, and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.
[Source: wikipedia]

Instead of using Firefox “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” (sic) in Internet Explorer, you can save URLs (web addresses) of the pages and sites you want to remember to your account on Delicious.

This means you can access your bookmarks wherever you go, rather than being tied to using the same computer.

You can also share your bookmarks, and see other people’s bookmarks. There is an optional setting to make any bookmark private.

When you save a bookmark you can add tags - or labels - to describe it, to make it easy to find and to group it with other similar bookmarks.

This also means that you can use delicious to track the tags you’re interested in.

There is an RSS feed available for all tags in delicious. Adding a tag’s feed to your RSS reader means you’ll be notified whenever your reader picks up a new item.

The page for all latest public bookmarks for East Dulwich is at http://del.icio.us/tag/eastdulwich, and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/eastdulwich.

As well as subscribing to feeds for tags you can also subscribe to feeds from people with accounts on delicious. My latest public bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/beatnic and the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/beatnic

I have my own public delicious bookmarks automatically published to this website, resulting in posts with a title beginning “links for yyyy-mm-dd” (where yyyy-mm-dd is the date I saved the bookmarks).

Other social bookmarking websites are gaining in popularity - see this list on wikipedia - delicious is easy to use and one of the most popular, so should give a reasonable representation of what’s getting noticed on the web.

In this series of short articles, I’m looking at different ways of subject-tracking on the internet.

Previous articles covered Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists.

This article is about Twitter and its tracking feature, using East Dulwich as the example subject.

Twitter

Twitter lets you share your thoughts with the world.

You can do this by text message (SMS), IM (instant messaging), via the Twitter website, or using a downloadable desktop application like Twitterific (Mac only).

Once you’ve set up your Twitter account you can start “tweeting” your updates. Sometimes called micro-blogging, it’s a bit like writing status updates in Facebook.

Your tweets will appear on your page on the Twitter website. My page is at http://www.twitter.com/beatnic and is public.

People who want to subscribe to your updates can become your “followers” - don’t worry it’s not as cultish as it sounds.

Your updates will appear on the Twitter public timeline. If you’d prefer not to be so public you can “protect” your updates - in this case people will need to request your permission to follow you.

If you’ve set yourself up with an RSS reader, you can add Twitter update feeds of the people you’re following.

People are using Twitter in all sorts of ways, including:

• The BBC tweets news headlines and links to the full articles on its website
• US presidential candidate Barrack Obama tweets about his campaign
• Transport for London tweets traffic updates (using a service called twitterfeed to convert RSS items to tweets.

Twittervision is a mesmerising website showing what people are tweeting right now, and where they are in the world. It’s a mash-up of Twitter - using a feed from the public timeline - and Google maps.

Tracking subjects on Twitter

One of the features of Twitter is the ability to “track” subjects.

You can do this using by text message (SMS) and IM. At the moment, this is limited to text message (SMS) only. [thanks to Andrew M for the correction - see comments]

Text or instant message Track East Dulwich to Twitter. You will immediately recieve a confirmation message.

That’s it. You’ll now receive updates for any public Twitter update mentioning the subject/s your tracking.

If you’re logged in to IM your updates will be by instant message only. Your text message updates from Twitter will be switched off until you log out of IM.

To stop tracking a subject, send a text or instant message with the words Untrack East Dulwich. Again, Twitter will send you an immediate confirmation message.

The rate of updates will very much depend on the subject you choose and the timing.

I’ve received one update for East Dulwich in the last three days.

Last night I tracked England and Croatia and received about 300 texts!

Cost of using Twitter with SMS in the UK

Sending a text to Twitter costs your mobile phone company’s standard text-message rate - watch out if you’re with 3 or T-mobile, according to this article on TechCrunch uk:

Note also that the 07624 in Twitter’s number (+44 762 4801423) means it is actually billed as “international” by 3 and T-Mobile, making it a pricey service for those who like to tweet via SMS.

Receiving text updates from Twitter is free in the UK. In the United States you pay.

The same Techcrunch article suggests a newly added a UK limit of 250 incoming texts per week.

Today Martin Belam publishes the scores from his excellent series of articles looking at the accessibility of the UK’s main national newspaper websites.

The Times came out on top, even though it makes no use of an on-screen text-resizing widget, nor of accesskeys as shortcuts for keyboard users.

Overall my conclusion has to be that only a couple of newspapers are taking seriously any obligation to make their services accessible. I was particularly concerned by The Sun and the Daily Mail using CAPTCHA technology with no alternative for users with accessibility issues, but the general pattern for most papers was quite poor. Many are putting completely unneccessary barriers in the way of people reaching their content by making simple decisions like using fixed font sizes, and not including ’skip navigation’ links.
[source: currybetdotnet]

The results are worrying but not surprising. And as Martin says, he’s still really only “scratching the surface” in his tests.

Sadly all too few website managers understand their obligations as far as accessibility and the law is concerned. Webcredible have a useful summary here, but in a nutshell you can be sued if you do not make reasonable adjustments to provide equal access to your content to everyone.

The RNIB has approached two large companies with regard to their websites. When they raised the accessibility issues of the websites under the DDA, both companies made the necessary changes, rather than facing the prospect of legal action (in exchange for anonymity).
[source: webcredible]

People really shouldn’t need convincing. I wonder if it would make any difference if they realised that by improving the accessibility of their websites, they will also make them more usable and more “readable”. And when it comes to the big internet search engines, being readable means being findable.

How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in. [Also in this series: Part 1 - Google Alerts, Part 3 - Twitter tracking, Part 4 - Delicious bookmark tags]

This article looks at Technorati Watchlists.

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

To get the most out of these tools and techniques, you’re best bet is to set yourself up with an RSS reader or aggregator. Don’t be put off if this sounds a bit geeky. The popular RSS readers are fairly intuitive to set up and free to use. For further information about RSS and how to set up a reader, see this page on the BBC website.

Technorati Watchlists

Set up a Watchlist on Technorati, and find out when somebody writes a blog post mentioning East Dulwich (or whichever subjects you choose). Currently Technorati tracks 112.8 million blogs on our behalf.

Technorati is a search engine which covers the “World Live Web” - a subset of the World Wide Web - and claims to be no more than 10 minutes out of date. Read more about how Technorati works here.

Setting up an account on Technorati is quick and free - look for the link titled “Join”. Once you have your account set up, here’s what you do:

1. Visit the Technorati Watchlist page
2. Enter your subject in the Add to your Watchlist box
3. Hit the Add button.

That’s it. You’re now watching the “World Live Web” for the subject you entered.

To view an example of what a Watchlist looks like for East Dulwich, click on the thumbail image below.

You now have 3 choices for keeping up to date with your Watchlist:

• Bookmark the web address for your Technorati Watchlist
  This is not the most efficient method, as you’ll need to remember to visit fairly regularly to avoid missing anything.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed for your Watchlist
  Using this method, your RSS reader does the work by regularly visiting your watchlist and looking for updates. Any new content will be listed in your RSS reader, a bit like new email in your inbox. Then you can scan this list in your reader whenever most convenient.
• Subscribe to an RSS to email service
  If you’d rather not user an RSS reader, you can always have updates emailed to you. Technorati doesn’t offer this service, so you’ll need to use another website to do this for you. I’ve set up an account on FeedBlitz - I will review this separately, but so far it has not scored high on usability!

Is anyone blogging about you? Why not set up a Watchlist for your name.

How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in.

This article looks at Google Alerts.

[Also in this series: Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking]

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

As well as for personal interest, these techniques are useful if you want to keep an eye on what people are writing about your industry, company, product, service, or your competition, not to mention your favourite sports team, tv programme, pop singer… So if you work in marketing, product development, corporate communication, the press office, public relations - to name but a few - take note.

Google alerts

Google Alerts is a service which emails you when it finds a new mention of your chosen subject.

So rather than you having to search for East Dulwich every now and then, you can get Google to do the searching for you.

You can have alerts sent to your preferred email address, but you’ll need a google account (free and quick to set up) if you want to edit and manage your alerts.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Visit google alerts
2. Type in the subject you want to track, e.g. East Dulwich or SE22
3. Choose the type of search you’d like. The choices are news, blogs, video, web, groups or comprehensive (an aggregate of recent results)
4. Select how often you’d like google to email you. The options are as it happens, once a day and once a week.

That’s it. Now you’ll never miss another mention of your chosen subject - as long as google picks it up of course.

You can set up as many alerts as you need.

The alerts are in the same format as the search results. They highlight where your subject is mentioned and link to the original source.

I was having coffee with a friend today who does work with people in countries where internet speeds are down at dial-up rates of 28.8kbps on a good day and where it is rare for workers to have their own internet connection in the office let alone at home.

I mentioned the recent post I’d written about myspace pages taking 5 minutes to load in India and Brazil.

It struck me that it would make sense for people with such low speed connections to the internet to use the mobile versions of the websites instead.

Another advantage of the mobile versions of these sites is that they cut out a lot of the clutter that you see on the normal pages because they’ve been pared down for faster download speeds for mobile devices.

Try these out for size:

• Flickr mobile site (yes, photos not best for low bandwidth I guess)
• Yahoo
• BBC News
• BBC homepage
• National Rail enquiries (UK)
• eBay (UK)

The following appear to intercept my browser request, notice I’m not on a mobile, and serve me the standard versions. Maybe there’s a way round this.

• m.facebook.com
• m.google.com

I’ve just received my PINsentry device from Barclays.

It’s the size of a pocket calculator (remeber those?) or a largish mobile phone.

So to do online banking with Barclays, you now have to carry this device around with you everywhere you go as well as have your bank card handy.

This is meant to make things super-secure.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have five online bank accounts which I check fairly regularly. Does this mean I’m going to end up having to lug five of these devices around everywhere I go?

Perhaps someone could design bank-agnostic device that works for any bank card?

More on the PINsentry at BBC NEWS | Business | Barclays steps up online security

Two things struck me when reading this article about Google’s Orkut being bigger than Facebook in India and Brazil.

First, that people are prepared to wait up to five minutes for a page to load.

Orkut - 1.5 minutes
Facebook - 2.5 minutes
Myspace - 5 minutes

You can quickly see why Orkut is favoured over the others.

Those of us with broadband connections to the internet quickly forget how lucky we are - I get frustrated if a site takes longer than two seconds or so to load on my screen.

Second, that through a mixutre of poor product management and complacency, the Internet is awash with bloatware - i.e. inefficient and badly architected software - which takes longer to download, clogs up the Internet and, in the long run, will hamper the companies creating it.

Google says “the web is better when it’s social” so it must be true.

OpenSocial from Google. Not another social network.

Is this a nail in Facebook’s coffin?

It’s funny, I’ve become so accustomed to consciously ingnoring google ads on web pages that the little box promoting the opensocial blog on the homepage nearly escaped my attention.

[...] I think we have been slow to embrace blogs as a way of discussing our strategy and direction. This often leads to the debate happening elsewhere, based often on only half the information, and without our being able fully to join in the debate. We’ve not done ourselves any favours, and we want to use this blog to re-engage with our friends and critics.

Ashley Highfield

Ergo… the BBC Internet Blog

Welcome to the BBC Internet blog, a sister blog to the existing Editors’ blogs for News and Sport. A place where we, senior staff from BBC Future Media teams will talk about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, our mobile services and the BBC’s presence on the internet.

The links on this blog and its del.icio.us stream are chosen by Alan Connor and Nick Reynolds.

Good luck to Nick et al.

From TechCrunch:

Facebook Takes the Microsoft Money And Runs.

The $240 million is a minority stake that values the company at $15 billion.

Uh oh…

This from CNNMoney.Com:

A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard.

Via a certain high-profile blog on our intranet! :)

Every so often an idea comes along that has the potential to change the game. When it does, you find yourself saying - “Sheesh, of course that was going to happen. Why didn’t I predict it?” Well, I didn’t predict this happening, but here it is, happening anyway.

In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle (and the spider that fuels the Internet Archive), is going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it. Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index - about 100 terabytes of data. It’s best known for its toolbar-based traffic and site stats, which are much debated and, regardless, much used across the web.

[...]

I am quite sure this means that Yahoo and Google will have to stare hard at their own (somewhat limited) search services and APIs, and think what they might do to compete, that much is certain. And if this starts to gain traction, all of a sudden, Amazon is a major search player, right next to Yahoo, Google, MSN, and IAC. A9+Alexa+web services= hmmmm….

Via John Batelle’s Searchblog

I’m full of admiration and respect for Tim O’Reilly but I get really wound up by what he’s coined “Web 2.0” or “web 2 point oh” as it seems to be pronounced.

It’s just the web. Nothing more nothing less.

Giving it a version number somehow suggests it’s something that can be commoditised, productised, owned.

It’s not like we’re living in “Earth 7.0″

Sure, there are ages of the web, but to suggest that there’s something called Web 2.0 implies we’ve been running up through minor versions of Web 1.0 and that sometime in the not too distant we’ll be pointing our handhelds at Web three point oh purlease…

</rant>

If you add in every small business in the world - and believe me, Google is thinking that way - you can sum up Google’s ambitions in the commercial world as this: the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire world economy.

John Battelle in his new book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

And from Battelle’s blog last week a post about base.google.com…

Word is ripping around the web that Google is testing a new subdomain called base.google.com. A screen shot - the site has been up and down - shows a Google database of sorts where you can “Post your items on Google.” It’s a tagged database of stuff that heads directly into the world of Paul Ford’s classic “Google Takes All” essay.

It’s weird. Even though lots of the time Google’s search doesn’t bring back what I want, and even though they’re starting to take over the world, my overall experience of Google is positive. I don’t feel the same sense of “can I trust them?” I feel when I’m using (or thinking of using) products and services supplied by other global brands.

I’ve been looking for some open source calendar software to sit alongside my blog for my own personal use and to share if useful one or two event categories with friends and family

Having just read that a google calendar might be with us within a month, I might just wait and see what it looks like.

Blogging is changing and challenging journalism. It changed and challenged mine even though I was doing the blogging. It is a way to focus the collective intelligence of the audience onto the facts and arguments. Moblogging from a single device that can do words, pictures, audio and video gives us a taste of the future: when the device can produce broadcast quality video the only limitation will be bandwidth. Everybody will have their own TV station. I can hear that line from The Incredibles - “when everyone is special nobody will be”. But it does not necessarily follow, since blogging, like Google, is a way of voting for excellence and even, frighteningly, voting for truth.

Paul Mason rounds off his Newsnig8t blog with some fascinating thoughts on blogging, journalism and what’s happening to broadcasting.

Several times recently I’ve been describing walks and runs to people and thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to plot them out on the amazing Google maps service.

It already does a great job with routes from A to B (say East Dulwich to Marylebone High Street - my current daily bicycle commute).

Imagine being able to put a shape (circle, say) on to a map and then drag its edges to particular co-ordinates or landmarks until you’ve mapped out your route.

Then you could save this route and send it as a link to someone or link to it from your website.

I was just wondering if anyone has any info on anything like this being developed anywhere?

I’ve just spent 10 minutes filling in Cameron Marlow’s weblog survey for his phd at MIT

I’m looking forward to seeing his results

Your expected outcome:
Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Lab -22
Con -53
	Lib Dem 88
UKIP -3
	Green 52

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Now that the election has been called, you can use this site to find out what your ex-MP did throughout the last parliament. We have performance stats, speeches, voting records and more…

theyworkforyou.com

A piece in today’s Guardian Online lists some of the web’s top search engines as a “new search war breaks out”

I’ve set them up below for easy access.

The groupings are taken from the paper version of the Guardian. (One or two missing from the original list until I have time to get them to work)

Today Microsoft launches MSN Search which it hopes will give Larry and Sergei a run for their money.

Looks like the folks behind it have taken a leaf out of the minimalist design book, and the results are delivered in a very familiar style to Google’s.

However good it is, personally it would take an awful lot to make me switch.

Even though I don’t always get what I think I want from Google, it’s built up one hell of a lot of loyalty points with me over the last few years (I think that alone will help keep them ahead of the rest for quite a while).