Tasty flowers
After all the talk about “the real life” on my blog, it is clearly time for a geeky post ;) Today I’m moving another part of my digital life online: Bookmarks. I’m probably a bit late to the party here, but I evaluated the options for quite a while. I wasn’t too impressed with the feature-set and user interface of deli.cio.us (besides the fact that I can never remember where to put those damn dots…). The release of ma.gnolia was more exciting, providing ratings, private bookmarks, nice typography and more social features. I’m totally digging (no pun intended) the concept of tagging, and have been pretty busy converting my “web 1.0”-hierarchy to sensible tags – take a look. Apple, can you please give me a filesystem that natively supports tags? (and I’m not talking about those stinkin’ smart folders, which are basically fake filesystem-searches). Two reasons why it took me so long to make the switch are speed and integration: Magnolia was painfully slow when it was released in 2006. And I was under the impression that the process of creating a new bookmark online wasn’t unobtrusive enough to actually be useable. Thanks to Safari, I call the ma.gnolia-bookmarklet by simply pressing Apple+1 now, easy as pie. These days, I’m always wondering what I get back for putting stuff on the interwebs. One of the biggest advantages for being active on last.fm is that you get music recommendations based on your input. It would be great to have these fuzzy recommendations for all kinds of services, say “People who read this feed are also interested in” or “People with similar bookmarks”.
Music-Listening 2.0
Our parents probably owned a dozen albums that carried them through their whole youth – nowadays, I’m already getting bored of the 4392 songs on my harddrive. I’m listening to the same music over and over again… Time for a fresh approach: Web-based collaborative listening! The free service “Last.fm” analyzes your musical taste by tracking iTunes (and for all you interface-masochists: It does WinAmp, too ;). Based on this data, Last.fm gives you a personalized radio-station. Unlike Pandora this personalization is much more than an algorithm: You can join music-groups, build a network of friends with the same musical taste, you can even tag music-collections and choose them as your new radiostation! Charts are generated globally, on a specific country (I always wondered what people are listening in Azerbaijan g), on a specific band, tag, usergroup. If I like a new song from my personal stream, I click on the bandname to get their tags, usergroups, best songs – well, you get the idea: everything’s interconnected :) The idea of personalized music is not new, but Last.fm is probably the first service which really kicks ass doing it – check it out!
My Info-Addiction
Check out my
Bloglines-Account to see
what I’m talking about: More than 50 news-sources generate about
200-300 news-items for me every day. Gee, great! While it’s nice to
have all those webdesign-trends, music-reviews and mac-rumors in
one place, it’s getting a real burden to keep up to the masses of
information. I’ve even begun to relay news-item into bookmarks for
“later reading” rather than simply dismissing them. While some of
the information is valueable for my job/studies, most of it is just
gossip and pointless info-junk.
Example: Take the whole Mac-Rumors. Even on their first occurrence
they are obsolete, but they get really redundant when being picked
up by other newsmags, often just crosslinking without additional
comments. The “New Powermacs?”-Rumors recently added up to a dozen
items, all talking about the same vague info. Same on the 1001st
“Why Mac?”-article – I just can’t resist to read it, although all
the arguments are barely new to me.
So, what’s the solution? Perhaps it’s just better filtering of
interesting topics, fine-tuned RSS-subscriptions (only certain
topics and tags), or even a personal editor which pre-selects my
news (well, someday…*g*). The most practical approach I found
yet: social bookmarking, which could also be transferred to RSS
easily. Check del.icio.us/popular/,
a service which shows the “hot bookmarks of the day” (but beware,
very addictive!). Another approach is Google News, which uses
software for the same thing (see
Newsmap
for a great interface-idea).
Or maybe…just subscribe less feeds, go out, read a book? Welcome to
the life of an info-junkie *g
Am I addicted?
I’m just buying my sixth and seventh shirt from threadless.com. I don’t know if it’s just the first rays of sun in Germany, or my addiction to shirts in general. But hey, they’re so darned cheap (10$ each)! :D Plus, I can now get my daily fix of well-designed and meaningful clothing at “preshrunk, a weblog dedicated only to shirt-stuff.
