I have been blogging now for about a year and a half and one difference I have noticed between my blog and the blogs I read is the participation level. Granted some of the blogs are read are written by the social elite of the bologosphere, but even some of the lesser blogs get more participation than I do. It’s not like I don’t get any readers, I check my stats regular and get almost 1000 unique visitors on average each month, many of them repeat visitors. My question is this, what am I doing wrong? Does my content suck? Does my quality of writing suck? If you are a reader who visits often or semi-regularly, please respond. Let me know your opinion on what you want to see. Even if you just stumbled upon my blog, take a few minutes and read through some of my archives and let me know what I am doing wrong. Any help/advice is greatly appreciated!
Archive for January, 2006
Build your own mini-emp RFID Zapper. Take that big brother!
So I have finally fallen into the web 2.0 craze and started using some of the web 2.0 services. Some of them I am happy with, some of them I am not so happy with.
43 Things
43 Things is basically a to-do list on crack. You can enter anything you want and they are treated as tags. Anyone can search them and add them to thier to do list. You can use this as a daily to do list or a “things I want to do before I die” list, or somewhere in between. Every ‘thing’ created on the site has it’s own page that lists who has finished it, who want’s to do it, has a discussion board so people can discuss thier experiences with it. Ties in with 43 Things is 43 Places, 43 People, and All Consuming.
They are all pretty much the same. 43 Places is for places you want to go or have been. 43 People is for people you want to meet or have met. All Consuming is a bit different than the rest beig a list of things you have ‘consumed.’ From the obvious food and beverages to books, movies, and anythign else you may want to put on the list. Sort of a ‘Social Consumer Review’ website. Everything said I really like this network of websites. You can view my profile and get started with your own ‘things!’
Newsvine
Newsvine is the newest in News 2.0 offerings. Basically it is a news website that combines the best of editorial news postings and user contributes news postings. Think a combination of Digg and Slashdot. It encompasses much more than technology however. It allows you to add certain tag’s to your watchlist so you can keep an eye on certain topics or categories of news stories.
It has many different types of news stories you can view. There is the ’standard’ edtiorial posts, usually tha main news article and topics for things you would fine on CNN, BBC, and the like. It also allows users to submit stories and tag them. Users are allowed to vote on these stories ala Digg, however that does not play a huge part which is something I am a fan of. I won’t go off on that rant as plenty already have. It also allows any user to write thier own news articles, tag them, and have them read. A great way for any up and coming journalist to get some cred and gain a following.
This is currently in a private beta stage. Although as far as I am concerned, that is just a media hype, it is definately reday for the masses. They are giving everyone who signs up 20 invites and invites are easy as pie to come by. Kinda like when gmail started giving out invites like crazy once it was ready for the masses but still wanted to keep the hype going as long as possible. If anyone want’s an invite, you can reach via my about page and I will hook you up.
I have also started using the typical web services some would consider web 2.0 more frequently. flickr has alot more than I ever thought it did. I have been using it to store photo’s for a while now, but there are flickr groups too. Communities for anything and everything where they post discussions and photos. Really liking that right now. GMail is an obvious one, no need to go into that. And one that alot of people won’t agree with me on is Digg. It has it’s problems of course, my main pet peeve being that just about anything useless can get onto the front page and take up space. It does often have some decent news stories worth reading however. I subscribe to my friends digg feed’s only and occasionally check the front page or search for something. There is also Feendlounge which I wrote a review of a few days ago. I am not currently using this service as my paypal account is not in order just yet, but I fully intend to be using it by the end of the month.
That about wraps up my web 2.0 experience thus far. I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid it, was just a matter of time before I fell in.
There is a music video for When I Wake Up by Wintergreen that explains the story of the ill fated E.T. game for the Atari 2600.
The FeedLounge demo is finally up and running. I think I got in on mine a bit late because mine only lasted for an hour or so. Plenty of time in my opinion.
FL is everything I have wanted in a feed reader. It has the 3 parallel plane layout, very intuitive interface, a great tagging/categorizing implementation, it is quite speedy, and it is centrally located.
It is not without it’s problems however. It had a few problems importing some of my OPML feeds. A few times when switching between feeds it would hang and not load them. I also didn’t see any way to manually refresh a feed. Of course I didn’t have much time to explore it, if it is not there yet, i’m sure it will be soon.
All things considered, I really like feedlounge, and intend to sign up for it just as soon as I get my financial situation sorted out. I also highly recomend taking the tour and seeing for yourself.
