Filed under: Laptops, Tablet PCs

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

A

An interesting new online video series, called Open Media Web, debuted today. The first episode is an interview with Yahoo's Lucas Gonze - who created music playlisting service WebJay, acquired by Yahoo! in January 2006. The interview was conducted by Chris Messina and Brian Oberkirch. In it Gonze discusses his thoughts on the Open Media Web, on user-respectful business models and coercive business practices, and business opportunities for open systems and data.

Lucas Gonze is one of the smartest people around in online music. In the video he discusses not only Open Media Web theory, but practical examples including last.fm and MySpace. He says the latter doesn't allow their music Flash player to be used externally in badges, which he generally labels "coercive behavior".

A Happy New Year to all our readers around the world! Here are some fun Mashable facts from the year, some more accurate than others (mail counts are hard to do, but I tried!):

6 512 - Number of posts published so far this year

300% - the growth in employee numbers in 2007

500% - Mashable.com growth this year

1200% - approx revenue growth in 2007

Fast Company - the Magazine that named Mashable one of the top 10 “Bigs of the Blogs” for 2007

Forbes - the magazine that named me a Top 25 Web Celeb in 2007 (aww…shucks)

PC Magazine - the Magazine that named Mashable one of its favorite blogs this year

77,661 - the number of Mashable-related mails I’ve received this year (approx count from Gmail, excludes spam and trash)

Adam - the most common name among the Mashable team (and a constant source of confusion)

800+ - the number of people who have attended a MashMeet since they began in November

1,215,838 - the number of views received by our most popular post this year (guess which one?)

Top 10 - Mashable’s position in the global ranking of blogs

New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago - the top locations of Mashable readers.

You - the person who made this possible!

Share This

So it’s the end of the year and I seem to be on a bit of a retro gaming kick, so I was stoked to find the AtGames Mega Drive Portable, a 20-in-1 handheld Sega Genesis device.

Alex Kidd, Golden Axe, and Altered Beast are just three of the twenty games included, and besides having a 320×240 backlit LCD to play on, the device has AV-out, meaning you can plug it into your TV. Sweet.

sega genesis portable: get your retro jollies on the run [Technabob]

ShareThis

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

After being hampered by habitual delays both legal and technical, it looks like the long-awaited über-tech of the display world may finally be on the cusp of reaching market, as Canon is reportedly developing a way to build surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) TVs without using contentious IP. Specifically, Japanese newspaper Asahi is reporting -- without citing sources -- that Canon is working on a "non-carbon" method of producing the sets that bypasses the Nano-Proprietary patents at the heart of that lawsuit. Still no hint on when we'll actually be able to install one of these models in our home theater, but the promise of unrivaled black levels, brightness, and contrast could well have us drinking the SED Kool-Aid for years to come.

[Via Bloomberg, thanks Dr. MORO]

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.

Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!

I stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for my own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, I've seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.

1. Re-enforce your learning at the end of year

The inspiration for this post came from social media aficionado Tim Bonneman's practice of tagging all the words he looks up online with the tag "dictionary." At the end of the year, he posted the full list of links to his blog. What a great way to deepen recall of the things you've learned!

2. Build a collaborative tag stream for a community of practice

One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSS feeds become available. One community of practice, a loose group of nonprofit technologists, uses the tag "nptech" to mark items of interest in del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, youtube and elsewhere. The feeds for nptech items in all of these services are then combined into one NPtech metafeed.

That makes a good community news feed, but it can be taken even further. At one point as many as 2000 people were using the tag nptech - that can be a lot of information. Consultant Beth Kanter now publishes a summary of each week's highlights from the Nptech feed over at NetSquared.

3. Create a shared items feed and put it on your web page

Many of our readers probably use the shared items feature in Google Reader. That service continues to grow more sophisticated - last week it added any shared items feeds from your Gmail contacts to your list of subscribed feeds, for example.

While that's pretty hot - there's something to be said for baking your own, too. If you tag items something like "toshare" in a service like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia then you can share URLs that you find outside of Google Reader and you can switch feed readers/tagging services without loosing all your shared items subscribers.

Click for "blog and shared small". Powered by RSS Feed DigestI did this on my personal blog this year by taking the feed from my items tagged "toshare" in del.icio.us and running it through the service FeedDigest. There I got a PHP snippet to display my links and notes on the sidebar of my blog (it's also live here in javascript on the right of this post, albeit a touch wonky with CSS). I also spliced the toshare feed together with my blog's feed (via FeedDigest) and ran the spliced feed through Feedburner. I then added a link to my sidebar offering my shared items + blog posts feed for subscription via Feedburner. Several hundred people have subscribed to get my links and knowing that someone else cares is a huge motivation to keep tagging things I find online. I open my bookmarking app to tag something "toshare" and while I've got it open I may as well give it a few other tags as well for better classification.

This winter I switched from Del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia for my social bookmarking and it was easy to replace the Del.icoi.us feed in FeedDigest with the Ma.gnolia feed. Nothing changed as far as Feedburner was concerned, it was still getting the same spliced feed URL - so all my subscribers are still getting my links.

If you're curious, by the way, the reasons I swithed to Ma.gnolia include: OpenID login, a very active development team, engagement with the newest data standards like oAuth and APML, live customer support chat by Pibb IM (also with OpenID, RSS) and a couple of other very cool features. The user community there is quite impressive, too.

4. Tag into a mobile reader

In addition to tagging things "toshare" I've also taken recently to tagging items "toread" and pulling that feed into Netvibes. Netvibes has a great <a href="http://m.netvibes.com"mobile interface that's good for checking a small number of feeds in between full-reader sessions.

Adding my toread tag to Netvibes has made it easy for me to catch up on things I want to read while traveling around town. Sometimes I'll just read the most widely popular items from my toread feed, by running that feed through AideRSS and getting a new feed of the 20% of those items that were most tagged, Dugg, commented on and linked to. AideRSS can be applied on top of all of the methods on this list.

It's another way that I'm incentivized to open up that tagging interface more than I would be if I was only saving things for posterity. Now a searchable archive of key pages is available as a secondary consequence of tagging things toread and toshare.

5. Tag your microblog posts

If you think opening up del.icio.us to save something is more trouble than it's often worth, then I'm sure you'll agree that it can feel really overwhelming to compose an entire blog post! (I wrote about this once and got linked to by the BBC, whereupon I was promptly called a loser by snarky British readers for even bringing up the dilemma. "Blogging," one said, "is like wearing a coat that says I am Billy No Mates." That's the funniest insult I think I've ever received.)

ANYWAY, I know I'm not alone in finding it much easier to share information over Twitter than by blogging or tagging in a social bookmarking app. Enter Hashtags. Like tagging for Twitter, hashtags are terms you put after a # in a post. Hashtags.org then aggregates all the tweets using a given tag and publishes an RSS feed. Reading a feed of short messages sent from the #sandiegofires was very interesting, for example.

Though you can certainly just subscribe to a search feed through a service like Terraminds - Hashtags let you do all the things in microblogging that you can do using the methods described in numbers 1 through 4 above. See also Dave Sifry's new project Hoosgot - a service he calls the Lazyweb for the age of Twitter.

5 1/2 The future

In a future that leverage our Attention Data, we'll be able to tag things in order to influence our Attention Profiles. What does that mean? It means that once you've exposed your Ma.gnolia APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) to your Bloglines RSS reader - then you'll be able to influence the feeds that Bloglines recommends to you by tagging certain things in Ma.gnolia.

Perhaps you discover that you love reading African photoblogs but you don't know much about the field. Tag a few that you discover in Ma.gnolia and the next time you open up Bloglines it will notice that you've expressed a new interest and recommend some of the top African photoblogs in its giant feed database.

That future isn't terribly far off, in fact. Ma.gnolia already publishes a rudimentary APML file for each user and Bloglines has announced that it will support APML soon.

Conclusion

So tagging hasn't taken off like early fans thought it would - but it's still really useful. If we explore ways that it can provide tangible, short-term, personal value then we can score the long term, aggregate value as a result. I wish it weren't that way - but that's how I've found value in the practice myself.

So let's tag some terms we have to look up the definitions for this year! Please let readers here know about any other super cool tagging practices you've experimented with.

If you drive across the country to rape a 15-year old girl and her sister whom you’ve met playing Xbox Live, it’s likely not a good idea to text message them and tell them you’re on your way. That’s what this cyber-savvy creep did in Spokane did over the weekend, driving from New York to Washington to stalk the girls. The details are pretty typical of such a case, but between the meeting on Xbox, googling the girls for personal information, and text messaging criminal intent, this is one scary cautionary tale.

Also, check out all the Bible references on his MySpace page. Totally weird.

New York man arrested after traveling to Spokane to stalk girls [KHQ Right Now]

ShareThis

How come I don’t find things like this before Xmas? This is the Gen-X Dual station, likely the weirdest console I’ve ever met. It’s an NES and a Sega Genesis combined into one, but the thing is it doesn’t use ROMs; it uses the old cartridges you’ve got in that box in the back of your closet.

Yes, this is real.

Gen-X Dual station plays Sega Genesis and NES games [Technabob, via Robot Ramblings via Slippery Brick]

ShareThis

It’s the end of the year - almost quite literally. I’ve only got a few more hours to figure out what my personal goals list will be for next year, but I can at least publish my geek goals so that I’ll have some public accountability as to whether any of these will be achieved in 2008.

Most of these are fairly open, too. My guess is that most of you will be able to adopt most or all of this list as your own. Let’s make it a year to remember. Let’s actually achieve some New Year’s resolutions.

01) Log-in to my social networks more than twice a week.
Whether it is because of the copious amounts of spam on MySpace, or the unending piles of Pirate v. Ninja notifications on Facebook, I somehow can’t bring myself to log into either one of them more often than a couple times a week. Interestingly enough, I’m finding that Twitter fills the gaps that I joined Facebook for in the first place. I wanted to be a part of Facebook so that I could communicate with interesting folks in my industry, but as my Twitter network grows, I’m finding that it is much easier to find folks I’m interested in talking to there, than wading through the hassle that is a web-based social network.

Still, there are benefits, like the centralized apps and mini-feed views, that are afforded from Facebook that you simply can’t get out of Twitter. Having one spot for productivity and a quick glance at what my friends have been up to recently is something I’m missing out on.

02) Drink the Apple Kool-Aid
I got my first new laptop computer in several years. Typically, I’m the sort of guy who will buy a machine that’s a generation or two back because I love bargains, and most of the time it is good enough for what I do daily. Since joining up at Mashable and spending literally 12 hours straight on the computer every day, I figured it was time to upgrade. I got a Black Friday special laptop from Dell, a speedy little Vostro 1000. Unfortunately, it came with Vista, and I must say I’m slightly less than impressed with it.

On the other hand, folks with the Apple laptops are always expressing their condolences and telling me how super-great Leopard is. They’re finally starting to wear me down. I want to be one of the shiny happy people now. The Hare Krishna act has finally worn me down. At some point next year, I suppose I’m going to need to drink the Apple Kool-Aid, and hope the increased productivity is worth the sack to my identity as a PC guy.

03) Set up a spam bot for Ron Paul
Because as much as he concerns me with his associations with the Alex Jones’ of the political fringe, unfortunately he’s the one that most closely represents my political desires (based on his Congressional voting record). Additionally, he’s probably the most tech-friendly Presidential candidate. I can vote for him, as I voted for Badnarik last cycle, but voting for the underdog doesn’t always get the job done.

What does get the job done? Apparently setting up spam servers works. Got him all that campaign money. I’m tech savvy, it is the least I can do to help the old coot.

04) Get control of my personal brand.
Not only is my personal website under construction, but as I try out more social networks and lifestreaming utilities, I’ve spread my personal brand all over the Internet. I’ve got podcasts, domains, writings, tumblogs, linkblogs and RSS feeds scattered all over the internet bearing my name. I need to find one or two good utilities and a slick looking format with which to consolidate it all in a useful, user-friendly manner.

05) Invest in the next Google.
I see and profile, what, twenty, thirty startups a day? I should be able to spot the next winner out of this bunch. I wanna be a Web 2.0 billionaire (or whatever we end up calling the buzzword du jour next year).

06) Get my calendaring organized.
This is the one area of my life I’m still really sucking at getting migrated out to the cloud. I still manage my calendaring with a local exchange server that synchronizes with a copy of Outlook on my local machine, which synchronizes with my ancient Asus WinCE unit and my wife’s video iPod. I really like Google’s calendaring, and I know that sites like Upcoming and others are great. I just haven’t found the one calendaring site that manages all my task list and todo needs as well as synchronizing with my ancient mobile devices.

07) Travel to more conferences.
I enjoy networking. I enjoy learning. I enjoy showing myself off as an expert. I even enjoy traveling. I should go to more conferences.

08) Fix my grammar errors.
I’m sure the regular Mashable readers can back me up here. WordPress doesn’t have grammar correction like desktop based word processors, and thus many dangling participles and silly “its-it’s” errors often slip past me. WordPress either needs to implement grammar into the SpellChecker, or I need to get more attentive to these errors. I don’t care which one happens, but I’m tired of Suezanne always calling me out on my grammar errors, I know that much.

09) Make the next blockbuster online video podcast.
It has been a minute since I’ve done any work in video podcasting. My last valiant efforts were before the rampant investment in video monetization firms. With YouTube monetizing, Revver paying out $30 CPM, and BlinkX boasting upwards of $60 CPM, now is the time to make something happen.

10) Get my email under control.
As I write this, I have 2551 unread messages sitting in my inbox. Aside from the 500 emails a day into the Mashable inbox that are forwarded to me, I’ve also got WordPress forwarding me everyone’s comments and track-backs, as well as a 10 year old email account that sends me a hundred or two pieces of Bacn a day. Add to that notifications from my social networks and the occasional email from someone I can actually correspond with, and it’s a monumental task to deal with. I need to set up more advance filtering and make more liberal usage of the delete button.

Share This