TC reports about Backtype, a Twitter for comments:

They’re a blog-comment focused startup – founders Christoper Golda and Michael Montano are for the first time aggregating all comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream. Think Twitter for all comments on the web.

A quick check shows that yes indeed they scraped a lot of websites. Which I don’t remeber agreeing on.

I left the following comment on the article (instead of rearranging the same sentences here i copy and paste it):

Especially as you are funded, you are in it for the money. Where is my share of you using my content without proper licencing rights?

Basically, you are scraping my content and display it without my consent. The fact that I comment on a blog like this or conciously add content through a site like discus does not make my content fair game for anybody else to scrape.

Do I see this to be useful? Yes. Is it a valuable ressource once filled? Yes. Could you have made a database from all those nuts early beta testers and how they handed over their blogs? Absolutly.

Am I amused to find my content in there displayed in a fashion I do not agree without being asked first? Absolutly not. Even less so as there is no way to opt out of where you should have asked in the first place.

Even more so since you yourself take protecting ‘your’ content seriously. From the T&C

“All trademarks not owned by BackType that appear on this Site are the property of their respective owners, who may or may not be affiliated with, connected to, or sponsored by BackType. BackType-originated content included on the Site, such as text, graphics, logos, data compilations and the compilation of all content on the Site, is the property of BackType and its licensors and protected by US and international copyright laws. Except as set out in these Terms, no reproduction of any BackType-originated content is permitted without written permission from BackType. User-posted content is copyrighted, and any use or reproduction of user-posted content must comply with the terms of the respective license(s) and must include a label indicating such license.”

btw this makes me rethink my idea to move my word to a more ‘scrapeable’ plattform like wordpress.

The thing probably rubbing me off the most is the clear statement on what they want to do with contetn you leave on their sites while at the same time doing the opposite with ‘your’ content. Even more so ‘it’s licensor‘.

Now I know that I am no guru in data mining, but I know that most people have no clue about it. Even worse: No imagination about what is possible. There is a built in business modell for brands and more to have a company like this scan comments left on your site for information they would like to know and compile. Which per se is not a bad thing, I am all for business.

But it is done behind your back, using your ressources and in the end content you provide on other sites to make money off.

Second, it does expose your behaviour on the web. Are you sure you want that for others to see? Do search your name for a moment and see how far back it goes. Basic rule: Everything which can be traced and data mined will be. (It is not as if it suddenly hits me as ‘oh my god I never knew that. Quite the opposite.)

Now, tell me, where can you see that you can delete this comment? Don’t think it is relevant? Have you ever asked somebody to change or remove a comment because of any reason? Good luck with changing it on this site and followers to come. Oh and its licencors.

btw: If you think you have nothing to “hide” you just have no imagination.

Have you ever restrained yourself not to mention a person or company in a blog post because you did not want to go through the hassle of linking to it, because it was additional work? Did you ever find yourself wondering why you needed to do this over and over again although your computer can learn other things when you repeat them? Excactly.

If you get used to how tools work and what features they provide, you are disappointed when you encounter new tools in a slightly different setting and they did not learn from what was already available. I have been talking about that a lot in the past in regard to Feeds and lifestreams (no experience gathered from personal scoring systems of Usenet) and Chats like Twitter (nothing learned from IRC).

Blog postings are another area where I am missing so many features I am used to from other tools. My search for an offline blog editor fell flat so many times because as somebody who is used to work efficiently in Windows most tools are just not living up to my expectations. It starts with a UI which is not up to par with how Windows is set up (I am a Windows user, I do not care about cross plattform), none existent or poorly done keyboard shortcuts (I live by them) and does not end with cross application features. Many people for example never understood how powerful the clipboard really is.

You know you are a geek when two words can send you in a state of delight.
Imagine my delight when I paid again a closer look at the new technical preview of the Windows Live Writer and noticed this time the term auto linking. Yes there are template solutions available. The magic word here is ?auto?.

It is a feature I have been missing from the beginning: Automatic linking at known words, called I think Auto Correction in the English Word. Used for spelling mistakes, it basically takes whatever you are typing and replaces it with something you want to have instead. I always deleted the whole file of suggestions and replaced it with my own typical mistakes plus used it in a short hand way. For example typing gbw would result in “Global Business Women” so I would not need to type that every single time.

And the link you see there with Global Business Women is how the new preview of Windows Live Writer handles the first mentioning of this term: It links it because it is in the dictionary. Notice how it is not linked to the second? That is a setting as well.

Though it does not replace like in Word it at least makes the links. It would be great if it would be handled like in Word because then you could use something like lname to change into <name with a link>. I am missing an import / export feature (yet) but the adding process is nice enough for the moment. As I know I will be writing a lot about Reboot over the next weeks, I will add a link to it once through the dialog and have it added automatically next time I write. I could use the word reboot10 to be more specific, but actually, when I write Reboot (especially with a capital R) it is unlikly for me to mean the verb.

Highlighting the word Reboot and hitting CTRL-K I get this dialog:

And my new entry for the autolinking is ready. Next time I write Reboot like this it will not get linked; but it would if I removed the original link and did write it again, so the tool is checking against ?already entered yes / no?. Now there are still a lot of kinks in it and knowing what Word provides with this feature I am greedy and want all of that as well. :)

My suggestion if you are not on the search for a new editor
You may not be looking for a new blog editor and it may seem contraintuitive, but how about making use of the tools at hand? Prewrite part of your posts in a tool like Live Writer, hit the source view and c&p it to your blogging platform and work from there. Even though my blog platform does not work well together with WLW (the metaweblog api seems not to be implemented well enough) I do use it for all of the writing and automatic upload of the images and then quickly edit the rest online. And there are several things I do not like how WLW implements them, so I just clean it up with a script in my text editor afterwards. Too much hassle? Not really, because the amount of time saved and the increased pleasure of writing is very much worth the extra steps.

Faking import and export
Though the current version does not yet have an import / export feature, the file itself is stored as XML in this path (if C: ist your homedrive):

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\LinkGlossary\linkglossary.xml

[Thanks to Dirk for helping me out with that, Vista search is just unusable and my locate32 failed me. ]
The file is structured extremly simple:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<glossary>
<entry>
   <text>Reboot</text>
   <url>http://reboot.dk</url>
   <title>   </title>
   <rel>   </rel>
   <openInNewWindow>False</openInNewWindow>
</entry>
</glossary>

With a spreadsheet and some text editors search and replace you can make and keep your personal link file in seconds. Due to the structured xml file, even exporting it again and working with it is a piece of cake.

It is not only a blog posting tool, it is a marketing vehicle for other services from MS
Have a look at the second half of this writer demonstration. Once you get over the ?bah it is scripted? you should pay attention at how easy it is made for a normal user to a) do great enhanced blog postings and b) even more important get tied into using Microsoft offerings from Video to Maps to more.

Now imagine how MS pushed this to the massed out there and they get used to having these features at hand for blogging. Now go back again to a plattform like WordPress and have a look at the dashboard and imagine your mom and dad. Do they really need to have that ugly interface to have control which they do not desire or do you think they will go for a Spaces account (which they have anyway) and use the shiny tools at hand? Exactly.

Further links:

• Writer Zone – Windows Live Writer team blog
• Get Productive with Windows Live Writer – Guide for Power Bloggers

Plugins for WLW + a selection:

• WLW Scrubber
  Some code that WLW automatically add into your post make you angry? With this plugin, you just select the entire post, and then click on this plugin (Insert Scrubbed Content), some code such as "<div class="wlWriterEditableSmartContent" … will be removed
  Note: does not work with Vista, not tested on other systems
• Related Posts
  This plugin provides a way to add a "related posts" section in your blog post no matter what blog system you’re using.That said, the plugin does depend on del.icio.us on which you have to save links (and tags) to all of your blog entries for the plugin to reference (see Usage below).
• Imtech Find & Replace Live Writer Plugin
  The missing search & replace feature for Windows Live Writter. Supports Regular Expression replace as well
• Polaroid Picture
  Add cool Polaroid-style pictures to your blog. This plugin allows you to tilt your polaroid in either direction and even add a text-caption to the photo.
• Insert Source Code Snippet
  This plugin converts clipboard with source code copied from Visual Studio or any other development environment and converts it into well-formatted HTML to post into your blog. Optionally you can add lines numbering or formated header for your snippet. It also detects, that the content of clipboard has been changed and promp you to update your snippet
• Text Template
  The Text Template plugin lets you save commonly used "snips" of HTML. From phrases you use, to moods, links, terms and more. Apply Categories to your templates to allow for easy sorting and filtering. You can even givem them their own icon…
• Flickr4Writer
  Flickr4Writer is a plugin that enables interaction with the Flickr(tm) services. You can browse by tags, photosets, or a simple photostream. After browsing, the plugin enables inserting the image reference into a post.
• Event Plugin
  Create your own events or find existing events through intergrated search of the Eventful.com website. Format the event, add a picture, edit the description, customize what data is displayed. The published post included correct hCalendar microformatting. The plugin also enables pastes of Live Clipboard copied events and Blog This of events from the Eventful.com website.
• FF Addon Live Writerfox

Friendfeed is a collection of your streams, or in my case the streams I find ‘worthy’ enough to be displayed as mine. Meaning I will not give you my every Upcoming entry, nor Amazon wish list entry etc, and I will heavily try to avoid duplicates. Up until now that meant routing my twitter updates to status updates on my Facebook profile, as it makes sense but for example not include my jaiku stream in Friendfeed because jaiku just receives my twitter updates.

And while friendfeed has a lot of relevant features missing, I somehow like them and I see how they improve their offering.

The (un) expected benefit

I basically installed the Facebook app because I wanted the Facebook profile link in my friendfeed profile plus wanted to have a look at the way it displays in my profile.

It puts all the entries of my friendfeed page into facebook and while I would have preferred to have an option of a ‘clean’ feed without liking / comments, I can see why they provide it. I added this to my facebook profile because it makes sense to show what I am doing in other spaces.

I did expect to be able to find the friends on Facebook who also use the service, and to be able to subscribe to them. Which it did, and I now doubled the number of people I am subscribed to – in other words, roughly a third of my facebook friends seem to be on Friendfeed with the app installed.

What I did not expect was the automated subscription (nice) plus the subscribing back – it seems as if everybody who has installed the app on facebook now is automatically subscribed to me. I have a hunch that they did not get the information via mail like they would have gotten if I manually subscribed to them (bad), but they should see me suddenly popping up in their friendfeed.

So if you like an easy subscribe / subscribe back, use the facebook app. If you rather would not like to see it pollute your profile, just remove the box afterwards, but make sure to add a link in your “profiles in other spaces” section in facebook, because people like myself love to explore where you are in other spaces.

Different for example to the stumbleupon facebook app, where I up until today do not know how to subscribe to my friends without spamming everybody else, this is a nicely done and usable facebook application! :)

Perhaps a limitation of Thunderbird not being able to handle the amount of messages to index (1,5 GB of messages, quite a few of them in there)? My other accounts work fine, it is just this one huge which does not work.

I rather have them in Thunderbird because I know I can export them, but then again, it is getting rather slow in there as well. Any hints appreciated :)

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.

Let’s give it a try:

MY thoughts on it
First: Great and easy thing, I do like the coloring. Has a popup and a direct posting to twitter.

But: I hate it when I have to give another website an information like login and password. I do not care if they say they will not do anything with it (which in this case they don’t).

Second, if I am a vivid twitterer which way round will it go? WIll I have a lot of people twittering about MY page or will I have a lot of pages I will want to twitter about?

So far – I may have overlooked it – I have not seen a tool which takes the current website *I* am visiting. It can’t be that complicated for TwitThis to add such a bookmarklet as well and then they would cover every side ;)

And why does everyone use tinyurl instead of a service which uses less characters – did I miss anything there?

Fascinating in itself but will not drive me much more into Twitter
Although I do not use Twitter a lot, I find it a fascinating topic because of the effects around it. I do see a lot of possibilities, but also a lot of limitations. It fits with the attention deficit culture we are heading for at the moment and increases the speed a tenfold. Actually, the Twitter craze gets me closer to just hit “mark read” on my unread feeds after nearly 10 days off due to me being at Cebit. I think it puts this development on speed and we will crash faster and harder now as Twitter is accelerating.

Also I am amazed by the amount of tools which spring up from Twitter, but equally amazed how often they only go half way.

In the meantime I am still struggling with Google Reader as it does not seem to catch all entries in the RSS files for twitter and I want to read them all in one batch not on the twitter page but in a normal way. And no I will not read them on my phone.

So where is the “take the public feed of a person, check every five minutes and then mail every hour the updates”?

A lot of tools, ideas and ways spring up like crazy. It is kind of like springtime for nerds. But basically it is just heading forward, moving on instead of taking closer looks at what could be done with it and what can be cleverly combined. A pity.

Which leads me to the conclusion: Twitter is a silo. One with a lot of bells and whistles, but a silo, and for the moment the users find it sexy enough to stay with it. I on the other hand miss updates on people, because they do not blog “best of” anymore which would force me into reading Tweets just to keep up to date.

But actually, I am just doing fine missing out on you. I myself rarely post more than once a day on there, though I might increase that for the specific purpose of being in the states in April because THEN there is a use for twittering more. And then I expect people to unsubscribe from my twitter – because they do not care about what I say chatting right away. ;)

Tag(s): twitter, twitthis, attention deficit, spring for nerds

And best of all: You can play bingo with it! Print it out, mark every service you are using and see if you got a hit in every square! (You are a geek if you do, but that is a different topic …)

Via André Ribeirinho.

Tag(s): Digital Identity, social software

From what I can see on the screen this means basically a) waiting for your net connection to come up b) hope that the application runs (we had a gmail server problem earlier) and c) mostly having to use a web application without the benefits of MS Office in efficiency and feature richness as well as ‘known’ and well designed UI.

I still have to have somebody to set up the system for me and make it usable because for the basic users everything of this is already overhype. So far I have not seen a lot of impressing stuff around possible enhancements for the Office 2.0 worker. The only thing I can see so far is collaboration through the net – which makes it easier to share and work on documents.

Now, a question: How many people in private as well as in company life do use such features? And how many of those still will just mail documents back and forth? How many of you have ever received documents out of MS Office even using the “show changes from other user”?

One other reason here I am here is my favorite thing: Asking the ‘international’ question. (That usually is of course my German / European view, but usually that is even more than enough to throw people of their “we are perfect and so cool!” mind.)

One of the basic requirements to have a successful application being used in Germany? Have a German interface. Not have a gazillion features, but do something basic right. In German.

No German interface? Only the geeks will use it. And if they use it and something German comes along? Chances are people will fled you.

The question this panels fails to answer is: Who is the target audience of being an office 2.0 worker? Enterprise users? Small companies? Single users? For me it boils – again – down to having an application which people can use and understand.

The guy from Joyent is the first one which really points out first and formost the it is not about the application but about open standards and how I can get my data in and out. Then, and only then I will be willing to perhaps try you out.

Now to be fair, I have seen a lot of nice little things on the presentations. BUT: If I want to use it with others together, I need to sign up for such a service. If I work on another project? Possibly a different service again. Which in the end does mean I will start using a service which most people are likely to use or have accounts with it.

And tell you what – even Gcal has not the mass amount of normal users you might need to have to organize your life with Gcal.

CRM System? Does this please sync with my mobile equipment?

Having it online – can I please have a working syncing to my local disk if I choose to? Now for example I only have from time to time net connection because I cannot get a prepaid card with data plan.

And can I please have either a self explanatory application OR have a decent manual?

So many many obstacles to overcome. Many problems to solve. It is probably not nice to say, but a lot of those companies will fail.

But they will be a step towards the real solution which is working.

Technorati Tags: office20con

and encounter strange error messages today …

First it told me my name is Crys:

You’re currently logged in as Neezee, but it looks like you’ve got more than one Flickr account.

You logged in to the Uploadr as Crys, so you’ll need to re-login to the Flickr website under that account to process your photos.

and now it refuses to send pictures:

The batch was cancelled, but not before 214 of 215 photos were affected.

API ERROR: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?> <rsp stat=”fail”> <err code=”1″ msg=”Photo not found” /> </rsp>

One would think that the software would be clever enough to deal with it …

Technorati Tags: flickr, errors

Also I wondered about the few e-mails I was still getting … it just was not enough. Not that I really want to have more e-mails but just by looking at it I could judge that there was something wrong with Gmail. Until I noticed that I was not getting a comment notification I thought “maybe it is a slow news day …”. After that I knew my mails where being deferred.

Since then I have been waiting for the rushing in of all the delayed e-mails and this afternoon, they came. Yikes. Did anyone else noticed something unusual?

Technorati tax (not tax. Tags. With a soft G. let’s try again: technorati tax. Well it seems I have to do some training …)
technorati tax. Now, little dragon, we don’t want to give Dave Sifry ideas. Come on: technorati tax.

Hrmf. I would just use my bookmark list bookmarklet.

Technorati Tags: gmail, gmail problems

When I saw on eBay an auction for the software, I was unhappy about the fact that it was a German version. To my surprise, there where also auctions with “Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred” in a US version available. Needless to say that this was my preferred choice.

This sentence was supposed to display house. Out Dragon PDAs over Microsoft’s speech-recognition

[This sentence was supposed to display how superious Dragon is over Microsoft's speeck recognition ... well. Let's try that again!]

The reason why I am eager to train the software onto my voice is simple:
if I have trained it well it will be much faster than me typing and I can produce more postings. Hey! I did say a blog posting.
No, I did not say “a” blog posting – I just said blog posting.

So far, I am quite surprised — pleasantly — that the software actually knows blog. Okay, it still needs some training between blog and block.

And the command for a new line (especially when I want two of them) should really be “enter enter” and not “new line new line”.

As far as punctuation goes I think it is easier to keep my hands on the keyboard and insert those – no need to do every thing with voice.

What will be more difficult for the system rather than for myself? The fact that I don’t keep to what the software probably considers to be good word composition – we will see if we can train him on that! :-) (did you know that they had a “smiley face” comand built in?)

One of the things I did not like was during installation was when it was trying to get a feel for how i write. It said “should I go through emails and documents” but then it just went through my personal folder and indexed everything. For normal user this might be okay, it is just that I keep every kind of document in there, for example saved Web pages with hotel reservations, a collection of spam messages for later analysis, and many more things which definitely should not be considered my writing style.

But those are the first baby steps into getting this software up and running. The reason I bought Dragon was simple: even if it just takes most of what I run to write down and I have to do manual corrections, it still should buy me considerable time when writing blog postings. And isn’t blogging at about a conversational style anyhow?

So using any speech-recognition software seems to be the perfect approach for podcast also. I tried to transcribe one of my Useful Sounds but that did not go too well … let’s just say that my river of thoughts is best to be listened to and not to be read in transcribed form. ;))

So from the first minutes of trying out this software it actually seems that I can do some work with this. It needs a lot of training but I can manage that. I will just throw in the training center some of my blog postings and read them out loud. (I might want to check if it knows words like put costing podcasting before I start typing – see what I mean? Where is the list of new media names when you need one?)

One way in the future of telling that I did use the speech-recognition software? A proper usage of the apostrophe on words like don’t / can’t / haven’t here as well as correctly written words like German, English, French with a capital letter. ;)

Other than that the other software I tried out before this program was much more fun. When I sayed “computer” it did “wake up” but this one just spells out computer – boo-hoo!

Hm. I need to train the software to recognize the expression hm. And it should allow me to have a technorati comand which will insert the tag including the HTML code into the current blog posting. Interesting!

I see a new Armada of commands coming like “ping technorati”, “go to my space”, or even “pay my rent in Second Life”.

After all this is 2006 and we should finally makes use of what technology is offering us.

= the (that was supposed to be my name — let’s try that again)

Nicole Simon, who now has to train English terms of punctuation …

yes this took long oh then just typing it down … but then again, I did not have to stress my hands with typing. Imagine you lying in bed and slowly dictating your blog posts one by one …

Technorati Tags: speech recognition, msspeech, dragon natural speaking