API	Feeds
Social Network
	(www)(wiki)		Facebook	yes
	(www)(wiki)		MySpace		blog
	(www)(wiki)		Bebo
	(www)(wiki)		Hi5
	(www)(wiki)		Orkut
Media Sharing
	(www)(wiki)		YouTube	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Flickr	yes *	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Picasa	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Veoh	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Uber
Bookmarking
	(www)(wiki)		del.icio.us	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Simpy	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		StumbleUpon
Blogging
	(www)(wiki)		Blogger	yes
	(www)(wiki)		LiveJournal	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Technorati	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Twitter	yes
News
	(www)(wiki)		Digg	yes
Music
	(www)(wiki)		last.fm	yes	yes
Community Aggregarors	(www)(wiki)		Mashable

* Requires agreement for commercial use.

Just updated Neptune’s Blogger profile. I added an addition blog on Blogger to host documents published from Google Docs.

Neptune’s Blogger profile:

http://www.blogger.com/profile/17531511657077227390

Neptune’s Docs on Blogger:

http://neptunesdocs.blogspot.com/

I will be writing more regarding Google Docs soon.

Neptune’s Lab is now a real blog! Finally showing up on Technorati, along with 94 million other blogs. I really like the “What Neptune’s Lab is about” tag cloud.

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/neptune.dilated.org

I did not submit Neptune’s Lab to Technorati so their spider must have been picked up a link from another site or feed. I will sign up Neptune as a Technorati user soon and explore all of its features in a later post.

Technorati appears to have an API with a ton of potential for content aggregation. The Technorati API documentation can be found here.

Key features are…

Search

cosmos - Blogs linking to a given URL.
search -Blog posts featuring a given keyword or phrase.
tag - Blog posts tagged with a specific topic.

Browse

toptags - Top tags indexed by Technorati.

Blog information

bloginfo - Information about a specific blog URL such as link counts, rank, and available feeds.

blogposttags - The top tags used by a specific blog.

Member Information

getinfo - Information about a Technorati member such as full name and other blogs by the same author.

YouTube automatically generates a number of RSS feeds. A couple of custom feeds I find terrible useful are user and tag.

Tags:
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the tag “monkey,” you would enter: feed://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss

Users:
feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert username here]/videos.rss
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the user “YouTube,” you would enter: feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss

Of course I used FeedBurner to burn my YouTube user feed. I have the feed syndicated on the side bar here at neptune.dilated.org.

Here is a link to a YouTube feed for the tag “neptuneslab”. The videos have no propigated to the feed at the time of this posting. Once I see the tag feed working I will burn it with FeedBurner.

Neptune now has a YouTube profile. After downloading the music video I made on eyespot I have uploaded it to YouTube. See below:

Eyespot is good for editing a bunch of clips together. The editing interface is very, very simple and much more constraining than JumpCut (one effect per clip, no title overlays) and a pain if you want to sync anything to audio.

However eyespot has a few killer features such as alloing you to download the video (now I can re-post it to YouTube,) they also give you the ability to “one click” syndicate to LiveJournal, Veoh, and blip.tv.

Here is a link to Neptune’s blog on eyespot.

Below is embedded content from Neptune’s first eyespot edited video.

After months of filming, the grueling location, the blood and the sweat, Neptune’s first and final music video is in the can. Actually it’s on JumpCut.

I shot a few clips of “Neptune’s Little Helpers” in action. Uploaded them along with an mp3 I wrote called “Ready Corona”. It took about 10 minutes to add effects, edit the clips to length, add titling and transitions. I am really impressed with how easy it was to use JumpCut. Even with the limitations of online editing you could probably pull off something a cut above any used car lot cable commercials.

I’ll be adding a Neptune’s JumpCut feed to FeedBurner and syndicating it to the side bar here at neptune.dilated.org.

Neptune set up a JumpCut account for online video editing. JumpCut is a Yahoo property. A few major competitors to JumpCut are eyespot.com, motionbox.com and photobucket.com to name a few. I went with JumpCut this time around simply for the yahoo tie-in. Companies like Google and Yahoo buy up 2.0 sites and quickly integrate them into their core services. Google’s Blogger photos automatically showing up in your Picasa web album is the kind of integration im looking for since Yahoo and Google both support rich API’s for extening and exploiting their functionality.

Check out Neptune’s JumpCut profile at:

http://www.jumpcut.com/neptune

Neptune now has a last.fm account. At the moment I am concentrating on blog syndication and as you can see I have Neptune’s last.fm blog headlines syndicated on the neptune.dilated.org sidebar. I like to run all feeds through FeedBurner, check out Neptune’s last.fm blog feed below.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesLastfm

last.fm recently played tracks feed.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesRecentlyPlayedTracks

Check the neptune.dilated.org side bar for a last.fm quite of favorite artists. I love it!

At first glance last.fm looks like it could have some mashup/syndication potential beyond blogging. Stay tuned for a further analysis of features.

last.fm lets you add music as an atrist or label. As an artist I’ll be adding tracks soon.

No problems syndicating Neptune’s new blog on MySpace. MySpace bloggs output RSS making them consumable. At this stage I do not know if there are other ways to pull other additional content from a MySpace profile. I imagine that I could make develop a script to scrape comments posted to my profile. I’ll look into that some day.

At this point it looks like the best thing is to syndicate blog posts from MySpace (as a content provider) and syndicate content to facebook (as a content aggregator). Of course the other direction is possible with flash widgets on myspace and facebook applications on facebook. Is your head spinning yet?

Neptune now has his facebook account configured.

Syndicating content into face book is easy and there are a number of ways to do it.

1. You can add an RSS or ATOM feed link to your notes application.
2. There are a few 3rd party RSS facebook applications you can install and configure.

Syndicating content from facebook is not a core feature. They do this to protect privacy (however they could easily allow you to have the option).

the developed facebook application would need to be installed by the user. This application can syndicate content back to the developer. I’ll be writing a facebook app for Neptune in the coming days.

Twitter is a kind of micro blog, a cross between a blogging tool and IM (Instant Message). Twitter is intended to let everyone know what you are doing right now. Depending on your security prefrence you may allow anyone or only friends to subscribe to your updates. In public most you can syndicate your entries.

Neptune now has an account on twitter (twitter.com) as you can see on the side bar here at neptune.dilated.org.

I see a log of potential in Twitter, espically the 2-way SMS allows you to update as well as keep keep track of your friends.

Neptune now has a Picasa account. Picasa web albums is another Google property. Picasa and flickr both have their short comings. However Picasa takes the cake with it’s Blogger integration. I had posted the photo of Neptune’s little helper from my phone to Neptune’s Moble blog on Blogger. The image below (after the slideshow) is linked from Picasa. Photo’s uploaded to Blogger are automatically stored in a Picasa album.

You might also notice the Picasa badge on the right. While Picasa’s badge is not quite as hip as flickr I have quite a bit more control. I made a larger version you see below. I can see these Picasa slide shows fitting nicely in a gallery with YouTube videos.

Below is a photo of Neptune’s little helper hosted on Picasa. The photo was originally sent to Blogger from my camera phone.

Neptune now has his very own flickr account. flickr is a yaoo company, although supposedly less evil than Google also less developer friendly. I have to first say that they do have an API and I have yet to look at it, however the API requires approval for use in commercial applications. I am guessing that this is why we don’t see flickr as a big name in the mashup world yet. Anyway, Neptune started his flickr account of with some photos from his trip to Microsoft Island on SL.

Also, don’t forget to check out Neptune’s cool flickr badge on the sidebar, is any blog complete without one?

The photo above is hosted from the flickr account. flickr states that I must make the photo link back to them. I think it would be much cooler if they gave me a choice between linking it back to them or watermarking it, much like YouTube.

The feeds are burned!

This was a good test of Blogger’s new feature allowing you to redirect all feed traffic to FeedBurner. Neptune’s Mobile (neptunesmobile.blogspot.com) is a Blogger blog syndicated via FeedBurnder at http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesMobile.

Here is a lift of all the feeds so far:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesLab
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForNeptunesLab
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesMobile

I guess I need to add the chicklets to the Lab.

I will also be adding the FeedBurner syndication widget to Neptune’s Mobile.

I can’t say I’m really that impressed. Building a RSS consuming widget in Flash takes only a couple of hours of ActionScript and Component tutorials. I do like SpringWidget’s implementation and whatever deal they make with FeedBurner I’m sure will product a ton of traffic for them. I build this widget from the link off Neptune’s Mobile FeedBurner feed.Also note if you really enjoy embedding things like flash widgets into your website for blog. I always have more luck ditching the object and only using the embed html element

Displaying content syndicated from Blogger is easy since Google has adopted the Atom standard throughout most of it’s properties.

Atom is a popular RSS syndication standard, however Atom differers from RRS 2.0 in a few ways. Notible differences are in required content and payload. Read More about these differences if they are important to you.

Through WordPress I quickly added an RSS widget to my sidebar. Of course the RSS widget only displays the post titles I could easily consume the entire post. Here is a link to Neptune’s Atom fee from Blogger.

http://neptunesmobile.blogspot.com/atom.xml (this may begin redirecting to FeedBurner)

I am about to explore possibilities with FeedBurner re-syndicating Neptune’s blogger feed. Google has acquired FeedBurner and Blogger (also a Google property) recently announced some tighter integration, allowing your Blogger feed to redirect to FeedBurner. This redirection help keep everyone syndicating from you all getting the feed from the same place. Additionally since feed burner offers usage Statistics along with a bunch of other goodies like automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us it’s a good idea to keep everyone on the FeedBurner feed.

Below is a photo uploaded from a camera phone to Neptune’s blogger account.

Neptune uses blogger to update his mobile blog. I have decided to use neptunesmobile.blogspot.com and have blogger host the mobile blog rathan than their very cool FTP option.

I tried the FTP option and had blogger update another subdomain on dilated.org. However the import option from WordPress required the blog to be hosted by blogger. Another option is to point the DNS on the subdomain to blogger. Since cPanel makes DNSing subdomains a pain I opted to just use the neptunesmobile.blospot.com domain.

I plan to have Neptune email a few photos to his new mobile blog along with other interesting ways to make it useful.

WordPress has an import and export feature to many popular blogging sites and software (Blogware, DotClear, GreyMatter, LiveJournal, MovableType and TypePad, Textpattern and WordPress,) however this is a bit of a manual process since you have to login as an administrator and click the import button. This feature seem to be intended to help you migrate you blog content from one system to another and not really for of syndication.

I will be exploring various syndication options from Neptune’s Mobile Blog on Blogge. Trying everything from simple RSS to Feedburner and hopefully Google’s API.

If you know me as Neptune Swindlehurst you might not want to admit it. Neptune lives in Second Life and has spent all of his time building a house and learning to do the splits without ripping his hip avatar jeans (SL scripting). Neptune has no hot avatar girlfriends and lacks any sweet dance scripts, Numchuck or bow hunting skillz. Joining Second Life is free, however if you use my link I get some SL cash (know as Lindens).

Since I research online trends and their convergent application’s as part of my job. Neptune makes an excelent anonymous persona. Neptune allows me to keep up with the innovations on SL while providing photos for my flikr account, video’s for YouTube and any other content I can squeeze out of him.

Neptune can be one of those super cool ride your segway to work cuppa jo sippping built it in 10 minutes with ruby on rails while talking on his iPhone eTarded.tv assholes, and I don’t have to even feel the shame.

If this blog series begins to benefit you in anyway, feel free to let Neptune know.