It’s a great move for the little company and I’m really happy for them.

And while I don’t believe in things like good and evil, I do have a bit of a queasy feeling when it comes to Herold. Not so long ago, they were getting a thorough beating when they announced the availability of a CD-ROM that contained the data of more than 4 million private people. While it’s legal, people were and still are up in arms about it. Which I totally understand.

Now, while I do believe Mike from Tupalo when he announces on their blog that they “will still continue as the lightweight, independent company we’ve always been”, I wonder whether people will still feel the same way, now that a company with such a backstory is part of the game.

I’m convinced that from a business perspective, the partnership between Tupalo and Herold was one of the best things that could have happened to them. Whether it’ll put off users concerned about their private data and how it’ll be treated, remains to be seen.

There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.

Now, I don’t believe that everything on the Interwebs should be for free. I’ve actually been a last.fm subscriber for quite a while, and I didn’t mind then that the service they provided for me was in fact inferior to what they provided in the above mentioned three countries.

But now, I feel a bit screwed over. I’m angry, but not at last.fm (well, there is a bit of rage there, but that’s purely emotional, not rational). I’m sure that the people who are put on the frontline, the ones that have to put up with the anger now unloading on them via their blog’s comments, are not the ones making decisions like these. They just want a great product and they want everyone to enjoy what they built.

Which used to be a viable idea on the Internet. You know, when it was still possible for everyone all over the world to enjoy what someone from a totally different place had decided to put online. Nowadays? Not so much. With all that bullshit about licensing deals, great services like last.fm, Pandora or even Youtube are going down the fucking drain because some suits think they need to squeeze every possible penny out of the rights they acquired in a world long gone and unfit for today’s technical advances.

It’s a shit world.

First of all, you get a free domain name, ending in .mp. Now, it’s not the prettiest top level domain, but apparently the company reached an agreement with the government of the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) that basically allows them and only them to register domains ending in .mp.

So after signing up, you’re the proud owner of a domain name. In a way. But more about this later.

With your new domain name, you also get a full-fledged personal website complete with a lifestream, the option of creating different versions for different contacts and a contact manager for the services you’ve hooked up to your site, like Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.

It’s fairly customizable, but in the end it’s basically a standalone profile that identifies you on the web. Your .mp domain also doubles an OpenID, which I think is a splendid idea. When you’re done configuring and hooking up your other services to the site, it will look like this.

It’s all very easy to configure, obviously geared toward people who haven’t yet created profiles on every social network there is (someone like me, in case you’ve missed that).

Oh, and a word about the domain name. The whole service is free, for the time being, including that .mp domain name. That is, it’s free if you use the rest of the Chi.mp service, but if you want to use your domain for something else, say a website about your anime collector’s dolls, you need to buy it for 20 USD a year. But considering that the whole idea behind Chi.mp is the creation of a profile and the interaction between all the .mp profiles created, buying that domain-name seems pointless. Especially if you can get ordinary .com domains for much less.

The service is still in private beta, so if you feel you’d like to try it out, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll send you an invitation (make sure to use a valid email-address or the invitation key will never reach you).

Update: All the invites are gone, sorry. But do leave a comment anyway.

But even though I’m fond of GMail, that doesn’t stop my fickle mind from constantly searching for something that may be better.

A tool that might be is Zenbe. Breaking down the name into its components, it suggests that its users will be in a Zen-like state using their service. I’ve never bought into the whole Zen thing (that’s why I’ve never even attempted to reach what David Allen calls a “mind like water”), but I do have to concede that Zenbe does a few pretty nice things.

Posing as a webmail-service, it actually combines all your communication needs. While you do get a free email-address when you sign up, you might as well keep using any address you’ve had before, provided it offers pop3 support. Fortunately, GMail does, so I was able to simply plug it into Zenbe.

The webmail side of Zenbe offers the usual shenanigans of later services, including the tagging of mails and conversation view of your messages. But that’s where the similarities end and the awesomeness starts.

In addition to the webmail part, Zenbe offers a plethora of tools that are designed to simplify your life. First of all, they offer a “Files”-view, displaying all the attachments you’ve received via mail, with the option of viewing certain filetype directly inside Zenbe.

Next up is a calendar, which is always handy to have right by your mail. The calendar is rather basic and doesn’t offer as much bells and whistles as Google calendar, but it lets you import calendars from wherever you want.

And then there’s Zenpages. Basically, Zenpages provides space for projects. You can add emails, tasks,  links, maps, videos, discussions and even an RSS feed. These pages can then be shared with and edited by whomever you like, regardless of whether they’ve got a Zenbe account or not. It’s a great way of sharing information and collaborating with friends and teams.

And since you’re already pretty overwhelmed by what Zenbe can do, I’ll just quickly fill you in on what the sidebar does. It holds your contacts, which can of course be imported from your other webmail services as well. Another tab holds a task list system. You can create as many lists as you like, lists you create in Zenpages also show up there. And then there’s Twitter, Facebook and GTalk ingetration, meaning you’ll never have to leave your Zenbe Inbox to check on your contacts from all over the web.

Now, the whole thing isn’t just very functional, the GUI is also very beautiful. Which could be where parts of the whole Zen-thing come in.

However, regardless of all its functionality and beauty, Zenbe has one big downside that makes me hesitant from using it as much as I would like to. It’s not a big player. The thing is, communication is the key to everything we do online nowadays. Giving that into the hands of a company that might not be here a year from now is just too risky.

In addition, I read through their blog and encountered this posting in which they are elaborating on future implementations of Zenbe. They disclose that new iterations of Zenbe will be focused on getting businesses on board. As a private user, that sounds just a bit too discouraging from future use, considering that new features will most likely be implemented in the business, rather than the private version.

So what is a knol? Google describes it like this:

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we’re making Knol available to everyone.

Knol has been described by others as a Wikipedia of sorts, but that’s not quite right. While Wikipedia is structured like a classical encyclopedia, with editors guarding like watchdogs what is added or edited, Knol lets many people write many different articles on the same topic. Readers can then rate, review and sometimes even edit other authors articles (via something called moderated editing, meaning edits by others must be approved by the author of the knol). Compared to Wikipedia, that’s about as laissez fair as it can get.

So, how has Google Knol been doing since the start? As the official Google blog announced last month, the 100,000 knols barrier was broken sometime at the end of 2008. That’s not too bad for a service that’s only been around for a mere six months. I guess the fact that Google lets you display ads on your knol’s page didn’t hurt either.

Which is where it becomes tricky. Right now one of the featured knols is an article that deals with plagiarism on Google Knol. According to the article, especially Wikipedia articles get copied massively without attribution, which is simply against the Wikipedia license. And if those people who’ve copied Wikipedia articles also earn money by having ads displayed on their stolen content, it gets a bit nasty.

The measures you can take if you feel content has been plagiarized are absurdly complicated. The owner of the copyrighted material has to contact Google in writing. That’s right, a letter on actual paper. Why on earth they wouldn’t simply let them contact them via e-mail or a form or whatever else people have been using on the Interwebs for the last 15 years is beyond me.

Anyway, I accidentally stumbled over a how-to contest Google Knol is holding in cooperation with Dummies.com, so I decided to add another knol to those 100,000. Since there’s at least a thousands things I could write the most splendid how-tos on, it was tough for me to decide, but I chose something that most people would be able to connect with. That’s right, I wrote a how-to on the perfect Martini. Check it out! And don’t copy it without attribution!

And most of the time, it’s a natural thing. If a service is unpopular, lacks originality or simply function, it’ll be closed down sooner or later. Just check out the TechCrunch deadpool.

But what about services that thrive, are popular but are shut down nonetheless? For example, I Want Sandy, which was a very innovative productivity tool. The company that created it, headed by Rael Dornfest, was bought out by Twitter. And since Twitter was only interested in Dornfest’s mind and not the matter he had created, it was decided to shut Sandy and its base service Stikkitdown.

Now, I personally think it’s a rotten thing to do. Sure, it’s a great career move I guess, but how much would it have cost Twitter to keep a server with I Want Sandy and someone who once in a while looks after that server? For a service that is getting funding in the millions, that shouldn’t pose that much of an obstacle, now should it?

And apart from the individual implications, I feel that moves like that will also greatly hurt the adoption of new small-scale web-services. It takes faith to really start using a web-service, to feed it with your data and your time. Shutting the door right in your user’s face is not going to sit well with most of them. And they are going to remember it.

If people would have known one year ago, that Sandy or Stikkit were mere testbeds for Dornfest’s ideas, they wouldn’t have opted for using it as extensively as they did.

And a very similar thing happened to Pownce recently. It was bought by Six Apart, and again, the only thing they cared about were the two main developers. Pownce will be shut down in a few days, and all the people who came to like it (admittedly, they’re not that great in number) will have to deal with it and move on.

Again, it’s probably a splendid career move for the developers, but it gives small web-services a bad rep. In the future, disappointed ex-users will think twice before trusting small web-services again. Instead, they’ll always opt for similar services created by one of the big players like Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft.

But seeing how I’m a generally positive person, I won’t leave you with this bleak forecast. Instead, I’ll show you how the Internets are fast-paced enough to latch onto unfortunate events like the one above and turn them into cuddly, little feelgood-stories ready for the closing seconds of a Fox newscast.

When Pownce announced that it would close doors, the good people at Soup.io didn’t hesitate for a second and created a very elegant tool that lets Pownce users import their accounts right into Soup. So Soup, which has functionality that greatly exceeds anything Pownce ever offered anyway, not only helped the poor souls stranded after the Pownce closing, but also added a whole bunch of new, happy people to their user-base.

And when it comes to the shutdown of I Want Sandy, a couple of things happened. A similar service, Zetetic’s PingMe, put up a primer on how to most effectively switch from Sandy to their service. And a couple of die-hard Sandy-fans actually started an open-source project that should sooner or later reproduce the functionality of Sandy.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the looming recession will kill off all services that don’t have a few millions stashed under their pillows anyway, but until then, it would be wise not to piss off and abandon your users when a bit of effort could ensure their everlasting gratitude and undying love.

It is always nice to find something I care to write about, and the easiest way to write about something is to write about writing and how you can write stuff more easily and quicker and funner!

Which is where Zemanta comes in. Or at least, that’s the premise of Zemanta. Because Zemanta promises to make you not only a more prolific, but also a quicker and better writer. Now, I’m actually not sure whether they really promise that, but writing something in good faith beats looking it up. So here you are.

So what does Zemanta do? First of all, it keeps me from writing my thesis right now and secondly, it analyzes whatever you’ve already written in a posting and then suggest images and links it thinks your writing might benefit from. In your preferences, you can actually edit the list of sources Zemanta pulls these things from, that’s why, for example, my Flickr pictures are also included.

Let’s see what Zemanta thinks would be a good picture to graphically enhance this post. Btw, Zemanta lets you decide how to style images inserted into posts, but you can also choose from their preset styling, which is what I did for this posting (upper left). Here goes.

Ah yes, so the Zemanta logo it is. Good work!

So, on to the links. I myself haven’t manually added any links to this posting yet, so I’ll have some fun with Zemanta now. All the links appearing in this posting have been suggested by Zemanta, I just added them where I think Zemanta probably thought they might fit.

Which means, a whole lot of Wikipedia links to various words which aren’t really central to the posting. Which is not really their fault, considering how broad I kept my writing (which, of course, is always on purpose – I want to attract as many people as possible!).

Zemanta can be used via a Firefox plugin or via server side plugins, for example the one I’m using right now, which would be the Wordpress plugin.

All in all, an interesting concept, and I can see myself getting used to not having to search for links and images for my writing anymore.

Oh, and Zemanta adds that little thing below too, so people who really like what you’ve written can easily repost it. (HINT, HINT!)

Developed by Adaptive Blue, this Firefox plugin is what you want when you’re interested in movies, books, music, restaurants and a few other things Glue can work with. Adaptive Blue is also the creator of the BlueOrganizer, which worked similarly, but is being discontinued in favour of Glue.

After signing up and installing Glue, whenever you are browsing sites Glue can work with, a little toolbar automagically appears at the top of your screen. Like this:

You’re then presented with all the other people who’ve recently looked at what you’re looking at. It may not sound too exciting, but surfing Amazon, Librarything or IMDB (which are among the rather extensive number of supported sites) is a whole lot more fun with Glue.

And it’s of actual use too. You may see that someone who is interested in Palahniuk’s “Choke” is also interested in a book called “Zombie” by one Joyce Carol Oates. And incidentally, “Zombie” is just as sick and twisted as “Choke”, so you’ve just been alerted to yet another sick and twisted book you can add to your reading list.

Glue does not have, what some people in the know call a “destination site”, meaning there’s no website where your and all the others’ activities are displayed. Which isn’t necessarily a downside, since it removes the need to keep going back to a site to see what all the others are doing (like, say, Facebook). It’s all there, right inside the plugin, baby.

The plugin also adds something to your browser that looks like a bookmarklet. It contains the most important links, not least the one to the things you’ve saved, or liked, as they call it:

The plugin of course integrates with, among others, Twitter and Facebook, lets you perform searches on the items saved and, since Monday, also has a sleek little iPhone app.

And apart from other similar tools that let you save and comment on various items, Glue is actually really smart. Even though it supports a plethora of websites for every sub-section, like Amazon and LibraryThing for books, or IMDB and Wikipedia for movies, the item you save is always recognized as a single one. Meaning that when you save “Choke” from Amazon and someone else from LibraryThing, you’ve still saved the same thing and Glue displays it as such. This, Ladies and Gentleman, is how semantic shit is supposed to work! And if you don’t know what I mean, just try it out already, will you?

Glue’s installation website contains a little FAQ and a Quick Start guide, which holds a bit of information on the sites supported by Glue. Check it out!

Oh, and since I just can’t shut up, here’s what I would like to see in Glue in the future: The ability to not only “like” stuff in order to save it, but also to just mark stuff and put it into certain categories, like “I wanna” or “I hate” or “I don’t know why I’m saving this, but it looks like sometime maybe I want to get back to it”.

But, and this is for all the skeptics who say that it’s actually a lot easier to just search for whatever you’ve got in your inbox by using the powerful built-in Google search, this is not it! Because Xoopit not only displays the images and videos currently residing in your inbox, but also takes all the links to images and videos and creates thumbnails of those.

Which means that you won’t have to sift through scores of links to find that one image of a cute little kitten dressed up as Yoda, because Xoopit has already created a thumbnail for it and you can simply click it. Phew!

For the visually inclined, a screenshot of a GMail inbox with collected images displayed:

Right now Xoopit is available in private beta only. Which means you probably won’t get in and will have to rely on my judgment. Which is exactly the way I like it!

Check this out: typing a query displays four results, hitting enter again shows four more, and so on. It’s very basic, but blazingly fast! And typing “help”, “h” or “man” produces all the shortcuts for the various Google services or to other stuff (like our beloved Wikipedia).

Command-line specifics are included as well, like using the cursor keys to access previously entered queries. Typing go and the number of the search result takes you there, so no need for a mouse anymore. And since it’s a command-line, when it gets all too crowded, just type “clear” or “c”, and you’ve got a blank page with a blinking cursor all over again.

Here’s a picture, in case you actually don’t have a clue what I’m rambling on about here:

PS: You can even add goosh as a search engine to the Firefox search form. Awesome!