Hope you all (or as we say in Texas, ya’ll) have a great week!

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I do my best writing when I’m not in the middle of information overload.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love information overload.  I have mild ADD so diving in to a vast cyclone of links, comments, entries and pictures is like taking a hot bath.  It is amazing and wonderful.

Me the Writer

However, while I am there, my short term memory shuts down and my mid-term memory is impaired.  I know this about myself.  It happens whenever there are a lot of bright, shiny distracting things in my environment.  Now, if I was a stockbroker, this wouldn’t be a problem.  But as a writer, it is pretty devastating to my ability to write anything cohesive.

I’ve been reflecting on my post quality from the point where I started my blog, 4 or so months ago.  At first, quality went up, as I got more comfortable with my writing and I came up with new ideas and new subject matter.  More recently my posts have become less frequent and sometimes lacking critical information, like references to similar posts, even sometimes key observations.

For me, There is definitely a strong inverse correlation between participation on FriendFeed and post quality.  I have to internalize the information I gather and make sense of it.  When I feel it is time, it isn’t hard for me to write a great article.  But if I try too hard, or try to write an article when I am distracted by a thousand other things, my article suffers.

And then, correspondingly, I also feel depressed because the work I have done seems wasted.

Stream or Digest… or Both?

They say there are two types of people in the world, those who organize things into groups, and those who don’t.  With that advice in mind, I am proposing that there are two broad groups of people divided by their ability to process information:

• Stream: Stream folks live in the now, the breathe in the information, they put things together as they happen, they can make use of the information right away.
• Digest: Digest people love to accumulate information, ruminate on what they have learned, and then when they are ready, can push out some quality analysis and insight.

Of course, nothing is that simple.  I’m going to turn this scalar into a vector by adding a different axis: critical thinking.  I believe people’s ability to think critically is also affected by what mode they are in when they receive information.  For example, I personally am not critical when I hear new information.  It is only when I have had a chance to mull what I have learned later that the critical thinking kicks in.

Speaking of modality by the way, I do believe we all have the ability to operate in either mode, or both simultaneously if we are lucky.  But I think we all prefer one mode over another most of the time.

To further illustrate my point, I have tried my hand at one of those popular domain graphs.  See it below.

Thus, I would consider myself a digest personality, at least when I want to write and contribute what know or have learned back to the larger community.  I definitely like playing in the stream mode though, but I’m definitely no editor.  I’m better at being the historian, and occasionally make a decent pundit.

Other People

Everyone is going to see themselves in the chart above differently.  However, I can gamely make a stab at a few standout folks on FriendFeed and in Social Media at large:

• Robert Scoble: Robert is always critically evaluating anything he absorbs.  I would say he’s usually an editor, and switches to pundit to write his blog posts.
• Louis Gray: I think Louis a strong archivist in the stream, and switches to historian or pundit when writing.. though, of all the folks on FriendFeed, Louis can move into direct critical thinking at times.
• Corvida: One of the few folks I really follow outside of FriendFeed, Corvida stays a lot in stream mode and uses her archivist talent to write about new stuff, or pundit when voicing an opinion.
• Mike Fruchter: Michael seems to be in stream mode most of the time, occasionally moving up to editor as needed and writes mostly from a historian persepective.
• Duncan Riley: Duncan stays directly in the pundit zone almost all the time.
• Cyndy Aleo-Carreira: Cyndy is almost always in editor mode, trending toward pundit when she writes.
• Steve Hodson: Steven definitely spends most of his time either as a pundit or an archivist.
• Franklin Pettit: Franklin can be very quiet (at least on FriendFeed) but I know he’s gathering info so I would say he stays in digest a lot, moving up to historian for his blog posts.
• Edythe (Polly): Edythe loves a very broad variety of things on FriendFeed, making her most comfortable in stream.  She will occasionally jump to editor.
• Mitchell Tsai: Mitchell is probably the most pure archivist I’ve seen on FriendFeed.
• Shey Smith: Shey is heavy stream and editor mostly, moving to historian for his blog posts.
• Sarah Perez: Sarah is finely tuned to write in editor mode, sometimes switching to historian, but usually not dwelling in pundit too much.
• Hutch Carpenter (BHC3): Hutch seems to spend a lot of time in stream and will dive into pundit as necessary.
• Allen Stern: Allen splits his time between archivist and editor, and jumps often to pundit for posting or video.
• (Jeff)isageek: Jeff loves the stream, and either hangs out there or archivist.
• Mark Dykeman: Mark comments a lot on things he likes, making him an editor in the stream, and a pundit when writing.

Thanks

I wanted to thank NiceFishFilms (Michael Sean Wright) for writing about different perspectives on FriendFeed and giving me the seed for this blog post.   It’s great to see new faces and new blogs, and I’m definitely going to follow him!

If I didn’t list you above, I’m sorry!  I am really interested on knowing how you rate yourself (whether you are listed or not).  Keep your eye out, I am going to re-post this with the graph so you can rate yourself on FriendFeed.  Thank you!

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What is LiveJournal?

LiveJournal (or LJ) describes itself as a journaling community, and they stress the tight-knit nature of the community.  Of course, anyone can create an ad-supported journal for free, and you make it as private or public as you like.  However, most of LJ’s features are designed specifically to keep the conversation between LJ users inside the community.

An example of this focus is their privacy settings.  In addition to public and private entries, by far the most common entry type is called friends locked.  This means only people who are listed friends of the person with the post can actually read it.  This allows more intimate details to be revealed without fear of the internet at large barging in.

Another tightly-bound feature unique to LJ are the communities.  These communities are groups that you can belong to (either by joining or by being invited) and act as moderated message boards that encourage conversation around a topic.  You can see what communities are being promoted here.

Of course, these features also give LJ and similar sites such as Vox and Blogger an insular feel.  People heavily involved in these sites tend to favor interacting only within them, and generally aren’t interested in interacting on more traditional blogs such as WordPress or Movable Type.

The Shout Out

Due to the community nature of LJ, it is really hard to become well-known across a lot of different circles of friends.  So there aren’t really any superstars I can point to and say, you really need to follow these folks.  Oh, LiveJournal has its share of drama queens.. it is, after all, a personal journal community.  But, oddly enough, there are certain feeds that are syndicated and widely read that seem to be the real cross-network stars.  Feeds like XKCD, PostSecret and Wil Wheaton dot Net (WWDN) are very widely read, even if those feeds see little or no reciprocity from their LJ readership.

So, most of the folks I read on LJ I have been following for years.  Like old pals that you play poker with once a week, I can count on them to be posting there indefinitely.

You can see a list of the folks I follow (and who follow me) on my profile page, down near the bottom of the page.  About two-thirds of them are people I know in Austin.  A few of them are friends I know in person.

I’d list them here – but honestly, they wouldn’t care about the attention.

Oh, I will mention Corwin, but only because he runs his own WordPress blog and is on Twitter.

When You Should Consider this Service

If you are looking for an established, sometimes-sleepy, sometimes-high-drama community that is very similar to the the old site The Well, LiveJournal is perfect.  There are hundreds of themes to choose from and quite a few customization options.  However, it does not allow advertising (other than its own) or special plugins to be run alongside your blog. 

Plus, gathering friends is not as easy as just following a bunch of people.  It requires interaction and having a shared pool of friends helps a lot.  LiveJournal has been known as a tough nut to crack at times, but the reward is having people you can call friends that are interested in your daily life.

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I’ve had a really exciting idea growing in my head for about a week now.  I guess it germinated when I overlooked giving some credit for an idea on a previous post.  Since then, I’ve been more aware of the people involved in stuff that I find interesting.  To that end, I wanted to give back a bit.

For the next few weeks I am going to concentrate on different social networking applications and the people I have met on them.  I’m going to write to my strengths by focusing on presenting a primer of the service in the first of each article, and the people in the second half.

I hope to have my first article written tonight or tomorrow.  I will follow up every three or four days, and continue until I’ve covered all the services I use actively.  After that, I may follow up as I get involved in a new community.

Please feel free to speak up, suggest a community I may have forgotten about, or even if I missed you!  Obviously, following hundreds of people on certain networks means I can’t give everyone equal time.  But not to worry, I promise to really make an effort to find really quality folks. 

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Developed by Effigent for Automattic, it seems like a very sweet little app! You can learn more about it at iphone.wordpress.net.

Below, hopefully, will be a gallery of screenshots of the app.

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Writer Wannabe’s

In fact, even bloggers don’t often like referring to themselves collectively as bloggers.  It’s almost too easy to say, he’s not a writer.. he’s a blogger. As if blogging did not call upon the same internal resources as writing.  You could argue the long form, of course… most bloggers will never write a novel by themselves, nor are they especially motivated to.

However, even journalists who write for newspapers or online trade mags and journals tend to look down upon bloggers.  Sure, there are differences to how a journalist and a blogger operates.  For one thing, a journalist has a copy editor and a deadline.  They have to cite sources.  They write for pay, and often need to try to stay unbiased, because otherwise what they are writing is called an editorial.

Blogging for Fun and Profit

But blogging isn’t just about writing whatever the hell you want on your own little piece of internet real estate.  Sure, that’s a perk, but the trade-off is that most of us don’t get paid. If you want to make blogging in to a business (also often called monetization), you have to make some fairly dramatic changes to your approach and motivation behind what you blog and why.

For one thing, you have to put on a lot more hats.  If you look at your standard book or even newspaper or magazine column writer, they prefer to stay on the cerebral or creative end of things, allowing publicists and established media channels promote their stuff for them.  Of course, like most things there are a thousand unknown writers out there for every famous one, but the promotional vehicles and channels have been there for scores of years already, and exist to allow the writer to write.

This is not true in the case of blogging.. it’s a new field, in a new ball park.  Bloggers have to work to be recognized for every part of their art, the writing, the promotion, the recognition.  There are no book tours for bloggers.  There is no talk show circuit for the most part.  Bloggers are having to re-invent all of that stuff from scratch in order to be acknowledged and, in a word, paid.

That means that bloggers are not just writers.  They are marketers, too. And networkers, social connectors.  They are new technology mavens and visionaries, pundits and critics all rolled in to one very tired body.  The cost of admission is low and dropping, but the price for success is staggeringly high.

Just Say .. Yes?

Does this mean a blogger should throw in their hat and go home?  No, not necessarily, but you should be at least acquainted with the realities of being a blogger, and the boulders that lie in the road to success.

For example, even when you get a bit of recognition, you have to deal with a ton of people who think you will work for free.  Just read Michelle Greer’s take on it.  If you put yourself through 8 years of medical school and become a doctor, do people start calling you and asking for free surgery?  Most likely not.  If work your way up to the senior editor’s desk at the New York Times, do you decide to spend half of your day doing work for free?  Hardly.

And yet, along with being constantly reminded that bloggers aren’t actually writers, even when they get a nut they suddenly are expected to share that nut with everyone.

And the Moral Is…

You got me.  I have no moral in this tale.  The ending hasn’t been written.  As I said, we are paving the path, burning the channels that will help bloggers and writers (and I am firmly of the opinion that bloggers by and large ARE writers, just as some writers are great and others suck, so also are bloggers).  I think the momentum is there for bloggers to make their own media channels, via podcasts, new TV, web radio, RSS and other technologies, to become legitimate.

And perhaps, turn Whuffie into something real!

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Silona and the Unicorn

They say write about what you know, and since I’ve been spending hours of my time on FriendFeed, I am starting to know it fairly well.

The Apology

Therefore, I am sorry that I’m contributing to the growing pool of I had this great conversation on FriendFeed and it inspired me to write this post-type posts, but this is going to be one.

The Set-Up

Recently, there was a conversation on FriendFeed that Trish Robinson started off with the question:

“Has anyone used the "create an imaginary friend" feature? Does it work?”

As it turns out, people use the ‘imaginary friend’ feature in different ways.  Here is what we know about imaginary friends on FriendFeed:

• You can set up an imaginary friend to show you one or more syndicated feeds from any of the 41 (at last count) services FriendFeed offers.
• Only you can see your imaginary friend. 
• Any comments or likes you put on an entry created by a imaginary friend are only seen by you as well.
• You can reshare an imaginary friend’s entry if you want others to see it.
• You can create an unlimited number of imaginary friends, and they can have any name at all.  Even the names of actual FriendFeed users or other imaginary friends.
• Just like there is no way of deleting a room, there is no way of deleting an imaginary friend.
• If you unsubscribe from an imaginary friend, its GUID remains, but inaccessible from anyone but perhaps the FriendFeed gods.
• You cannot invite or otherwise add an imaginary friend to a room.
• If you see an entry from an imaginary friend in your main friend’s feed, you will not be able to hide the entry.  (Unverified)
• If your actual friend creates a new account using the same name as your imaginary friend, that is entirely possible and you will potentially see duplicate entries.

The Payoff

So far, imaginary friends seem fairly straightforward.  Let’s say you have a friend or a web site that is not represented well on FriendFeed and you want that information to be there in ff.  Not a problem, add an imaginary friend, add a feed to it, away you go.  You can treat that imaginary friend like you would other users aside from your likes and comments not showing up on the public stream.

However, if you look at an imaginary friend as a customizable feed reader, it suddenly opens up into a very useful construct that fits well into the FriendFeed workflow (or is that idleflow?).  Now, you can see new feed items as they are published and you can like them to bookmark them, or comment on them to leave yourself little notes for research or further reading.  Instant feed reader, no Google Reader needed!

You can also use imaginary friends to keep track of comment fragmentation.  You can, for example, assign the comment feeds for different web sites to imaginary friends with those site names, along with their RSS feeds, then, you will see ongoing discussions as they happen on those sites.

You can keep track of people or entities on the internet that you love to hate, or just hate.  You can then cathartically scream and punish your invisible enemy as much as you want, and nobody is the wiser (except for the aforementioned FriendFeed god, who if they know what is good for them will never tell anyone).

The Unexpected Bonus

I like you, reader, because I could have saved this tip for a different article.  But you will get it here, a reward for getting this far!  Here’s your bonus tip:

Most of these things you can do with invisible friends can also be done with private rooms.

Yep.  You can create a room, add a feed or 3, reshare, comment as much as you like, etc.  Private room entries also will show up in your main friend feed if you want them to.  Rooms provide another layer of segregation of content, if you want it.

It would be cool if you could have invisible friends feeding in to private rooms, but since the functionality is duplicated, personally, I don’t miss not having it.

The Wrap-Up

Don’t take features for granted.  Please refer to this post, where I say:

Find uncommon uses for the service.  See if it makes a good search engine, or gets free concert tickets or a better job.  You never know.

Even after using FriendFeed daily for almost two months, I am still finding cool new ways of doing things in the service.  That, almost as much as the community aspect, keeps me coming back to it.

The Belated Credit

For some reason, I totally blanked on the fact that Justin Korn (FriendFeed profile) wrote up his experience using FriendFeed as an RSS reader and organizer on his own blog.

I feel especially bad because I encouraged Justin to write it!  Honestly, I feel like a complete heel.  When it comes to giving credit, I have a thing or two to learn.

My unreserved apologies, Justin.

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The long tail.  For a relatively simple chart, it appears a lot of additional explanation and rumination is needed to really understand it.  And of course, what is more illustrative than a helpful chart?

Rewind back about 10 years ago, and a similarly iconic graph was getting a lot of attention: The bell curve.  Here, too, a relatively simple diagram was tossed out like a life-saver the hapless reader, drowning in a sea of information.  You can infer much from a bell curve, but apparently its mysteries, like the long tail, are only revealed through extensive research.

Personally, I got the concept just by looking at the chart (in both cases).  I think this is perhaps why these two ideas are so catchy.. we want to try to apply these concepts to any novel situation we encounter.

Basically, in the book The Long Tail (summary here), says that there is a market for less popular products but one that requires a different marketing strategy in order to address and work successfully with. For example, you can immediately apply Amazon.com as an example of selling to the long tail.  They have an enormous number of different products (your local Wal-Mart would have to be as big as a small town to have all those products in one place), and they don’t expect to sell out of every item.  However, the selection makes them a very popular first stop for people looking for something specific.

I tend to think of the long tail from the bottom up, though.  As a product, a concept, I know that I’m well into niche territory.  This isn’t a surprise and in fact I started my blog deliberately fairly narrow so that I would not be competing with bigger, better funded, and (let’s face it) better blogs out there. 

Why, then, do I catch myself time and time again feeling anxious and competitive?  Or feeling envy at those who are achieving some measure of success through their own efforts?  Occasionally, it’s enough to put me off blogging altogether.

One of these times recently, I posted with exasperation to FriendFeed,

“I’m in a blogging slump. I can’t even get myself to blog about it. Ha.” 

Thankfully, the response I got was encouraging and sincere, and I really need absorb some of the advice (like exercise and taking walks).  One of the simplest bits of advice came from Louis Gray, who said,

“It’s not a contest. Just be yourself.”

So now, my right brain will repeat that advice like a mantra to my left brain:

It’s not a contest.  It’s not a race.  My niche is my home, not my silo. 

The success I am seeing with others?  Sure, some of it may be due to deal-making, lucky breaks or other factors, but would I read writers that were in it just for the money? Probably not.  The people who are willing to step on others? No, not after I found out they did.

The people I follow have their own thoughts, their own passions.  They do different things well.  Sometimes, they know this about themselves and they capitalize on those strengths.  Other folks, well, they are writing to make a point, or in order to understand something, or help me understand.  A million reasons. 

But the folks that are in for the long term, the ones that have a following, and are still one-person operations?  They love to write.  They do it because they enjoy it.  They would write if it paid the mortgage or an occasional dinner at the local Greek restaurant.  Even if it was an expense out of their own pocket.

When I think about why I am writing, that is what motivates me.  Because it comes naturally to me, and I enjoy it. I like to know if people respond to what I am writing.

Let me bring this back around to the long tail.  How does my motivation for writing have any bearing?  In my opinion, it has all the bearing.  Personally, I can’t write if I feel like I am just doing it to compete.  If I go down that road, I will get burned out and I will never ‘win’ whatever nebulous price I think awaits me at the end.

Somewhat ironically though, if I write for me, if I write because I love it and on things I find interesting, I know that this will resonate and those articles will carry me slowly up the long tail to success. Whether I ultimately want success or not, I can’t tell you right now.  But I know if I focus on it too much, it will slip away, like trying to squeeze an ice cube. 

We knew the world was ready to receive the heirs to The Who. All we had to do was to keep doing what we were doing and we would become the biggest band since Led Zeppelin, without a doubt. But something just didn’t feel right. We felt we had more dimension than just the next big anything, we had something unique to offer. The innovation was what would suffer if we went down the standard rock route. We were looking for another feeling.

— Bono on The Unforgettable Fire’s new direction. (via Wikipedia)

Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson Read more about this book…

Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray Read more about this book…

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Caleb has added a new feature to his socialized RSS feed sharing app, Toluu today.  Now, anywhere in Toluu when you see a feed name and you hover your cursor over it, you will get a pop-up dialog with the feed name and the last 5 articles titles.

If you click on the article titles, you will be transported directly to the article in question.

This new feature will reduce the amount of context switching you will need to do as your peruse feeds in your friends list and other places.

If you haven’t registered at Toluu yet, it’s quick and easy to get started.  You can always email me (phil – at – scribkin) for an invite!

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You can probably guess the reason why. 

Yes, I got an iPhone.  A white 16GB model to be specific. I love it.  And I’ve been using it pretty much to the exclusion of all else.

iPhone Unboxing Gallery, "Video Games Live" Concert Gallery

More About the iPhone

I have seen so much press for the iPhone 3G already, I won’t contribute too much to it myself at the moment.  I might weigh in with my thoughts, favorite apps and other stuff later.  For now, let me just throw these things out:

• No iPhone, original or 3G, supports A2DP.  This is a Bluetooth specification for allowing stereo music playback and remote control of the music stream.  It has been proven the hardware in the iPhone can easily support A2DP, but so far, Apply has deliberately ignored it.  Why?  I also asked people about this on FriendFeed.
• I definitely miss cut and paste, a lot.
• The camera works better than many folks bitch about.  Try living with the 1.2 megapixel crapola toy camera on the Sidekick 3 and LX for a while.  You basically stop taking pictures, they are so bad.  Here’s an example.
• Sure, the iPhone isn’t a Nokia n95.  It’s also not 800 bucks, 3/4ths the size of an ACME brick, or burdened with a laggy interface.  And the browser.. even without flash.. magnificent.
• The screen gets dirty really easily.  I’m cleaning it all the time.  And I’m glad I got a white one, because the black back shows dirt and oil as much as the front.
• Where is video recording?  Surely they are working on this.

Moderately Tasteless Ad

I have to apologize for the ad in my sidebar too.  You see, on a lark I decided to offer ad space on my site for a ridiculously low price, thinking I could be selective about the ads.  Even then, nobody was buying.  Well, a few days ago I got a bite, but it wasn’t an ad that I wanted.  I must have misunderstood the terms of the agreement though, because I thought, if I didn’t approve the ad, I didn’t have to run it. 

Apparently, you have to specifically not approve an ad because, guess what, the ad network accepted it for me and then yelled at me for not having the ad code on my page.  Oops.

Now, it’s not a completely tasteless ad, but it isn’t what I normally would have chosen and I have an email in to ask about changing or removing it, maybe refunding the money.  But for now, enjoy.

New iPhone Support

I’ve been using MoFuse for a few months now to support folks that are using the iPhone.  MoFuse is a great, free app (there are premium feaures you can get too) that takes your RSS feed and makes it into a mobile-optimized site for the iPhone and an alternate “light” site for other phones.  Corvida has written a more thorough article on MoFuse here.

I already was using a WordPress plugin (WP Mobile Edition, that I listed in this article) that is quick and clean for mobile phones, but today I looked deeper into direct iPhone support and I found the WPtouch plugin.  Although there are several caveats (like not being able to use it with WP Super Cache) it works great on my site and exists nicely with my other mobile plugin, appropriately only redirecting only iPhone users to its special theme.

So enjoy it, and let me know if you run across any problems.

Update: Do you want to see the new iPhone theme?  I’ve included a screenshot below.

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However, for some reason Feedbooks was having trouble with my RSS feed for a while, so I dutifully flagged it for consideration and waited.  I checked every day.  And today, I can proudly say that the problem has been resolved!

The upshot of all of this is here, a little widget I can display in my sidebar. →

More About Feedbooks

Ok, so probably the most publicized feature of Feedbooks is its ability to take an RSS feed and convert it into a number of other eBook formats as well as a customizable PDF format.  Obviously, that is what I am using the service for.

But I believe this is a side business for them.. perhaps what you would call a loss-leader.  They know, smart marketers that they are, that if they provide a unique service for free to potentially millions of blogs out there, their name gets out there.

E-Books

And their name isn’t feed-to-PDF.  It’s Feedbooks.  Think e-books.  They are working hard to be your first stop for electronic books from any source.. public domain, news, RSS feeds.   In fact, here is the quote from their front page:

“Feedbooks is a universal e-paper platform compatible with all e-paper devices where you can download thousands of free e-books, publish and share your own content, and create customized newspapers from RSS feeds and widgets.”

So they are in the e-book business, pretty much.  Download them, read them, share them.  If you have written a book online perhaps, submit it to Feedbooks to have them convert it into an e-book, quickly and stylishly.

Newspapers

Basically, this takes individual feeds (like mine linked above) and aggregates them together into one, larger e-book format.  A good example is the BBC News Full Content Newspaper, which mashes together 4 different BBC feeds to bring you the news of the day.

Subscriptions

Once a newspaper, or single-feed e-book has been created, Feedbooks allows people to subscribe to the paper as well, invaluable if you are using a e-paper reading platform like the Kindle or the Sony e-book reader (or maybe their very own e-ink reader!).  This means when an updated newspaper is created, you are always on top of it.  Great for those devices that have less-than-stellar native RSS readers built in to them.

Conclusion

Feedbooks has neatly filled a niche that was lacking (either from the newness of the technology, the ineptness of the hardware manufacturers, or some deliberate oversight) in getting RSS feeds on your electronic reading platform.  They also have a nice platform for searching for great public domain books.  Definitely worth a look.

Besides, you should go and download the PDF version of my feed.  It’s simply gorgeous, it makes me feel like a real writer! The link is here:

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Apparently, people assume too much and don’t promote enough.

You know what they say: If you assume, you make an a out of Su and me. And believe me, Su doesn’t like being an A. So don’t do it.

If you think a product is great, promote it! Tell people. Write up an article. Whatever. But don’t say, “Gee, yeah, I really loved that last week when I used it for 5 minutes and now you’ve missed the bus.” Because that is what you are saying. To me. And to Su.

Su doesn’t even have a car. Now he has to walk.

So what the heck is TinEye? Is it that decorating show, you know, the one with the people? Hardly.

If you assume that the Tin Man has eidetic memory and a talent for finding pictures that look like each other, you’d be getting close to what TinEye does.

In a nutshell, TinEye leverages some proprietary tech that Idée has been working on for creating digital fingerprints of images. This technology is mated with a high-speed matching engine and a database of hundreds of millions of public domain pictures to give you fast image matching based on a source picture.

You know what, I’ll just link in Scoble’s little QIK interview with Paul Bloore, the CTO of Idée, and you can see a little demo of the product in action as well.

After using the product for a while, I have to say I’m impressed. Currently, with its sub-set of all the pictures out there on the internet, it can’t find a lot of pictures uploaded to, say, Flickr. But if you do a Google image search and then drop the URL of the image you are interested in, it will find that picture wherever it resides on the internet.

For example, I searched for a picture of George W. Bush and dropped the URL in TinEye. Here is the result (click image for larger size):

It found the image in 272 different locations on the internet! It also gives the size of the image, and lists separate links to the same source image by domain. I do wish they would give you the option to re-sort the results by different criteria, such as image size, file size or bit depth.

So, if you want to know if a particular picture appears somewhere else on the image (say for copyright reasons), this is a great tool to have.

I’m really happening this comes out of closed beta soon, however, if you are clever you may already have noticed that the FriendFeed link at the beginning of the article has a special URL you can use.

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That happens to me all the time.

But the great thing about most startups are their agility and drive to succeed.  If you take your eye off of them for a moment, when you re-visit them it seems like a whole lot of great new things happened during your absence.  Contrast this to some big, established web application companies where you are lucky to get a great new feature once a quarter or so.

Here are a few examples.  Please note:  Clicking on the logo will take you to the product blog page.

Socialthing!

Here’s an app that is really trying hard to make itself unique in an ever-growing pool of social-aggregator type apps.  When I first logged in to Socialthing!, right after SXSW Interactive this year, it was still struggling with performance issues, and services were being added and removed every few days.

In the interim, they have not been sitting still.  Performance is great.  Their interface has undergone some appearance improvements.  A couple services have been added.  You can view updates by user or by timestamp.  You can now post to several services a la Ping.fm.  You can reply to tweets from within their interface.  Here’s a big one:  They now have a public user feed page!  Here is mine.

So they aren’t focusing on supporting every service out there.  They are trying to get the big services integrated correctly.  In a nutshell, their drive to make Socialthing! your social dashboard is starting to come together.  Also, I apparently have 20 invites if anyone needs one.  Just leave a comment.

Spokeo

I wote a lengthy article covering Spokeo on SheGeeks a couple of months ago.  The core app and goal remains the same: you put in your friends’ email addresses, and Spokeo goes and finds them on social networks across the internet.

However, now it does it with a lot more style.  Their interface used to be, to be polite, a bit spartan.  The content was the focus and the interface was mostly left up to the user to figure out.

However, they have been polishing up their visuals quite a bit to the point that its now much more of a status dashboard when you login, sorting your friends by latest upates and the categories you have defined.  Support for customizable keyboard shortcuts are till there and work great.

Spokeo is apparently being positioned for HR staff to use to ‘help’ vet a new employee, at least from their home screen.

BlogRize

BlogRize is still a fairly small single-developer site that was developed to be a social media meme-tracker.  Still somewhat under-the-radar, it has nonetheless added a few new features in the past month or two.

The ability to notice if an article that is being tracked has been shared by one of the users in the database.  This used to be a manual process, where you voted an article as interesting, funny, insightful or lame.  Interesting seems to be marked automatically now, if you share an article.

I love all the memetrackers out there, but this one is fun and I’d like to see it become more public.

Shyftr

Shyftr is a new entrant in the social feed reading segment.  It got into a bit of a bruhaha because it was taking full feeds and aggregating them inside the interface, and there was some worry that if advertising was added, it would take eyes away from the originating blogs. Shyftr to their credit quickly changed to partial-text feeds and I’m still not seeing any advertising, so I think the fears may have been a bit premature.

Shyftr has been working hard on its interface look and feel as well.  It is responsive and easy to use, actually quite a pleasure to navigate.  It reminds me a bit of the interface design in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with lots of white space and clear, two or three-color icons.

I don’t think this upstart is going to kick Google Reader out of its throne anytime soon, but the social features are better integrated and its fun to use.

Others

I have my eye on a few other services that are staying under the radar but continue to improve, like  Whoisi (my entry), Noiseriver, Swurl (my site), and Aviary.

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Although I forgot to grab it in the screenshot, there’s also some quick links for bold and italic within the comment block as well.

Add to this integration with Picnik, and we are seeing a bunch of new features being added fairly rapidly to this platform.

Update: Never mind, my excitement overcame my rational brain for a few minutes.  I had forgotten I had installed the Firefox addon Better Flickr from Lifehacker earlier today.

Please, resume your normal lives.  Thanks.

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I’m going to try something new in this post.  Aaron Brazell wrote an article on Technosailor recently noting the differences between western and eastern writing styles, especially when it comes to a column or opinion piece.  In my never-ending quest to explore new avenues, I will try my hand at a more eastern-style column.

There is a difference between passive acquisition of knowledge, and active application and sharing of that knowledge.

We all learn, as we grow and explore our world.  We learn by experience, positive and negative reinforcement, and eventually, by the lessons learned by others.  This knowledge serves us to make better decisions and infer indirect connections.

Some people love knowledge for knowledge’s sake.  They love to acquire information, to store it, index it, put it into context, and that is fine.  However, the motivations of these people are only knowable to themselves, and perhaps some future historian or researcher who tries to replicate the mind-set of such an acquirer posthumously.  This type of person does not share what they have learned.

Thankfully, the more common type of person has a more workable approach to information gathering and synthesis.  In order to function in a modern society like ours, a lot of context and historical precedents must be learned to know why things happen the way they do.  Usually growing up in our society does organically get them ready for this, and any additional quests for information are relegated to more specific goals.   They learn to become more proficient or more skilled in a certain knowledge area.  They tend apply this knowledge more, for their own benefit and those around them.  They take a more active social role toward information and knowledge applications.

Our society has grown up with a unique social medium called radio.  Obviously, everyone has heard of radio, it’s been around for over a century at this point.  It has changed its role in relation to American society since its inception, having been relegated as a secondary entertainment medium next to television, and more recently being pushed even further back now with the advent of the internet.

It has, however, always offered a choice to the listener: They can passively listen, humming along to their favorite tune or listening to the news of the day, or they can take a more active role, tune in to a program that allows people to call in and contribute their opinion to a topic in real time.

This idea of opening up radio for the listener to contribute is extremely powerful.  This channel has been around since telephones have become ubiquitous and its popularity still allows radio stations to remain profitable (albeit on the cheaper AM band) even to this day.

With television, society mostly skipped the social feedback loop that exists between AM radio and telephones.  Although forays have been made to make TV more interactive, they have been largely unsuccessful due to expense, or lag, or technical difficulty.

The internet has neatly solved this decades-old conundrum of passive entertainment versus active involvement.  On the internet, there are a myriad of ways to become involved with discussion, knowledge contribution or redistribution, synthesis, and sharing of archived information.  Although the technical hurdles for participating on the global internet culture are high, they are not as disconcerting as those of interactive TV and they are actively being lowered all the time.

The social channel has existed on the internet since the beginning.  Even before what we call the World Wide Web, people were engaging in remote discussions about hundreds of different topics on services such as Usenet.  Unfortunately, when Tim Berners-Lee laid out his hypertext-enabled vision of the web, the intrinsic social element, the ability to mark-up the content of sites, was not universally adopted along with the other technologies.  If this was a result of fears over making web sites too malleable or vulnerable to defacement, or other reasons I can not say.

In the past few years though, there has been a steadily and perhaps even logarithmically growing trend for adding a social channel to more traditional publishing mechanisms that have already existed.  Where once you might have visited a web site to read the news of the day, you now can comment on the news, or read the comments of others.  This once-intrinsic ability is starting to come back into its own, and in a big way.

One such medium that was built from the ground up with an active social element is FriendFeed.  Presented with a mysterious grin perhaps, it bills itself as a social aggregator.  Getting started is simple – you merely feed it some of the other services you already use, such as Flickr or Digg, and it pulls these in to a river of news and updates from your friends and acquaintances.  You are then able to comment, enjoy or even re-share anything that you see.

This simple concept has seemingly been thought out from a small service to a burgeoning community with tens of thousands of folks interacting continuously with it.  It would seem to be a logistical nightmare, but on the surface FriendFeed does a very admirable job of maintaining a simple, responsive and, more importantly, engaging and addictive demeanor.

Forgive me for not providing a link, but recently I read in a FriendFeed comment that the service was no more than an AM radio call-in show for the internet age.  This comment, perhaps meant as dismissive, stayed with me.  The parallels between FriendFeed and talk radio are there – a comment or link is thrown out, the pundits and peanut gallery get a hold of it and provide their two cents.  The conversation turns, sometimes in a wonderful, exciting direction, sometimes darkly negative.

This result, though, is almost secondary to the actual point:  The coversation is there.  The conversation turns.  It breeds more conversation, more sharing of knowledge, and more synthesis.

In this light, I hazard to say that FriendFeed, while perhaps emulating the humble radio call-in show trades the local and redneck nature that tend to mark such shows with a national or even global community, revealing, yes, perhaps narrow views, but also extremely worldly and wise views.  It merges these worlds with apparent ease and a unique mechanism that seems to prevent the quick formation of cliques and walls – silos, perhaps – that seem to happen in other social mediums.

History will tell us if this bold experiment in to social knowledge sharing and synthesis will maintain its momentum, grow, or perhaps result in catastrophic failure.  It is however, quite in fact, unprecedented in its ability and scope.

In conclusion, you may be a gatherer of information, or you may not have a strong social interest, and that’s ok.  However, if you do think such a medium is worth your time and effort, I can virtually guarantee you, in terms of knowledge, information, and social contact, FriendFeed will reward you ten times for the effort you put in.

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