Skyfaller.space

After reading this article on how your e-mail inbox says a lot about you, I went and deleted over a thousand messages from my inbox.

This leaves me with only about 2500 messages to go. *sigh*

If you know what Jabber is, and use a multi-IM client like Gaim or Adium, you should check out LJ Talk (see also the post on lj_dev)… basically Livejournal is providing a Jabber server which automatically populates your Jabber buddy list with your LJ friends. They’re working on their own client, and you will be able to talk to anybody else who is using Jabber, e.g. Gtalk, Project Gizmo, etc. I’m on LJ Talk right now, and I’m posting this through the LJ bot (Frank)… you can IM him saying “post:” and it will post it to your Livejournal for you. I don’t know why you would ever use that, but hey, if you want to post from your IM client, now you can.

Perhaps I shouldn’t get excited over new web 2.0 services, since as Asheesh points out they’re proprietary and you have no control over them. That said, if you’re using web services like Flickr, it’s good to have accounts on competing services so that if they suddenly turn evil for some reason you can switch to someone else without too much trouble.

In that spirit, I’m trying out this Flickr clone, Zooomr, which is apparently giving out pro accounts to people who blog about it in an attempt to boost their userbase. I guess it worked for me ^_^

One thing that’s cool about Zooomr is that you don’t even need to sign up to get a free account… if you have a Livejournal account or a Google account, you already have a sign-in for Zooomr. I wish more services would use OpenID or something like it (I’m told OpenID has its flaws), it’s fun and easy ^_^

UPDATE (August 17, 2011): Five years later, none of my images on Zooomr are loading, including the one in this post, and the site looks rather ugly and abandoned. The problem with playing with trendy new web 2.0 services is that if they are a fad and you actually rely on them, you may be left out in the cold.

Brian, Karen and I have started a band called Wrong Side of Dawn, and we’re looking for people to play bass and drums. If you know anybody who plays those instruments and lives near Swarthmore, PA or North Brunswick, NJ (where Brian lives), please let us know!

You can listen to our demo tape on the website, which we hope to turn into a professionally recorded album by the end of the summer. Let us know what you think of the demo!

Yesterday I was trying to make it easier for people to subscribe to War News Radio‘s podcast, so I turned on Feedburner’s service which allows people to subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail. Unfortunately, I realized today that Feedburner sends out e-mails daily (with no option to change the frequency of e-mails), and that you can’t control how many posts are sent at a time. We only publish one show every Friday, so there is no need to e-mail people about our last 10 shows every day. This is a really stupid and useless service, and they don’t even have a pro version with more functionality.

So I went looking for competing services, and I found plenty. The problem is that there are too many, and I can’t choose between all of them! Here are a few I am considering:

* FeedBlitz – Everyone agrees that it’s butt ugly and horrible, but for some reason massive numbers of people use it.
* Squeet – Also kind of ugly, and apparently doesn’t let you see the e-mail addresses of your subscribers, which is a win for privacy but a loss for functionality/convenience.
* Yutter – Looks simple and relatively pretty, but their blog seems a bit unprofessional, and they seem like such a small operation that they may very well disappear.
* Zookoda – Apparently very full-featured and customizable, but apparently a pain to set up. Also, I’m not sure whether the people who subscribe using it will show up properly in my Feedburner stats… FeedBlitz and Squeet are FeedBurner partners so they show up fine, and Yutter claims it will be counted in FeedBurner stats… Zoodoka doesn’t say one way or another in their FAQ.

Where the @#$% is a comparison chart when I need one? Comparison charts are really indispensable for making up one’s mind in situations with too many choices.

What should I do, folks? I’m seriously hyperventilating here.

UPDATE: As Asheesh points out, all of the above services are proprietary, and a self-hosted open source solution would be superior. What I really want is a WordPress Email Notification Plugin, but unfortunately the existing one is out of date / abandoned looked out of date/abandoned. There are rumors of an updated version being in development, and I would be willing to donate to such a worthy cause if it is in fact in progress. I’ve e-mailed them, we’ll see if they respond.

UPDATE 2: The people responsible for the plugin wrote back and said:

Nelson,

This is still active and we’ve not had any issues running the latest release on WP 2.0. If you know of any specific issues, please let me know.

Also, yes, donations would be extremely helpful in order to free up our time. (See: http://blog.watershedstudio.com/2006/03/anouncement-wordpress-email-notification-plugin-v30-development/ ) If everyone that used it donated a few dollars we’d be golden, but I believe that we have a grand total of $7 in the v3.0 development jar to date.

If you have any questions feel free to let me know.

Brian

I think I will put a little money in the pot… if this is something you might use, you should too ^_^

I’m hosting the first Philadelphia Copynight with Steve McLaughlin from Penn Free Culture (University of Pennsylvania). If you haven’t heard of Copynight, it’s basically a Meetup for people who are interested in free culture / copyright issues. If you’re in the Philly area, please consider joining us tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8pm, at the White Dog Cafe.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

* Fourth Tuesday of each month, 8 PM
* White Dog Cafe, 3420 Sansom Street (map)
* Hosted by Nelson Pavlosky and Steve McLaughlin, Philadelphia (at) copynight.org
* Join the Philadelphia mailing list

A couple of nights ago I dreamed about a superhero named “Vox Pop” who had the uncanny ability to speak with the voice of the people, i.e. he always said things which the general populace agreed with and they in turn supported all of his activities (regardless of their legality or relation to traditional morality). There was some debate as to whether this meant he was superhumanly good at surveys and statistics, whether he was reading the collective mind somehow, or his thoughts and speeches were superhumanly effective at swaying popular opinion. In other words, was he really good at understanding what the people wanted, or did his desires somehow cause the people to share his desires? Did he represent or did he lead, and was this a matter of his capabilities or his inclinations? Either way, he was a potent force, and a somewhat creepy guy.

In the dream, some other superhero was trying to convince Vox Pop to take a stand on some vital issue, and Vox Pop was being evasive and quiet. Of course, since they were underwear perverts, Vox Pop was being quietly evasive while the other guy was angrily trying to beat him senseless, and destroying lots of scenery. *sigh* Boys will be boys. Or perhaps action-addicted superheroes will be action-addicted superheroes.

I also dreamed that I had the ability to see monsters that may or may not be there. That is, I had hallucinations that sometimes turned out to be real, but this “second sight” was inconsistent in its accuracy. This was problematic because there were in fact invisible monsters running around eating people, but I was getting lots of “false positives” and developing a bit of a Cassandra or “boy who cried wolf” syndrome. Anybody have any plausible explanations for a such an affliction? (For the purpose of, say, writing a short story about it?) This was a bit too silly to be a nightmare, but the monsters were pretty disturbing and I’m glad that they’re not real. Or are they?

War News Radio is looking into getting a CD duplicator for mailing copies of our shows to people (and helping the rest of the college with its CD duplication needs). Do any of you know anything about CD duplication? What should we buy?

Do we want one that does printing as well as duplication? If so, Primera’s Bravo II CD/DVD Duplicator looks like a good choice. It does both printing and duplication for up to 50 CDs/DVDs in one batch, and comes with software for both Mac and Windows (but sadly not Linux).

Do we want one that stands alone and doesn’t need to be hooked up to a computer? If so, this Alera Technologies 1:11 DVD/CD Super Copy Tower 16x DVD/CD Duplicator Copier looks like it might be pretty good… I’m not sure what to look for in a CD duplicator.

I’m going to recommend the Bravo II for now, but if anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.

I was going to try to use Nicecast to stream audio from the conference, but (1) it’s proprietary and I haven’t paid for an uncrippled version, and (2) I haven’t figured out how it works yet. So no dice.

I finally met Jimbo Wales in person and got to talk to him personally. We discussed trying to do a tour of FreeCulture.org’s chapters for him next school year (he’s still interested), and also open access textbooks / wikibooks. Interesting part of the conversation: Jimbo notes that while in some ways a student is not qualified for writing the textbook for their class, obviously since they’re taking it they have something to learn, but in other ways they *are* qualified. I forget exactly what Jimbo said about why they’re qualified, but they’re engaged in the material and teaching others is a great way to learn.

Biella accuses me of being a “flosstitute” and a “flip-flosser”, apparently insults that originated with Mako Hill.

I also talked to Pat Aufderheide (sp?) and Peter Jaczi about their fair use in documentaries documentary, I think we should do screenings of it at our chapters… they said they could give us DVDs. All in all, a relatively productive conference, I think.

I’ll be attending The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age tomorrow at UPenn’s Annenberg School. Among the speakers are Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and David Weinberger. I will try to get an audio stream up online from my laptop if they don’t already have one… check back here for more details tomorrow.

Also, If I haven’t already mentioned, I am working at War News Radio full time this summer (where I’ve gotten permission to take a day off to attend the conference), so I will be around Swarthmore / Philadelphia for a while… I’m going to try to blog about my time at WNR a bit at Inside War News Radio, the unofficial blog I’ve just started. I think this is going to be a good summer ^_^