11 Vessels they are meant to protect (6)

Book meme:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Via Leah Culver, via Eric Florenzano’s Blog

The nearest book to me was a cryptic crossword book. This is the fifth across clue from the 56th crossword.  No idea what the answer might be.  Any ideas?

UPDATE:  Chris has done this over on his blog.

There have been a few mumblings on social media blogs, as there often is, about how Digg has been alienating it’s core user base, possibly in favour of attracting new users or appearing more saleable.  I’m not sure how much of this is true but I do know that I am a fairly regular user of Digg and I don’t feel particularly alienated or disaffected.  Perhaps this is because I don’t do anything as perverse as using scripts on the site or blindly digging friends stories.

Having said that there is one way that Digg is letting me down.  I would consider myself a power user when it comes to computers, as I imagine many Digg users are given it’s tech news bias and history.  I would say that one of the most valuable UI metaphors for a power user would definitely be keyboard shortcuts.  I certainly used them heavily to write this blog entry.  (Alt-Shift-A within the Wordpress editor is a good one for creating a link).  For a long time though shortcuts were limited to the desktop as the web was not rich enough to support anything other than mouse navigation (with the exception of shortcuts for back or forwards and tabbing through endless links).

With richer and richer web applications there is now a good precedent for using keyboard shortcuts within the browser page.  A shining example of this is Google Reader with over 20 commands covering pretty much everything you’d need to do with the application.  There’s even a cheat sheet of the different combinations that you can access by simple typing ‘?’.  Here’s a fairly old video from Tim Ferriss where Robert Scoble describes how he uses Reader with the keyboard to read over 622 feeds a day. (This is over a year old, so who knows how many feeds he reads now.)

Keyboard shortcut cheat sheet in Google Reader

Another great example is Socialthing!.  Socialthing! is quite a simple app that aggregates feeds from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg.  When  updates arrive, to prevent the UI from changing while you might be viewing it, a button appears that you can click when you’re ready to have the new items displayed.  Scrolling to the top of the page and clicking this with the mouse got really tiresome, really quickly.  Luckily the Socialthing! developers spotted this just as fast and allowed you to simply hit ‘E’ to import new items.  They added a few other useful shortcuts as well.

I don’t need the mouse to do this

So why use the mouse to do this?

So how can the Digg experience be improved for regular, heavy users?  The major peeve for me when using the Digg story page is the select field for sorting the comments.  I often want to change back and forth between the modes that the comments are sorted on and having to switch back to the mouse every time I need to do this becomes a real drag.  There are too many links on the Digg story page to tab to it so having a shortcut to focus this field would be nice.  However  I would propose having four key commands:  ‘O’ to show oldest comments first, ‘N’ for newest, ‘C’ for the most controversial and ‘M’ for most dugg.  Hitting ‘S’ or the spacebar to show the story that has been linked and, of course, ‘D’ to then digg it would complete the shortcuts for the story page.

What about the front page or any of the category sections that display a list of stories?  How about taking a leaf out of Google Reader’s book and using ‘J’ and ‘K’ to cycle forwards and backwards through the list, and then perhaps ‘O’ to open them?  Perhaps also hitting number keys 1-10 to select one of the top news stories from the list on the right.

Making it easier to quickly Digg stories may not chime with the motivation behind Digg’s recent decision to ban those who are using scripts to automatically Digg stories.  However these shortcuts could easily be mimicked with a simple Firefox extension so I hope that Digg will act to prevent it’s most loyal users succumbing to RDI: Repetitive Digging Injury.

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Here’s a little tutorial on how to set up a checkbox in the header of an Altio list.  The minimum requirements to complete this tutorial should only be that you have an Altio server instance installed, preferably version 5.1 or later.  Why not take this opportunity to try out the 5.2 beta?

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Daniel just Pownced a link to Wordle, a very slick application for generating clouds of words from a bunch of text where the most frequent words are displayed the largest.  It has a nice interface for customizing the appearance of the resulting cloud with a good range of fonts and preset color schemes to tweak.  Also it’s a Java Applet which actually features smooth animation and decent graphic design / typography.  Definitely a candidate for the Cool Applets blog.

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Michael Arrington of the popular tech blog TechCrunch just twittered the following:

I’m now using the techcrunch toolbar to post to twitter. awesome http://www.techcrunch.com/t…

However anyone familiar with Twitter will know that each tweet, when listed on the Twitter site, will also tell you the source; the piece of software used to post it.  In the case of Mike’s tweet, Twitter informs us that he used a service called BeTwittered, not the TechCrunch toolbar.

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I know, I know! Powncified hasn’t been working for some time now.  In fact it’s been out of action for over two weeks.  My excuse is that with the JavaOne trip and the big push for the upcoming Altio 5.2 release I’ve been too busy to get things sorted.  My excuse for not putting up a post to explain this and acknowledge the issue doesn’t exist.  I don’t have one.  Sorry.

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A while back David asked me which service I preferred for aggregating my social feeds, FriendFeed or Socialthing.  Both services aim to provide different ways to manage, consume and post to the different streams of information we receive and push to and from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, RSS et al. every day.  At the time I stated a preference for FriendFeed but I figured that might change as Socialthing supported new feeds and services.  And it has.   The addition of Pownce was quite key and it has become such a useful tool to me that I now run it in its own Prism window rather than a tab in Firefox, Google Reader being the only other web application sharing that honour.

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As promised here is another Altio demo that Dan and I built for the forthcoming Altio Graph Control. Like our previous Last.fm demo it diagrams users relationships within a social graph but this one uses a much wider dataset, the Google Social Graph. Given a url to a social network profile or a blog site it will attempt to find other profiles or sites on the web that belong to the same person. It will then find all the “friends” of that person according to the profiles it found. The initial user and all their friends will be diagrammed with lines drawn to indicate friendship between then. The graph can then be expanded by loading the friends for any user already on the graph.

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A couple of weeks ago I Pownced about a Firefox extension for GMail called Xoopit. The premise is it scans your inbox for any links to media such as images and videos and collates them all at the top of the GMail inbox page.  This means you can easily browse any media that your contacts have linked or attached in the emails they have sent you.  This includes links to popular media sites such as Flickr and Youtube.

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Would anyone like to help me beta test Findme, my new Firefox extension? It uses Google’s Social Graph API to find other pages that belong to the same person as the page you’re currently viewing. For example from this blog’s main page it will provide you with a URL to my Pownce profile, my Myspace profile, my Last.fm profile etc. I was thinking of naming the extension “StalkMe” as it is possible to start at one profile on one social network and find most, if not all, of their web presence. StalkMe is a little bit creepy however I’d be willing to hear suggestions.

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