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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

If You Happen to Care About the Details

I've found myself recently with a lot more time to engage in 'research' for work. We're currently adding a good number of 'web 2.0' features into our video portal application, so as the product manager, it's my responsibility to keep up on this stuff. This means keeping up with new tools and technologies, going to obnoxious conferences, and reading the very occasional (yawn) academic study on how users are using the read/write web. (Thanks JoSS...and this time I'm not talking about Joss Whedon...and I am being sarcastic.)

I also feel justified in spending more of my time actually using these technologies. I'm at work now writing a blog entry. Never in a million years would I have been able to justify that to myself before I was on this project. The happy result for you, dear (non-existent) reader, is that I've stepped things up a bit on my site

First of all, I corrected some things on my blog that I realized really annoy me on other sites. I removed the frame-based redirect. You don't see www.earthlyworld.com in the address field anymore. Instead, you can now actually bookmark pages that you browse to from my site. I know, what a novel idea. Also, given that I have not brought myself to switch over to one of Blogger's new templates, I have had to manually tweak and maintain a lot of layout crap on my page. I'm happy to say that (I'm pretty sure) this page looks about the same in all browsers now. Also, big news, when you link to an individual post, it aligns properly with the top of the page now. That was bugging the hell out of me. It shoulda been an easy fix, but, for some reason, it was not.

I've also widened the main table so that I can fit larger pictures in my posts, as well as squeeze a bunch of crap over on the right side. Flickr badge, embedded veoh player (which I'm not thrilled with), delicious bookmarks, RSS feeds, and more to come. Let's see how messy I can make it.

Social bookmarking is actually a new thing for me. I use .mac, so I can sync my personal bookmarks across all my machines without making them public. However, the delicious badge has provided an awesome way for me to update my site with stuff that's meaningful (to me and hopefully others) on a daily basis. I've also realized how responsible social bookmarking can actually help get information out to other people. We may think of it as simply sharing the things we're interested in with other people, but it's also a method of promoting ideas and information - a lazy form of activism, I suppose.

There are some things I'm doing that I won't link to from here. I have a facebook account now in addition to my myspace account. Our lead developer was sick and tired of hearing me talk about myspace when discussing social networking on the web, so I decided to move over. I actually think facebook is very cool - much cleaner - and there are a ton of applications you can plug in to your profile page. However, the fact is that no one I know (except one guy I went to film school with) is there. Every god damn body is on myspace.

Box.net is one of my new favorites, too. I don't really have an application for it on my blog, but it sure has made some work stuff convenient. I'm just using the free account right now, so it's not secure, but, hey, such is life and web 2.0.

My next challenge is to figure out how to consolidate all my tags and labels. I was playing with swicki last night, but it's too manual. You have to enter your tags in two places for it to work. I gotta make it easy. In the past, I've really enjoyed manually tweaking stuff to make it work, but nowadays, I just want to make it easy. Evidence shows that I'll actually update content more often when it's easy to do.

Labels: web 2.0