Thanks to Andy and Suz for blogging (and blogging) about the 50 Ways To Leave Your Bookmark article that we co-wrote for developerWorks.

Andy’s got a great description of the premise, so I’ll lift his shamelessly

A little while ago my colleague Frank Jania posted a crazy thought on his internal IBM blog. The idea was that since Dogear (our internal social bookmarking system, and also part of Lotus Connections) has an API based on the Atom Publishing Protocol, and that just uses HTTP POST, it should be pretty simple to come up with a range of different ways to add bookmarks to Dogear using different technologies.

The gauntlet was thrown down, so a number of us started to contribute to Frank’s wiki page, coming up with our own code examples.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Categories: article, bookmarks, developerWorks, dogear, social-authoring
No Comments »

collision detection: Why solitary workers can be faster workers

From the article:

“For years, I’ve worked in isolation — either sitting alone in my office, or, recently, sitting in a rented cubicle in New York. I haven’t had a job that required me to work physically alongside coworkers since 1998.

And maybe that’s been a good thing for my productivity — because according to a new study, when you can see other workers performing different tasks out the corner of your eye, it slows you down. Tim Welsh, a kinesiologist at the University of Calgary, organized a nifty experiment in which he asked a subject to perform a task on a computer, alongside a partner performing a different computer task. Then he’d get
the subject to perform the task while his partner went off to another room…”

Categories: stuff
2 Comments »

I’ve made the cut. Along with unsubscribing to a shockingly large
number of newsletters in my personal email account, I’ve canceled both
my MySpace and Friendster accounts. I’ve had them for some number of
years and they’ve lied fallow in comparison to my activity on Facebook.

I have some friends that are primarily active on MySpace or Friendster,
but maintaining updates on both of them was just really more than I
wanted to do. So we’ll see how all this works out. I’m still on
last.fm, Facebook (of course), flickr, dopplr, fireeagle, etc etc, but
the sites that were primarily a personal profile have been
consolidated. Ahhh.

Categories: stuff
No Comments »

“Sort of” is the new “like”.

Listen for it.

Categories: stuff
2 Comments »

downloadsquad has a post about enabling the firefox spellchecker to work in regular text fields, not just textareas…

How to eliminate speling mistkes in Firefox text boxes – Download Squad

Sweet.

Categories: stuff
No Comments »

Neat-o Torpedo! Google docs now lets you put a form in front of a spreadsheet if you just want to use it to collect data…

Official Google Docs Blog: Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information

“We’re really excited to bring you forms!
Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone
with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond
directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web
page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the
form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet
automatically.”

Categories: stuff
1 Comment »

Hmm.. how about this. This is an social app that allows people to record themselves as “sick” with various degrees of granularity:

From the site:
Who Is Sick was started in 2006 with a mission to provide current and local sickness information to the public – without the hassle of dealing with hospitals or doctors. With a strong belief in the power of people and a faith that user generated content can be extremely valuable, our team set out to create an entirely new system for tracking and monitoring sickness in your area and obtain sickness information. Information retrieved by tracking sickness in my area can also be used to map sickness trends in my region.

Given the relatively slower adoption of internet and “web 2.0′ technology by much of the healthcare industry, our team of healthcare professionals, technology entrepreneurs, mothers, fathers, and caregivers set out to create a simple, user-friendly, and valuable website for the average consumer. We are currently building out our team and expanding our technology breadth across new and exciting areas of healthcare with Who Is Sick as our first offering. Stay tuned for more!

Categories: social-software
1 Comment »

After a wonderful Pad Thai at Martha’s house tonight, we made a pact. No more fancy cable. We’re both calling Time-Warner tomorrow and cutting down to the most basic cable, and that is just for reception. Corey and I are looking into some of the elgato products as a means for possibly avoiding cable entirely!

It’s kind of scary — I grew up with a television on almost all the time. We all figured that there is so much media out there, and we can watch movies and TV shows via iTunes and AppleTV, so who needs to let Time Warner molest us?

It’s also really exciting — I’d been watching too much TV anyway.

I suspect this is going to work out quite well

Categories: cable, tv
No Comments »

Inspired in part by the 2005 and 2006 annual reports by Nicholas Felton, and by a desire to be clever and crafty with my 2007 holiday card, I’ve been thinking about collecting a year’s worth of statistics.

So… What kind of statistics would you want to collect of yourself (or of me) over a year? I’m thinking of going with a graph theme and collecting data that would show well on a linear scale with a point for each day of the year.

In considering all of the collectible data I’ve come up with this so far – what else would you add?

Food and Drink
Ate at Whole Foods / Ate out / Cooked home
Drank something other than water

Health
Took medicine
Felt ill
Saw a doctor

Work
Worked from home / at the office
Worked on a weekend day
Conference / Vacation
Keystrokes typed (This would just be neat to know

Travel
Miles flown
Miles driven
What country I’m in

Lifestyle
Exercised
Went on a date
Bought a plan / plant died
Finished reading a book
Dollars spent

Categories: annual-report, infographics, statistics
1 Comment »

No, its not the title of a M4M personal ad, but a concept I’ve been grappling with. As I was about to head out the door this weekend for a North Carolina Equality Conference I thought about grabbing my computer and taking it along. (The MacBook of course…)

As I thought more about it I decided not to. When I think back about my decision it was a mix of a few things that I’d order:

1. Ruggedness
2. Flexibility
3. Distraction

Part of the reason that I bought the MacBook (as opposed to the MacBook Pro) was its size. I wanted the most portable (flexible) option I could have among the Mac collection. I’ve found though, that I’m hesitant to bring it along because I’m afraid of how rugged it is, and it’s nowhere near as portable as a paper notebook.

The element of it being a distraction was really not comparable to the other two.

I know that this is in part a function of cost. If I could get a new laptop with minimal cash cost, and minimal hassle cost (transferring files and settings and such) I’d probably bring it more places, but not many places – at least I don’t think… That’s because of how portable it is – it still feels like an encumbrance.

So terrific – I’ve basically said nothing more than “My laptop is heavier than I thought it was, and I’m afraid to break it”. It’s a tangible thing so that is clear.

I’m interested in the trade-off between rugged and flexible in other spaces too, particularly in social software. I think we’re doing a great job on ruggedness – We’ve got plenty services that people rely on heavily to get “real work” done and they are performant and stable to a more than acceptable degree. But how flexible are they? Flexible can be defined a number of ways – my highest barrier to entry seems to be the space between my brain and the software.

I’ll have an idea that I want to blog about in the car, and it seems to get lost by the time I get to wherever I’m going. And when I am in front of a machine, the cost of opening the blogging tool, whether its local or form-based on the server, seem high enough to allow my fleeting attention time enough to move me onto the next pressing thing.

There is also one of the biggest costs of entry for me which is pretty much embodied in this post. The part of my brain that says that “not perfect” is not good enough when it comes to, well, a lot, but blogging in particular. I’ve had a few ideas for posts in the past that have completely disappeared b/c I didn’t feel like I had the time to craft them “properly”. (Assuredly a mix of both obsession and continuous partial attention deficit disorder

I was hoping to try a strategy for working some of this out at the conference this weekend. I downloaded TwitterBerry (the BlackBerry twitter client – a must since I don’t have an unlimited txt plan) so I could tweet throughout the day. As it turns out there was a problem with data coverage / EDGE access / DNS access / something that kept me disconnected. Oh well.

So I guess this post is my first attempt to work it out. I’m convinced my WordPress install is rugged, the tools a sufficient for me to enter a post, and they don’t have to be “perfect”. Lets see how all that works out

Categories: quandry, stuff
No Comments »