chillu.com

After all the talk about “the real life” on my blog, it is clearly time for a geeky post ;) Today I’m moving another part of my digital life online: Bookmarks. I’m probably a bit late to the party here, but I evaluated the options for quite a while. I wasn’t too impressed with the feature-set and user interface of deli.cio.us (besides the fact that I can never remember where to put those damn dots…). The release of ma.gnolia was more exciting, providing ratings, private bookmarks, nice typography and more social features. I’m totally digging (no pun intended) the concept of tagging, and have been pretty busy converting my “web 1.0”-hierarchy to sensible tags – take a look. Apple, can you please give me a filesystem that natively supports tags? (and I’m not talking about those stinkin’ smart folders, which are basically fake filesystem-searches). Two reasons why it took me so long to make the switch are speed and integration: Magnolia was painfully slow when it was released in 2006. And I was under the impression that the process of creating a new bookmark online wasn’t unobtrusive enough to actually be useable. Thanks to Safari, I call the ma.gnolia-bookmarklet by simply pressing Apple+1 now, easy as pie. These days, I’m always wondering what I get back for putting stuff on the interwebs. One of the biggest advantages for being active on last.fm is that you get music recommendations based on your input. It would be great to have these fuzzy recommendations for all kinds of services, say “People who read this feed are also interested in” or “People with similar bookmarks”.

Check out my Bloglines-Account to see what I’m talking about: More than 50 news-sources generate about 200-300 news-items for me every day. Gee, great! While it’s nice to have all those webdesign-trends, music-reviews and mac-rumors in one place, it’s getting a real burden to keep up to the masses of information. I’ve even begun to relay news-item into bookmarks for “later reading” rather than simply dismissing them. While some of the information is valueable for my job/studies, most of it is just gossip and pointless info-junk.
Example: Take the whole Mac-Rumors. Even on their first occurrence they are obsolete, but they get really redundant when being picked up by other newsmags, often just crosslinking without additional comments. The “New Powermacs?”-Rumors recently added up to a dozen items, all talking about the same vague info. Same on the 1001st “Why Mac?”-article – I just can’t resist to read it, although all the arguments are barely new to me.
So, what’s the solution? Perhaps it’s just better filtering of interesting topics, fine-tuned RSS-subscriptions (only certain topics and tags), or even a personal editor which pre-selects my news (well, someday…g*). The most practical approach I found yet: social bookmarking, which could also be transferred to RSS easily. Check del.icio.us/popular/, a service which shows the “hot bookmarks of the day” (but beware, very addictive!). Another approach is Google News, which uses software for the same thing (see Newsmap for a great interface-idea).
Or maybe…just subscribe less feeds, go out, read a book? Welcome to the life of an info-junkie *g

I’ve just watched MTV’s “Roomraiders” on telly, a dating-show where the candidates are judged by the condition and contents of their rooms. The thought popped up “What would they find in my room?” Well, a huge amount of technical gadgets, computer-literature, clothes lying around everywhere – thats about it. It’s not that I don’t listen to music, watch good films, collect family-photos – but everything is stored digitally in my Powerbook, invisible for any observer. I entrust an increasing part of my cultural identity to machines, which is very dangerous in times of harddrive-crashes, viruses, EMPs (ok, perhaps in some years g*). What info will my grandchilds have about me? I think it’s time to order some reprints of those fancy digital gallerys… On a global basis I suppose this century will be some kind of new “middle-ages” concerning cultural inheritage – we can’t handle the information-overkill on a daily basis, and we’re far away from storing it in a persistent readable format for the “after-world”. I would like to know how long these lines will exist – probably until the next big Typo3-disaster *g So long…

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, which essentially means you can read content (mostly news and weblogs) off-site in a standardized format. chillu.com also joins the hype, and for the whole crowd who already subscribed to my feed (so, essentially macsepp g), I’ve got a new feed-url. There are lots of applications out there for reading those “RSS-feeds”, such as Newsmonster (newsmonster.org, Plattform-unabhängig), NewzCrawler (newzcrawler.com, Windows) oder NetNewsWire (ranchero.com, Mac). On my Powerbook I prefer the latter in its new incarnation “NetNewswire 2.0” with tabbed browsing – yeah baby!

Sometimes every computeruser is faced with decisions – tonight with 917 to be precise. Being awake with too much coffee and full-moon I battled against a fierce enemy: the rest of my untagged MP3-collection. With over 900 ratings per hour (or 15 ratings a minute whohoo) I am now proud owner of a completely tagged list! This might sound geeky, but there are a lot of guys out there that would envy me about it g. At smartplaylists.com you can see the use of such a list: via the (wonderful) iTunes-feature you can e.g. compile a playlist with all songs that contain “live”, “acoustic” or “unplugged” to get a great live-concert with all your stars. More tips like this on smartplaylists.com